Quotes About Society

Jennie had a set of values, but she didn't realize they were different values from the rest of us. She never could understand why she was always in trouble. In the end, I mean. She didn't know what it was that made her angry all the time. I'll tell you what it was. It was very simple: it was our society trying to break her, trying to make her a nice middle-class person.

The Mole People, by Jennifer Toth (Chicago Review Press, 1993).

The Maya created a vibrant and brilliant society that, in the end, failed to adjust to a changing environment and the needs of its people;

in our culture, women can do anything a man can. and vice versa. don alfonso's eyebrows shot up. i do not believe it. it's true, sally said defiantly. in America, the women hunt while the men have babies?

As is typical of Maya inscriptions, not a single one at Copán mentions a commoner. Working folk had to build all those buildings. Farmers had to feed all those laborers along with the holy lords and nobles. This type of class division usually works when everyone believes they are part of a system, with each person occupying a valued place in society and contributing to the vital ceremonies that maintain the cosmic order.

There is an old French curse: may your fondest wish come true. If this treatment is cheap and available to everyone, it will destroy the earth through overpopulation. If it is dear and available only to the very rich, it will cause riots, wars, a breakdown of the social contract. Either way, it will lead directly to human misery. What is the value of a long life, when it is lived in squalor and unhappiness?

On October 28, 2008, when Judge Paulo Micheli found Rudy Guede guilty of the crime of murder, following an abbreviated "fast track" trial, the killer of talented British college student Meredith Kercher was removed from society and placed safely behind bars, where he has resided ever since. That same day, the judge also ordered a case devoid of merit or motive to proceed to full trial against the victim's American roommate and her Italian boyfriend.

Sometimes, a society can see its end approaching from afar and still not be able to adapt, like the Maya; at other times, the curtain drops without warning and the show is over. No civilization has survived forever. All move toward dissolution, one after the other, like waves of the sea falling upon the shore. None, including ours, is exempt from the universal fate.

If the murder rate that Jane Goodall saw among the several dozen chimpanzees she studied in Gombe were extrapolated to New York City, for example, there would be over fifty thousand murders a year there. "Man is the only animal that kills for pleasure" you hear people say. What poppycock!

America. What a wonderful country. Too bad it was doomed to fail.

The body has been made so problematic for women that is has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit.

In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we, of you we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible: we were trying to live a personal life and yes, that was the only life we could bear witness to But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged into our personal weather They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove along the shore, through the rags of fog where we stood, saying I

A woman in the shape of a monster a monster in the shape of a woman the skies are full of them

Necessity for a more unyielding discipline of my life. Recognize the uselessness of blind anger. Limit society. Use children's school hours better, for work & solitude. Refuse to be distracted from own style o flife. Less waste. Be harder & harder on poems.

If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.

Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.

In a change of government, the poor change nothing but the name of their master.

It is really a hard life. Men will not be nice to you if you are not good-looking, and women will not be nice to you if you are.

The amount of missing girls I've had to trace and their family and their friends always say the same thing. 'She was a bright and affectionate disposition and had no men friends'. That's never true. It's unnatural. Girls ought to have men friends. If not, then there's something wrong about them....

The body—the cage—is everything of the most respectable—but through the bars, the wild animal looks out.

I find most of the human race extraordinarily repulsive. They probably reciprocate this feeling.

There's no reason why women shouldn't behave like rational beings," Simon asserted stolidly. Poirot said drily: "Quite frequently they do. That is even more upsetting!

There is at Christmas time a great deal of hypocrisy, honourable hypocrisy, hypocrisy undertaken pour le bon motif, c'est entendu, but nevertheless hypocrisy!

Wherever there is human nature, there is drama.