Quotes About Society

In contemporary societies, by contrast, old age and infirmity have gone from being a shared, multigenerational responsibility to a more or less private state—

The veneration of elders may be gone, but not because it has been replaced by veneration of youth. It's been replaced by veneration of the independent self.

The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. If you don't, mortality is only a horror.

The aged did not lose status and control so much as share it. Modernization did not demote the elderly. It demoted the family. It

Some will be alarmed by the prospect of a doctor's writing about the inevitability of decline and death. For many, such talk, however carefully framed, raises the specter of a society readying itself to sacrifice its sick and aged. But what if the sick and aged are already being sacrificed—victims of our refusal to accept the inexorability of our life cycle?

In 1913, Mabel Nassau, a Columbia University graduate student, conducted a neighborhood study of the living conditions of one hundred elderly people in Greenwich Village—sixty-five women and thirty-five men. In this era before pensions and Social Security, all were poor. Only twenty-seven were able to support themselves—living off savings, taking in lodgers, or doing odd jobs like selling newspapers, cleaning homes, mending umbrellas. Most were too ill or debilitated to work.

For more than half a century now, we have treated the trials of sickness, aging, and mortality as medical concerns. It's been and experiment in social engineering, putting our fate in the hands of people valued more for their technical prowess than for their understanding of human needs. That experiment has failed... we seek a life of worth and purpose, yet are routinely denied the conditions that might make it possible, there is no other way to see what modern society has done.

I don't suppose there has been a moment in the world's history where more people felt themselves to be artists, of when less art was produced.

My own theory is that the spectacle of the homeless may be necessary to keep the rest of us on the straight and narrow...

When Glenda Jackson reveals that she has never been in a relationship with a man in which he hasn't raised his fists to her, I don't know whether this tells us more about the contemporary male or about Glenda Jackson.

Anyone in England who puts himself forward to be elected to a position of political power is almost bound to be socially or emotionally insecure, or criminally motivated, or mad.

I was shocked to read that Lord Ferrers, a Home Office minister, when booked for speeding and presented with a £40 fixed penalty with three penalty points, them wrote to the Suffolk police to thank them for catching him. There is a sickness in England. If his lordship appreciates punishment so much, it was unkind just to fine him. He should have been caned, with his trousers down, by the side of the road.

The rest of us learned the simple lesson - invaluable in a bureaucratic society - that there is no moral or practical obligation to tell the truth when filling in forms.

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.

What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope.

What better way is there to police the streets of a minority community than to turn one generation against the other?

It is not the destiny of Black america to repeat white america's mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life.

It is as hard for our children to believe that we are not omnipotent as it is for us to know it, as parents. But that knowledge is necessary as the first step in the reassessment of power as something other than might, age, privilege, or the lack of fear. It is an important step for a boy, whose societal destruction begins when he is forced to believe that he can only be strong if he doesn't feel, or if he wins.

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You hear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying.

In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematised oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the space of the dehumanised inferior.

If this society ascribes roles to Black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it Black women who must bend and alter our lives to compensate, or is it society that needs changing?

Each of us struggles daily with the pressures of conformity and the loneliness of difference from which those choices seem to offer escape.

Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men

Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama. For not only do we touch our most profoundly creative source, but we do that which is female and self-affirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society.