Quotes About Social

Americans invented adolescence. It is not a natural phenomenon. Adolescence is a social construct, created by an urban-industrial society that keeps its young at home far past puberty. Teenage angst is a luxury if a successful modern human conceit that isn't condoned by our superior species.

Indeed, for social solidarity to take widespread hold, it may be especially important that elites—the "rich," the "learned," and the "authorities"—undergo their share of the suffering

It was bad to be embarrassed, hard to be ashamed. But pitied? That was the worst of all.

Borgia bastard could never be the social equal of a legitimate Medici.

I always thought there would be more interesting people at my wedding.

Overindulgence" is a deprivation of constructive attention, a refusal to teach social/life skills, a refusal to teach self-regulation in social situations, a refusal to teach how to distinguish between wants and needs. Desires are indulged at the place where needs are starved.

You're not user-friendly. You're too needy. You have no social currency. You're a freak. Without a normative side, you can't get in. That's it. Sorry.

Living in Paris requires constant effort: effort to make myself understood, effort to understand and to be alert for those cultural intricacies that can turn even going to the post office into a social adventure.

Les françaises—particularly parisiennes, she stresses—perceive those of the same sex as rivals, not as potential friends.

Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.

A man like you, humble for life, who wants to feel and live, has trouble—not wanting," said Tamkin in his parenthetical fashion, "to exchange an ounce of soul for a pound of social power—he'll never make it without help in a world like this.

In his Social Contract, Rousseau noted the obvious, that "Law is a very good thing for men with property and a very bad thing for men without property.

You should also try to figure out which people are thing people and which ones are people people.

Keep in mind that disapproving of Trump's style and personality is a social requirement for people who long for a more civil world. Effectiveness is a separate issue from persuasive skill.

Nisbet recognized that communities that serve important social functions in our lives, such as families and parishes and social clubs, give structure to our day-to-day living, and thus contribute to our identity. But when the functions of these communities fade or are replaced, such as by the government, their strength as identity-forming institutions fades as well.

High school wasn't a trial by fire or some ordeal that had to be survived. It was all a big joke. You just had to provide the laugh track.

What provokes me worst of all are our fateful bourgeois distinctions of rank. Of course I know as well as anyone that differences of class are necessary, and that they work greatly to my own advantage: but I wish they would not place obstacles in my way when I might enjoy a little pleasure...

I know very well that we are not and cannot be all equal; but in my opinion he who avoids the common people in order to command their respect, is as culpable as a coward who hides himself from his enemy because he fears defeat.

Quando si vive con persone che hanno una delicata sensibilità per la convenienza, abbiamo paura per loro se incontrano qualcosa di sconveniente.

We do not know, in most cases, how far social failure and success are due to heredity, and how far to environment. But environment is the easier of the two to improve.

All I wanted was to be left alone. They abhor a vacuum, other people. You find a quiet corner where you can hunker down in peace, and the next minute there they are, crowding around you in their party hats, tooting their paper whistles in your face and insisting you get up and join in the knees-up.

Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.

The happiness of being envied is glamour.

Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. The industrial society which has moved towards democracy and then stopped half way is the ideal society for generating such an emotion.