Quotes About Society

The constant broadcast and reception of ghostly images via radio and television, according to this notion, had weakened the sense, particularly among youth, of possessing physical the sense, particularly among youth, of possessing physical bodies and private identities. McLuhan CD-ROM

Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition.

In the age of instant information man ends his job of fragmented specializing and assumes the role of information-gathering. Today information-gathering resumes the inclusive concept of "culture" exactly as the primitive food-gatherer worked in complete equilibrium with his entire environment. Our quarry now, in this new nomadic and "workless" world, is knowledge and insight into the creative processes of life and society.

Thus, as passivity becomes extreme in the bulk of society, a sizeable segment of citizens detaches itself from the dream-locked majority. As vulgarity and stupidity thicken, more and more people awaken to the intolerability of their condition. Much can be done to foster this state of awareness, even though little can be done directly to change the policies of those in control today of the media of communication.

Arquímedes dijo una vez: <> Hoy en día, habría señalado nuestros medios de comunicación electrónicos y habría dicho: <>. Pero una vez que hemos entregado nuestros sentidos y nuestros sistemas nerviosos a las manipulaciones de quienes tratan de sacar provecho aniquilando nuestros ojos, oídos, nervios y cerebro, el resultado será que ya no tendremos derechos.

Either we penetrate to the essential character of man and society and discover the outlines of a world order, or we continue as flotsam and jetsam on a flood of transient fads and ideas that will drown us with impartiality.

It is a frightening thing to love someone you know the world rejects.

La razón tiene una dignidad especial que se alza por encima del juego de las fuerzas, y sólo en la medida en que se respeta la razón en una sociedad las minorías serán capaces de hacer escuchar sus justas, pero impopulares, demandas.

Roosevelt vio que los derechos protegen a la democracia del embate de la envidia. Nadie puede envidiar de su prójimo lo que toda persona tiene por derecho. Elevar ciertas bondades económicas clave a la categoría de derechos socava la envidia, al menos hasta cierto punto. Una de las razones por las que vemos tanta envidia es porque las personas no se sienten seguras en lo que a la base económica de sus vidas respecta.

Society readily accepts that a father can't be expected to raise a child alone, without help; yet a mother is completely different. For a mother to claim she couldn't do it, well, that's unacceptable.

I liked the imaginary people on the entertainment feed way more than I liked real ones, but you can't have one without the other.

The deal with multiculturalism is that the only culture you're allowed to disapprove of is your own.

My clothes are made of monosodium glutamate and hexachlorophene. My food is made of polyester, rayon and lurex. My rug lotions contain vitamins. Do my vitamins feature cleaning agents? I hope so. My brain is gimmicked by a microprocessor the size of a quark, and costing ten pee and running the whole deal. I am made of — junk, I'm just junk.

Standing in the nordic nook of the kitchen, I can gaze down at the flimsy-limbed joggers heading south towards the Park. It's nearly as bad as New York. Some of these gasping fatsos, these too-little-too-late artists, they look as though they're running up rising ground, climbing ground. My generation, we started all this. Before, everyone was presumably content to feel like death the whole time. Now they want to feel terrific for ever.

People who go to the Opera, they don't go to the toilet, not even at home.

As I've already mentioned, 1984 and I were getting on famously. A no-frills setup, run without sentiment, snobbery or cultural favouritism, Airstrip One seemed like my kind of town. (I saw myself as an idealistic young corporal in the Thought Police.)

Like most people, I feel ambiguous guilt for my inferiors, ambiguous envy for my superiors, and mandatory low-spirits about the system itself.

Evidentemente è questa la caratteristica della città contemporanea. Puoi aver voglia di lavorarci. Ma nessuno si aspetta seriamente che tu ci viva.

If we all downed tools and joined hands for ten minutes and stopped believing in money, then money would no longer exist. We never will, of course. Maybe money is the great conspiracy, the great fiction. The great addiction too: we're all addicted and we can't break the habit now. There's not even anything very twentieth century about it, except the disposition. You just can't kick it, that junk, even if you want to. You can't get the money monkey off your back.

The world is boiling. You hardly dare open a paper these days: the news is all of cataclysm and collapse. Tempers are threadbare; the yobs are winning; everybody accepts the fact that they've got to get nastier in order to survive. The world is going bad on us. I'm having nothing to do with it.

Girls, in those days, couldn't do anything to you (they couldn't call the lawyers, the tabloids, the cops) except kill themselves or get pregnant. All they had was life: they could augment it, they could bear it away. They could subtract from it or they could add to it; and that was all.

He was an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that society had to be like this, had any right, had any business being like this. A car in the street. Why? Why cars? This is what an artist has to be: harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles.

His wife died from being too lower class. She wasn't up to it.

it is not places that are dangerous, but people