Quotes About Society

Art is about experimenting and ideas, but it is also about excellence and exclusion. In a society where everyone is looking for a little distinction, it's an intoxicating combination.

Although the art world is frequently characterised as a classless scene where artists from lower-msddle-class backgrounds drink champagne with high-priced hedge-fund managers, scholarly curators, fashion designers and other "creatives," you'd be mistaken if you thought the world was egalitarian or democratic. Art is about experimenting with ideas, but it is also about excellence and exclusion. In a society where everyone is looking for a little distinction, it's an intoxicating combination.

The trail of lime trees outside our building is still a public loo. …where else are they supposed to go to the toilet in a city where public toilets are about as common as UFO sightings?" (pp.281-82)

clochards—homeless people who have been living on the same streets for so long that no one can remember a time when they weren't there.

The French are not impressed by anything as banal as niceness.

France is a very hierarchical society," he says. "The whole question of service is linked to old ideas of power and class.

Behind every bad law, a deep fear.

Perhaps, however, it is the same with spinsters as with ghosts; and one has to be of their ranks in order to see them at all.

How easy it was, she thought unhappily as she did it, for men and women. They could stand in a street and argue, flirt - they could kiss, make love, do anything at all - and the world indulged them.

Don't you think that queer? That a common coarse-featured woman might drink morphia and be sent to gaol for it, while I am saved and sent to visit her—and all because I am a lady?

She let her head sink, until her brow met the varnished glass. How easy it was, she thought unhappily as she did it, for men and women. They could stand in a street and argue, flirt—they could kiss, make love, do anything at all—and the world indulged them. Whereas she and Julia—

She will be like everyone, putting on the things she sees the constructions she expects to find there.

We are not here to help them, ma'am. We are here to punish them. There are too many good women who are poor or ill or hungry, for us to bother with the bad ones.

La felicità è una cosa talmente fragile di questi tempi. E' come se non ce ne fosse abbastanza per tutti.

Well, that was the clerk class for you. They might be completely without culture, but they certainly knew how to make themselves comfortable.

As for women and men, she said—well, that was the first thing that must be cast off.

why must people of that class always reveal so much of themselves? A few more minutes and she would have shown us her varicose veins.

Frances tänkte inte be om ursäkt. Bättre att vara som jag, tänkte hon, än att vara gift. Hellre ungmö än trångsynt tjänstemannafru!

You are a lady,' he says softly, 'and young, and handsome.—I don't speak from gallantry now, you know that. I say only what is true. You might do anything. ' 'You are a man,' I answer. 'Men's truths are different from ladies'. I may do nothing, I assure you.

Why do gentlemen's voices carry so clearly, when women's are so easily stifled?

Capitalism is a cult. We've become so ensconced in it, however, so blind to its power, that it's hard to see it as such. Which is how a cult is imposed on people. I mean, we can't fathom that there could be any other way of existing and we defend it even when we can see it is no longer working for us.

Then, I realized that there is an indigenous presence in the Solar System. It's us. So, then, I got to wondering what would happen if a more technologically advanced society moved next door to us, the way we moved next door to the American Indians.

Does politics have to be injected into everything?

If education does not create a need for the best in life, then we are stuck in an undemocratic, rigid caste society.