Quotes About Society

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. If Black men continue to define "femininity" instead of their own desires, and to do it in archaic european terms, they restrict our access to each other's energies

I might add here that in no socialist country that I have ever visited have I ever found an absence of racism or sexism, so the eradication of both of these diseases seems to involve more than just the abolition of capitalism as an institution.

When women grow old and cease being women, they get beards on their chins; I wonder what men get when they grow old and cease to be men?

My child? A man has no children, it is only woman who has children, and therefore the future is hers when we die childless.

Will I end up in Hell along with the Hamburger Helping Hand, Joe Camel and Wendy, the Snapple Lady?

That may be true, I thought, But they don't have digital cable or Internet access, so really what's the point of being alive? Civilized life, with all its threats and potential dooms, is too much to bear without the respite of three hundred channels. True, Osama bin Laden may very well send nuclear-bomb-filled suitcases on Amtrak trains into Penn Station, but until then: I Love the 80s on VH1.

Theatre is a form of knowledge; it should and can also be a means of transforming society. Theatre can help us build our future, rather than just waiting for it. ~

The smallest incidents of our social life contain all the moral and political values of society, all its structures of domination and power, all its mechanisms of oppression.

Saints, it has been said, are the sinners who go on trying. So free men and women are the oppressed who go on trying and who in the process make themselves fit to bear the responsibilities and uphold the disciplines which will maintain a free society.

Moulmein for food, Mandalay for conversation, Rangoon for ostentation

I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals and I loathe humanity for its failure to live up to these possibilities.

There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them.

Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - You may know that your society is doomed.

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.

When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, Who is destroying the world? You are.

She was fifteen when it occurred to her for the first time that women did not run railroads and that people might object. To hell with that, she thought- and never worried about it again.

Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.

Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.

We, Equality 7-2521, were not happy in those year in the Home of the Students. It was not that the learning was too hard for us. It was that the learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them. The Teachers told us so, and they frowned when they looked at us.

I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society.

The crowd would have forgiven anything, except a man who could remain normal under the vibrations of its enormous collective sneer.