Quotes About Society

It's something most people of color and most women have been burdened with their whole lives, having to suppress your natural emotion to make everybody else feel comfortable. Repeatedly having to do that takes its toll.

It's a different thing to write a love story now than in the time of Jane Austen, Eliot, or Tolstoy. One of the problems is that once divorce is possible, once break-ups are possible, it can all become a little less momentous.

One doesn't like to appear vulgarly inquisitive. But if everyone one knows has suddenly started murdering everyone else, it would be terribly nice to know about it.

it is impossible to become a billionaire without bending the rules. Most of the members of that class run their operations and live their lives in ways that injure our communities. Most are trying to rig the system even further. These are not upstanding citizens. They are parasites and freeloaders—however they try to justify themselves. We do not owe them deference.

They were groping for a modern order that allowed citizens to participate in the new economies of scale instead of being subject to them, one that offered more freedom of choice to more members of society. Theirs was a version of modernity based on grassroots cooperation, not zero-sum competition

In the United States, serious and damaging public corruption is not getting punished. That means, by default, that we deem it to be just fine.

That idea, that God signaled his "election" of a person by showering him or her with money, followed the Dutch and English Protestants to the New World and became a central strand in America's own mythology. Still, over the course of history and around the world, the intensity of people's obsession with money has not been constant over time. It waxes and wanes. The 1980s marks a waxing phase.

Brains and talent were sucked onto Wall Street, while other things that contribute to a country's greatness were starved of air. That's called an "opportunity cost," and it was huge.

There is no magic formula, no step-by-step method for bringing the hydras that are laying waste to our societies under control.

She is only a young woman who did not want to become a nun. The world is full of them.

Houses had the meanest set of white people in them. Pretty in their living but nasty in their ways.

The loss of liberty which must attend being a wife was of all things the most horrible to my imagination.

When I came here, it stunned me at first to realize how much what I had thought of as civilization was really just advertising and marketing, incessant urgings to buy, Buy, BUY. from Dead Cat Bounce

If shrewdness and sharpness be a just cause of separation between man and wife, I think few men in England would keep their wives long.' The

We endorse the manmade competition between ourselves that disunites us, striping us of our true ability. We don't believe we can govern better, and until we believe this, we never will. It's time for a new society.

They go out into the world expecting adventure, and the patriarchy eats them.

Outsiders pretend to be insiders, and it makes them unlikable. Insiders pretend to be outsiders, and we love to play along.

People congregate according to their relative levels of luck.

It's all kind of a big illusion: the white picket fence and the perfect marriage and the kids. Check that box off, check that box off, and move forward.

It's commonly believed that there's less pressure on a woman to be married these days than there used to be. If that's true, if things are better now than they were before, then they once must have been very bad indeed.

She was lonely, but she'd never tell anyone that. If you admitted you were lonely, people assumed there was something wrong with you. The media talked about an epidemic of loneliness, and yet admitting that you felt that way was a statement of failure.

We who were her neighbors were full of gayety, which was but the reflected light from her beaming countenance. It was not the first time that I was full of wonder at the waste of human ability in this world, as a botanist wonders at the wastefulness of nature, the thousand seeds that die, the unused provision of every sort. The reserve force of society grows more and more amazing to one's thought.

And in this day and age, we sometimes seem to care more about the record of joy than the experience of joy itself.

One of the organizing principles of gentrified thinking is to assess everyone based on what they can do for you, and then treat them accordingly.