Quotes About Society

Lovelessness is a boon to consumerism.

ours is a culture that does not love children, that continues to see children as the property of parents to do with as they will.

There is only one emotion that patriarchy values when expressed by men; that emotion is anger. Real men get mad.

Most men are on quest for the ready-made perfect woman because they basically feel that problems in a relationship can't be worked out. When the slightest thing goes wrong, it seems easier to bolt than talk.

They persist in our daily life and they undermine our capacity to live fully and joyously. They even prevent us from participating in organized collective struggle aimed at ending domination and transforming society.

So many of us have felt that we could win male love by showing we were willing to bear the pain, that we were willing to live our lives affirming that the maleness deemed truly manly because it withholds, withdraws, refuses is the maleness we desire. We learn to love men more because they will not love us. If they dared to love us, in patriarchal culture they would cease to be real "men.

Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure. Since sexist norms have taught us that loving is our task whether in our role as mothers or lovers or friends, if men say they are not loved, then we are at fault; we are to blame.

Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples.

The unhappiness of men in relationships, the grief men feel about the failure of love, often goes unnoticed in our society precisely because the patriarchal culture really does not care if men are unhappy.

When the politics of greed become a cultural norm, all acts of charity are wrongly seen as suspect and are represented as a gesture of the weak.

When greedy consumption is the order of the day, dehumanization becomes acceptable. Then, treating people like objects is not only acceptable but is required behavior.

While the poor are offered addiction as a way to escape thinking too much, working people are encouraged to shop.

If our society had a commonly held understanding of the meaning of love, the act of loving would not be so mystifying.

Ironically, many people assume that any female-headed household is automatically matriarchal. In actuality women who head households in patriarchal society often feel guilty about the absence of a male figure and are hypervigilant about imparting sexist values to children, especially males.

There is a gap between the values they claim to hold and their willingness to do the work of connecting thought and action, theory and practice to realize these values and thus create a more just society.

Even though some individuals scholars try to tell us there is no direct connection between images of violence and the violence confronting us in our lives, the common sense truth remains; we are all affected by the images we consume and by the state of mind we are in when watching them.

As a society we are embarrassed by love. We treat it as if it were an obscenity. We reluctantly admit to it. Even saying the word makes us stumble and blush . . . Love is the most important thing in our lives, a passion for which we would fight or die, and yet we're reluctant to linger over its names. Without a supple vocabulary, we can't even talk or think about it directly. —DIANE ACKERMAN

No puede haber amor sin justicia. Hasta que la cultura en la que vivimos no haya aprendido a respetar y defender los derechos civiles fundamentales de los niños, la mayoría de ellos no llegará a conocer el amor. En nuestra sociedad, el hogar privado es la única esfera institucionalizada de poder que fácilmente puede convertirse en autocrática y fascista.

It is no accident that greater cultural acceptance of lying in this society coincided with women gaining greater social equality.

Youth culture today is cynical about love. And that cynicism has come from their pervasive feeling that love cannot be found.

We often overestimate the degree to which exploitative behavior has been normalized and the degree to which we've internalized these norms. It takes, then, a commitment to an acutely self-conscious practice to be able to think and behave better than we've been taught.

You could be Jesus in drag, but if you're brown, they're sure you're selling.

Indeed, all the great movements for social justice in our society have strongly emphasized a love ethic. Yet young listeners remain reluctant to embrace the idea of love as a transformative force.

There are a few if any public spaces where black folks can express fear of whiteness, be it engendered by rational or irrational states of mind. However, white fear of blackness gains a constant hearing.