Quotes About Society

Whenever people propose that we go back to the traditional family, I always suggest that they pick a ballpark date for the family they have in mind. Once pinned down, they are invariably unwilling to accept the package deal that comes with their chosen model.

Certainly people fell in love during those thousands of years, sometimes with their own spouses. But marriage was not fundamentally about love. It was too vital an economic and political institution to be entered into solely on the basis of something as irrational as love.

Even today, Young says, marriage is "the cornerstone of patriarchal power." Christine Delphy and Diana Leonard argue that marriage is one of the primary ways that "men benefit from, and exploit, the work of women."23

By 1952 there were two million more working wives than there had been at the height of World War II.

What about traditional Chinese and Sudanese ghost or spirit marriages, in which one of the partners is actually dead? In these societies a youth might be given in marriage to the dead son or daughter of another family, in order to forge closer ties between the two sets of relatives.

Males are also damaged by gender expectations that have changed enough to erode many old sources of masculine self-esteem but not enough to lessen the pressures on them to maintain or reinvent manly behaviors and images.29

A date took place in the public sphere, away from home. It involved money, because when you moved from drinking mother's lemonade on the front porch to buying Cokes at a restaurant, someone had to pay. And because in the context of women's second-class economic status, the boy would have to pay, a girl could not ask a boy to take her out. The initiative thus shifted from the girl and her family to the boy.

the entire notion of the state undermining some primordial family privacy is a myth, because the nuclear family has never existed as an autonomous, private unit except where it was the synthetic creation of outside forces. The strong nuclear family is in large measure a creation of the strong state.

Despite humane intentions, an overemphasis on personal responsibility for strengthening family values encourages a way of thinking that leads to moralizing rather than mobilizing for concrete reforms.

Certainly people fell in love during those thousands of years, sometimes with their own spouses. But marriage was not fundamentally about love.

If it is hard to find a 'natural' parent-child relationship in this variety of family arrangements, it is also difficult to make pat historical judgments about what kind of family is best for children.

More than half of Spanish women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine are single. The rate of marriage in Italy is much lower than in the United States. Japan shares with Scandinavia the distinction of having the highest percentage of unmarried women between age twenty and forty of anywhere in the world.44

Learning to be a lady / is like learning / to live within a shell, / to be a crustacean encased / in a small white / uncomfortable world.

The renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead said that what marks the beginning and assures the continuity of civilization is compassion.

The chaos indicates you're smart enough to spend your time fighting for what matters, instead of wasting time adhering to society's useless mores about what a home should look like. Speaks to your power.

Scientific "facts" are taught at a very early age and in the very same manner in which religious "facts" were taught only a century ago.… But science is excepted from criticism. In society at large the judgment of the scientist is received with the same reverence as the judgment of bishops and cardinals was accepted not too long ago.… science has now become as oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight. (ibid., p. 182)

Como é que uma sociedade, cujas instituições educacionais pregam uma abordagem fragmentada da vida e uma divisão distorcida do mundo, pode produzir um indivíduo saudável e criativo?

The mass of people was ignorant, driven by fashions, fads, and the tongues of orators...

But in that space were crammed humans, not animals.

The public could be made to want anything, if it were sold to them the right way. But one thing the public did seem to want in 1880 was to emulate high society and the way high society lived. Very well. The Dakota would provide such emulation.

In fusty Boston and austere Charleston, for instance, society never dined in public. But in New York society had discovered the restaurant, and the fashionable gathered at Niblo's and Delmonico's for dinners and even floor shows. The daring drank wine, and the less daring mixed a little wine with their milk.

Moses Lazarus, father of Emma, had been a founding member of the Knickerbocker Club, New York's second-most exclusive. The Sephardim made the most of their entrenched position, and, if German Jews found the gentiles in New York society indifferent, they found the Sephardic Jews almost unapproachable.

I hate you. I love you. You're a freak, you know that? Everyone says so. They always have. I'm trying not to be.

Craig said the problem with things is that everyone is always comparing everyone with everyone