Quotes About Society

there will be much personal misery . . . if fertility is so low that four grandparents must share one grandchild, and if lots of grandparents don't have grandchildren.

The hierarchy of class in London was rigid. It was like a religion. It still is to a certain extent.

Ningún escritor es libre de renunciar a su momento político, pero la literatura refleja la política, no influye en ella, una distinción importante.

Trouble is, kids feel they have to shock their elders and each generation grows up into something harder to shock.

After the Civil War, Worth drifted, like so many veterans, to New York City, which by the mid-1860s was already one of the most concentratedly criminal places on earth. The politicians were up for sale, the magistrates and the police were corrupt

privately he considered him a prime specimen of the doomed ruling-class elite. "His intellectual equipment was unimpressive," Philby later wrote, "his knowledge of the world, and views about it, were just what one would expect from a fairly cloistered son of the upper levels of the British establishment.

Like most people who proclaim themselves free spirits, she was fiercely conventional.

As a mark of opposition, many wore paper clips in their lapels. The paper clip was a Norwegian invention; the little twist of metal became a symbol of unity, a society binding together against oppression.

When a man modifies or adorns a woman's name, or dispatches an endearment into her vicinity, he is attempting at once to alter and deny her, to dilute the privacy of the category she has inherited and to require that she respond as someone quite less than herself.

The American Naming Authority, a collective of women studying the effects of names on behavior, decrees that a name should only have one user. The nearly 1 million American users of the name Mary, for example, do not constitute a unified army who might slaughter all users of the name Nancy, as was earlier supposed, but rather a saturation of the Mary Potential Quotient. Simply stated: Too many women with the same name produces widespread mediocrity and fatigue.

In a perfect world the current laws would not apply.

All women are beautiful; it's society who's ugly.

Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.

Storytellers ought not be too tame. They ought to be wild creatures who function adequately in society. They are best in disguise. If they lose all their wildness, they cannot give us the truest joys.

The school-children were in their uniforms. A cock crowed repeatedly. Mum got her tray together. I was ready for school. Mum went down the street, swaying, moving a little sleepily, with one more burden added to her life. She was merely a detail in the poverty of our area.

Centuries of being attached to the machine had atrophied the languages of the earth.

mieux vaut vivre libre dans un monde ravagé qu'être un esclave dans une utopie pacifiée.

Better to live free in a ravaged world than to be a slave in a peaceful utopia.

that I couldn't blame the protesters for being dissatisfied.

I was glad to see Obama bringing these issues,

Trump's victory was not an isolated event but part of a worldwide trend toward populism.

is not right that children be dunked headfirst into the vat of garbage we call popular culture.

a society of essential oils and self-esteem has replaced a society of logic.

The best countries—and the best societies—are those where citizens are virtuous enough to sacrifice for the common good but unwilling to be forced to sacrifice for the "greater" good. Flourishing societies require a functional social fabric, created by citizens working together—and yes, separately—toward a meaningful life.