Quotes About Society

If a friend had a coronary scare and finally started exercising three days a week, who would hound him about the other four days? It's the worst of bad manners—and self-protection, I think, in a nervously cynical society—to ridicule the small gesture.

What I'm saying is nobody feels sorry for anybody anymore, nobody even pretends they do. Not even the President. It's like it's become unpatriotic.

So much energy squandered in the unwinnable war waged by woman against the life-form she is.

we consume. I think that's just how we have to be." "Of course you think that. When everybody around you thinks the same way, you can't even see what you're believing in.

A ten-year-old getting high on pills. Foolish children. This is what we're meant to say: Look at their choices, leading to a life of ruin. But lives are getting lived right now, this hour, down in the dirty cracks between the toothbrushed nighty-nights and the full grocery carts, where those words don't pertain.

The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures.

you always write about individualism vs. community, and that you see independence as stupidity and instead celebrate dependency.

Well, but it's criminal negligence, really. These kids have to grow up and run things. Larger things than a ball field, I mean. What kind of world will they really be able to make?

capitalism, with its need for endless growth, is no longer viable? That we, the middle class, have to learn not to want so much?

That the electorate could validate such a mean, grabby, self-aggrandizing man. At any level.

We will change our ways significantly as a nation not when some laws tell us we have to (remember Prohibition?), but when we want to.

While the little boys ran around pretending to shoot each other and fall dead in the road, it appeared that little girls were running the country.

Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.

The dominant culture has a way of becoming more real than the stuff at hand.

We will change our ways significantly as a nation not when some laws tell us we have to (remember Prohibition?), but when we want

To hear you tell it, you'd think man was only put on this earth to keep urinals from going to waste.

the most remarkable feature of human culture is its capacity to reach beyond the self and encompass the collective good; yet

here where we pay soothsayers and acrobats to help lose our weight

Likewise the Charles Dickens one, seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat's ass. You'd think he was from around here.

Thirty or forty bucks an hour, old men still talked like those were the days Jesus walked among us throwing around hundred-dollar bills.

But where is the place for girls in that Kingdom? The rules don't quite apply to us, nor protect us either. What do a girl's bravery and righteousness count for, unless she is also pretty? Just try being the smartest and most Christian seventh-grade girl in Bethlehem, Georgia. Your classmates will smirk and call you a square. Call you worse, if you're Adah.

Because DSS pay is basically the fuck-you peanut butter sandwich type of paycheck. That's what the big world thinks it's worth, to save the white-trash orphans. And if these kids grow up to throw punches at washing machines or each other or even let's say smash a drugstore drive-through window. Crawl in and take what's there. Tell me how you're going to be surprised. There's your peanut butter sandwich back. Every dog gets his day.

Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behavior in children, and medicate it in adults? That

The Marines aren't rooting for the new society. The U.S. is paying the contras, the guys that attack the farmers." Hallie would not laugh now, she would be inflamed. She said we were a nation in love with forgetting the facts.