Quotes About Society

Only where great masses are superfluous or can be spared without disastrous results of depopulation is totalitarian rule, as distinguished from a totalitarian movement, at all possible.

The disintegration processes which have become so manifest in recent years—the decay of public services: schools, police, mail delivery, garbage collection, transportation, et cetera; the death rate on the highways and the traffic problems in the cities; the pollution of air and water—are the automatic results of the needs of mass societies that have become unmanageable

democratic government had rested as much on the silent approbation and tolerance of the indifferent and inarticulate sections of the people as on the articulate and visible institutions and organizations of the country.

different, demonstrates clearly, I think, not only that the conquest of poverty is a prerequisite for the foundation of freedom, but also that liberation from poverty cannot be dealt with in the same way as liberation from political oppression.

Revolutions always appear to succeed with amazing ease in their initial stages, and the reason is that those who supposedly "make" revolutions do not "seize power" but rather pick it up where it lies in the streets.

while we know the operation and the specific function of the totalitarian secret police, we do not know how well or to what an extent the 'secret' of this secret society corresponds to the secret desires and the secret complicities of the masses in our time.

They are designed to translate the propaganda lies of the movement, woven around a central fiction—the conspiracy of the Jews, or the Trotskyites, or 300 families, etc.—into a functioning reality, to build up, even under nontotalitarian circumstances, a society whose members act and react according to the rules of a fictitious world.

All the déclassés of capitalist society were finally ready to unite and establish mob organizations of their own; their propaganda and their attraction rested on the assumption that a society which had shown its willingness to incorporate crime in the form of vice into its very structure would by now be ready to cleanse itself of viciousness by openly

The universal demand for happiness and the widespread unhappiness in our society (and these are but two sides of the same coin) are among the most persuasive signs that we have begun to live in a labor society which lacks enough laboring to keep it contented. For only the animal laborans, and neither the craftsman nor the man of action, has ever demanded to be happy or thought that mortal men could be happy.

The absence of a political hierarchy in the nation-state and the victory of equality rendered 'society secretly more hierarchical as it became outwardly more democratic.

South Africa's race society taught the mob the great lesson of which it had always had a confused premonition, that through sheer violence an underprivileged group could create a class lower than itself, that for this purpose it did not even need a revolution but could band together with groups of the ruling classes, and that foreign or backward peoples offered the best opportunities for such tactics.

Defining virginity means directly affecting the lives of nearly all women, and many men as well. Despite what some people appear to think, defining virginity is not merely a philosophical exercise. It is an exercise in controlling how people behave, feel, and think, and in some cases, whether they live or die.

Locker rooms are not, in actual fact, the secret clubhouses of the Effortlessly Thin Women's Fat-Lady Harassment Society.

The opposite of "slut" is someone who has not been labeled a slut, someone who has never been charged with violating doxa.

Hell is other people," said the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, and he wasn't even a fat guy.

Oh, said the mother, that is not a turkey. How well he uses his legs, and how upright he holds himself! He is my own child, and he is not so very ugly after all if you look at him properly. Quack, quack! Come with me now. I will take you into grand society, and introduce you to the farmyard, but you must keep close to me or you may be trodden upon. And, above all, beware of the cat. When they reached the farmyard

Superbe! Charmant! exclaimed the ladies; for they all used to chatter French, each one worse than her neighbor.

Clear answers to problems like guilt and atonement, dying and immortality; • And with all this, still a wide-ranging assimilation to Hellenistic-Roman society. Once the freedom of religion

Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.

This was a place where tattoos outnumbered teeth.

America was waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that one-third of our people will kill one-third of our people while one-third of our people watches.

Check out the comments underneath," Augie says. I move the cursor down. "There are over fifty thousand of them." "Just click 'Top Comments' and read a few." I do as he asks. And as always when reading a comments section, my faith in humanity plummets:

But life changes people. It smothers that kind of larger-than-life woman. Time quiets them down. That firecracker girl you knew in high school—where is she now? It didn't happen to men as much. Those boys often grew up to be masters of the universe. The super successful girls? They seemed to die of slow societal suffocation. So

There was an awkwardness to him, a stoicism that most people, with their need for appearances and fake smiles, found off-putting. Shane couldn't handle small talk or the excess bullshittery of modern society. When