Quotes About Society

It washed over me for the first time in my life how much importance the world had ascribed to skin pigment, how lately it seemed that skin pigment was the sun and everything else in the universe was the orbiting planets. Ever since school let out this summer, it had been nothing but skin pigment every livelong day. I was sick of i.

Myths born in patriarchy offer a limited source of data on women. What they usually tell is how women react under patriarchy.

it washed over me for the first time in my life just how much importance the world had ascribed to skin pigment, how lately it seemed that skin pigment was the sun and everything else in the universe was the orbiting planets.

Night after night, I endured these grand affairs alone, revolted by what objets d'art we were and contemptuous of how hollow society had turned out to be, and yet inexplicably, I was filled with a yearning to be one of them.

rudeness is a misdemeanor in Charleston.

the Russell slaves name Tom has his own blacksmith shop on East Bay. Missus Russell let him work for hire all day

I didn't know whether this Mr. Smyth was behaving like white people, or if it just showed something vile about all people.

we've accepted the widespread attitudes and effects of patriarchy as givens. They are so much a part of the world, we start to think that's just the way reality is. In the play The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, a deceptively wise

You speak as if God was white and Southern! As if we somehow owned his image. You speak like a fool. The Negro is not some other kind of creature than we are. Whiteness is not sacred, Mary! It can't go on defining everything.

our culture, even the culture of our faith, has helped anesthetize the feminine spirit.

Despite what her father had said about the client's good character, she felt squeamish about polygyny, which was still practiced by many Muslims and a smaller number of elite Hindus. In truth, there was surely polygyny in her own parents' family histories. Parsis hadn't made it a crime until 1865.

But when we work with numbers and abstract reasoning, the benefit to our society is infinite.

There was no divorce in the DPRK, but in America the rate was more than 50 percent, and divorce let to crime and mental illness, according to him. So what happens when people are unhappy here after being married for a while? I asked. The student looked at me blankly. Still another student wanted to write about how McDonald's was horrible. The same student then asked me, So what kind of food does McDonald's make?

Of course, the DPRK purposely infantilized its citizens, making everyone helpless and powerless so that they depended on the state.

this was a country where the most important thing a woman had ever done was to give birth to the Great Leader—not unlike the Virgin Mary.

It would be ridiculous to talk of male and female atmospheres, male and female springs or rains, male and female sunshine.... how much more ridiculous is it in relation to mind, to soul, to thought, where there is as undeniably no such thing as sex, to talk of male and female education and of male and female schools. [written with Elizabeth Cady Stanton]

This I know for sure: Life is...uncertain. As a society and as individuals, we must protect healthy people from disease. We must also treat those suffering from disease in an intelligent, humane, and compassionate way. We need to be rational and keep our fears in check.

How unfair it seemed that boys could dream to grow into the tallest oaks, but girls were destined to be the vine that clings to the oak.

corn sweetener is to the republic of fat what corn whiskey was to the alcoholic republic.

the aristocrats came over a decade later on the Arbella. The trash came on the Mayflower.

The mother myth gives great cover to unloving mothers, who far too often operate undisturbed while their husbands, other family members, and society deflect any criticism or scrutiny aimed at them.

was generally agreed that Mildred had managed a déclassé

Personally I can think of nothing more terrifying than to live in a land where law and order have no meaning and violence is the rule of the day.

Whereas rape victims' self blaming has often been misunderstood as merely a self-destructive response to rape, arising out of low self-esteem, feelings of shame, or female masochism, and fueled by society's desire to blame the victim, it can also be seen as an adaptive survival strategy, if the victim has no other way of gaining control.