Quotes About Society

The craft is finding a decent drainpipe to get access to the site as much as it is in the art...Van Gogh used short, stumpy brush strokes to convey his insanity - I use short, thin ledges above mainline train tracks.

The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages.

Remember crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access.

I've never really understood why people sleep. Wasting a third of your life and becoming vulnerable for almost 8 hours every night. Doesn't seem very appealing to me.

As far as I can tell the only thing worth looking at in most museums of art is all the schoolgirls on daytrips with the art departments.

Anyone who believes in capital punishment should be shot

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

We live in a culture that discourages empathy. A culture that too often tells us our principle goal in life is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained.

I think when you spread the wealth around it's good for everybody.

In December, I agreed to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because it was the only way I could prevent a tax hike on middle-class Americans. But we cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. We can't afford it. And I refuse to renew them again.

What I've realized is that life doesn't count for much unless you're willing to do your small part to leave our children — all of our children — a better world. Any fool can have a child. That doesn't make you a father. It's the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.

She was born smart. She's put her brain into neutral ever since, like everyone else in this place.

The cost of the pretense was the loss of the real human texture underneath, but since we all thought that was what was expected of us, that was what we delivered.

Suddenly women's lib had made me feel my life had been wasted.

I'll wager that in ten years it will be fashionable again to be a virgin.

Because some people dressed more expensively and lived in a higher stratum of society, it did not make them less human. They were born and they died. They sought for happiness in the same way as the humblest scullery-maid or the lowest paid stable-boy wanted to be happy in their lives.

Those were the ideals that drove us to nationalization of the health service.

Are we always to be wanting what isn't: the greenest grass accord and principle motherhood and career? Yet our age lies to us like an asp, whispering. "Both.

It was the women's movement that did it, told us we could be everything, but we can't. We can't be mothers and wives at the same time that we're professors. It just doesn't work. Someone always gets gypped.

Violence is already active here; it is built into the very structure od the existing society. If we seek a world in which men do the least possible violence to each other (which is to state just the negative of it), then we are committed not simply to try to avoid violence ourselves, but to try to destroy patterns of violence which already exist.

Yes, they manage to sound very reasonable to themselves as they talk of deterring others from crime; but the act of putting a man in jail remains essentially the act of trying to wish that man out of existence. From the moment of arrest one begins to feel against one's flesh the operation of this crude attempt at sorcery.

Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.

Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent.

There seems to be no stopping drug frenzy once it takes hold of a nation. What starts with an innocuous HUGS, NOT DRUGS bumper sticker soon leads to wild talk of shooting dealers and making urine tests a condition for employment -- anywhere.