Quotes About Society

In India, the eldest has the most responsibility and the crown goes to him. The crown could go to a person with the most talent. But how could 'most talent' be determined? So Indian society settled on age.

Yet feminism has never killed anyone. Machismo, it kills every day.

Maintenant que nous (les femmes) pouvons devenir parfois, dans certains pays et dans certaines circonstances, des Hommes comme les autres, ce caractère qu'on croyait inné apparaît pour ce qu'il est : un conditionnement imposé.

We need to cure ourselves of being women. Not of being born women but of being brought up as women in a man's world, of going through each stage and each act of our lives with men's eyes and with men's criteria. And we'll never bring about this cure by continuing to listen to what these men gave to say in our name or for our good.

Americans could open doors to almost all that was admirable--it was their misfortune, not their fault, that movies and victrolas and advertisements squeezed in when they opened the door.

Man is potentially a son, and woman is potentially a mother; woman depends on the dependence of man. The spinster, if pathetic at all, is pathetic because she has no one to look after, not because there is no one to look after her. Bear in mind that the conventional spinster keeps a canary as a substitute for a husband.

Want keeps pace with dignity. Destitute of the lawful means of supporting his rank, his dignity presents a motive for malversation, and his power furnishes the means.

There's nothing scarier than groupthink.

Everyone today is so fragmented. This isn't a country anymore. It's a collection of tribes, all competing with each other for jobs, money, media attention. When I was young, we were all Americans. Back then, we did what we had to, or what we could, to make this a better nation. We did what was right, what was moral.

It was not that he was ashamed of his job or anything, it was just that . . . well, he was ashamed of his job.

To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men.

The open society is one that is deemed in principle to embrace all humanity.

Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization.

Truth is the cry of all, but the game of the few.

Have you seen the well to do? Up and down Park Avenue? On that famous thoroughfare, With their noses in the air? High hats and arrowed collars, Wide spats and fifteen dollars. Spending every dime, For a wonderful time.

she even contemplated having her womb taken out to eliminate periods altogether, which would surely be her greatest possible career move, a tactical hysterectomy for ambitious women with menstruation problems

Democracies cannot dispense with hypocrisy any more than dictatorships can with cynicism.

With the decline or disappearance of other powers, the priest, even though appearing so intimately integrated into the life of society, has become a more singular and unclassifiable being than any of those old magicians the ancient world used to keep locked up like sacred animals in the depths of its temples, existing in the intimacy of the gods alone.

The discreet slaughter of fifteen or twenty wretched people per day will not prevent tramways from running to schedule, cafés from being full, or churches resounding with the Te Deum.

The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.

Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.

In a free and democratic society such as ours, justice should not eternally abrogate one's rights to freedom and liberty, except in the most extreme cases.

In no obvious sense was the American Revolution undertaken as a social revolution.

In England the practice of "virtual" representation provided reasonably well for the actual representation of the major interests of the society, and it raised no widespread objection.