Quotes About Society

Freedom is a difficult burden to bear in an absurd world.

Las putas nunca debieron irse de aquella casa. El primero y el segundo oficio más viejos del mundo deberían estar juntos. Al fin y al cabo, entre el nacimiento de uno y otro sólo mediaron unas horas. El primero surgió para que cualquiera pudiera satisfacer las exigencias del amor; el segundo, para que nadie intentara satisfacer por su cuenta las exigencias del odio».

I am chaos in this ordered society, the flaw in a carefully wrought plan. I am turbulence in the queen's eternal river.

The tradition of the personal essay is full of self-appointed outcasts. In that tradition, I am not a poet or the press, but an essayist, a citizen thinker.

Observing that we have waged wars on poverty and drugs as well as cancer, Susan Sontag writes, "Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in

Having virtually invented a paid profession and being almost exclusively available to the rich, doctors were suspect to the working class.

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive," John Kenneth Galbraith writes in the great first sentence of The Affluent Society. "But, beyond doubt, wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding.

We shouldn't ask our rich to be good, in other words, we should ask our economic system to be better.

Attitudes toward the state easily translate into attitudes toward vaccination, in part because the body is such a ready metaphor for the nation.

Circumstances rule men and not men rule circumstances.

History is the key to everything: politics, religion, even fashion.

A cultural change is less a matter of content than a restructuring of relationships between subordinate and dominant elements.

The culture of capitalism is self-contradictory, demanding that people be hard workers by day and hedonists by night.

Culture is sometimes only a context in which people relate to each other, but sometimes culture has a power of its own to shape and transform social relationships.

Far from being a 'haven' from the marketplace, modern romantic love is a practice intimately complicit with the political economy of late capitalism.

the popular conception of the gene as a simple causal agent is not valid. The idea that there is a gene for adventurousness, heart disease, obesity, religiosity, homosexuality, shyness, stupidity, or any other aspect of mind or body has no place on the platform of genetic discourse.

Almsgiving tends to perpetuate poverty aid does away with it once and for all. Almsgiving leaves a man just where he was before. Aid restores him to society as an individual worthy of all respect and not as a man with a grievance. Almsgiving is the generosity of the rich social aid levels up social inequalities. Charity separates the rich from the poor aid raises the needy and sets him on the same level with the rich.

It's only gotten to the point where it's easier for us to imagine the destruction of the world than the changing of our economic system

Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings.

God didn't make rich people or poor people, our society did.

I mean, what is 'normal' anyway? It's just a societal construct that we all choose to live under to avoid social friction.

A job is a person's identity in a society, his way of living, and his relevance in society.

Fat jokes aren't relevant, but they're hilarious when you find them.

We're so busy broadcasting our latest cultural disdain that we scantly notice anything we enjoy. 'Oh man, this Rebecca Black kid is terrible! Let's laugh at her!' has become more culturally relevant than, 'I really love this new Bilal record.'