Quotes About Society

In our time, we couldn't find a virgin—of either sex—over the age of sixteen.

Marriage is more than a tradition. It's an economic necessity. In societies where there are more married couples, there are fewer children in poverty, and less violence.

Less than four percent of foster kids graduate with a college degree, compared to 46 percent in the general population. And don't get me started on the number of young women who end up pregnant by age twenty-one.

most of us no longer have the luxury of asking whether a job is genuinely productive, but only whether it pays well and has tolerable conditions.

When consuming goods rather than satisfying work becomes the focus of our culture, we have created (or acquieced in) a society of permanent adolescents.

Rousseau introduced the idea of false needs, and showed how the systems we live in work against our growing up: they dazzle us with toys and bewilder us with so many trivial products that we are too busy making silly choices to remember that the adult ones are made by others.

Roosevelt spoke eloquently, in his penetrating tenor, of those 'who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life . . . I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,' he told the audience, '. . . The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.

All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.

My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me. It doesn't justify my homosexuality. But it would give me — I feel — a license.

I live in an unethical society that coarsens the sensibilities and thwarts the capacities for goodness of most people but makes available for minority consumption an astonishing array of intellectual and aesthetic pleasures. Those who don't enjoy (in both senses) my pleasures have every right, from their side, to regard my consciousness as spoiled, corrupt, decadent. I, from my side, can't deny the immense richness of these pleasures, or my addiction to them.

Pop art: only possible in an affluent society, where one can be free to enjoy ironic consumption.

We live in a time in which tragedy is not an art form but a form of history.

Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)

No está mal ser bella lo que está mal es la obligación de serlo.

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.

La necesidad de confirmar la realidad y dilatar la experiencia mediante fotografías es un consumismo estético al que hoy todos son adictos. Las sociedades industriales transforman a sus ciudadanos en yonquis a las imágenes; es la forma más irresistible de contaminación mental.

Elites presuppose masses.

Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and an object of surveillance (for rulers).

Who believes today that war can be abolished? No one, not even pacifists.

Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.

A necessidade de comprovar a realidade e de engrandecer a experiência através das fotografias é uma forma de consumismo estético a que todos nos entregamos. As sociedades industriais transformam os seus cidadãos em viciados de imagens; trata-se da mais irresistível forma de poluição mental

Uma sociedade torna-se moderna quando uma das suas principais atividades é produzir e consumir imagens, quando as imagens, que influenciam extraordinariamente a determinação das nossas exigências para com a realidade e são elas mesmas um substituto cobiçado da experiência autêntica, passam a ser indispensáveis para a saúde da economia, para a estabilidade da política e para a procura da felicidade privada.