Quotes About Society

A fotografia não se limita a reproduzir o real, recicla-o, o que constitui um processo-chave de uma sociedade moderna

This is America, [...] where the maudlin happy end is as appreciated as a bout of self-righteous, gleeful slaughter.

Space reserved for being serious is hard to come by in a modern society, whose chief model of a public space is the mega-store (which may also be an airport or a museum).

People can turn off not just because a steady diet of images of violence has made them indifferent but because they are afraid.

our capacity to respond to our experiences with emotional freshness and ethical pertinence is being sapped by the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appalling images

Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together.

It used to be thought, when the candid images were not common, that showing something that needed to be seen, bringing a painful reality closer, was bound to goad viewers to feel more. In a world in which photography is brilliantly at the service of consumerist manipulations, no effect of a photograph of a doleful scene can be taken for granted.

A portrait that declines to name its subject becomes complicit, if inadvertendy in the cult of celebrity that has fueled an insatiable appetite for the opposite sort of photograph: to grant only the famous their names demotes the rest to representative instances of their occupations, their ethnicities, their plights.

Women may be vain, but when a man is vain, it is beyond believing, for a man is willing to die for his vanity.

We all have our own unique gifts. It is incumbent upon the larger society to discover them.

It was a wonder, after so many years of trying to press herself into society's mold, to suddenly suspect that the problem was with the mold, not with her.

She suspected that a big factor in her choice was the fact that they were both men. They had exactly zero interest in attacking a woman. But it was more than that. It was the love she read on their faces when they looked at each other, their commitment to openly and fiercely love each other even though society might disapprove. Given its conception during a violent rape, this child might also need that strength of commitment and acceptance.

Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.

The next day Mrs Honeyfoot told her husband that John Segundus was exactly what a gentleman should be, but she feared he would never profit by it for it was not the fashion to be modest and quiet and kind-hearted.

It has been remarked (by a lady infinitely cleverer than the present author) how kindly disposed the world in general feels to young people who either die or marry.

For this is England where a man's neighbours will never suffer him to live entirely bereft of society, let him be as dry and sour-faced as he may.

Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians.

The evolution of the capitalist style of life could be easily -- and perhaps most tellingly -- described in terms of the genesis of the modern Lounge Suit.

What is the damnation of hell? To go with that society who have not obeyed His commands.

Politics is the conspiracy of the unproductive but organized against the productive but unorganized.

By a very conservative estimate, a hundred million people have died at the hands of their own governments in this century. Given that record, how bad could anarchy be?

The measure of the state's success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not.

It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment. Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.

It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed hungry person. True freedom can only be where there is no exploitation and oppression of one person by another; where there is not unemployment, and where a person is not living in fear of losing his job, his home and his bread. Only in such a society personal and any other freedom can exist for real and not on paper.