Quotes About Society

It has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which we will be allowed to institutionalize memory.

Like television, motion pictures, and computers, [Stephen] King has replaced reading...the triumph of the genial King is a large emblem of the failures of American education.

The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.

A political reading of Shakespeare is bound to be less interesting than a Shakespearean reading of politics [.]

It's just what Wendell Phillips said," she declared. "' The Puritan's idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.

George Orwell famously observed in The Road to Wigan Pier that leftist intellectuals seldom had anything to do with the lower classes that they championed, for a simple reason, his emphasis: "The lower classes smell.

Do you defend niggers, Atticus? I asked him that evening. Of course I do. Don't say nigger, Scout. That's common. 's what everybody at school says. From now on it'll be everybody less one-- Well if you don't want me to grow up talkin' that way, why do you send me to school?

Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird ], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. [Open Letter, O Magazine , July 2006]

I say guilt, gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society.

I never understood her preoccupation with heredity. Somewhere, I had received the impression that Fine Folks were people who did the best they could with the sense they had, but Aunt Alexandra was of the opinion, obliquely expressed, that the longer a family had been squatting on one patch of land the finer it was.

To kill a mockingbird is a sin

in favor of southern womanhood as much as anybody, but not for preserving polite fiction at the expense of human life.

Scout- .. Uncle Jack? Uncle Jack- Ma'am? Scout- What's a whore-lady?

We Finches don't marry the children of rednecked white trash.

Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal.

That proves something—that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human.

The only way in which all men in America are equal, is in the courtroom - Atticus

In our courts, when it's a white man's word against a Black man's, the white man always wins. They're ugly but those are just the facts of life. - Atticus Finch

They're people, aren't they? We were quite willing to import them when they made money for us.

But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court.

There's something in our world that makes men lose their heads—they couldn't be fair if they tried. In our courts, when it's a white man's word against a black man's, the white man always wins. They're ugly, but those are the facts of life." "Doesn't

The best minds in the country have told us who you are. You can't escape it, and we don't blame you for it, but we do ask you to conduct yourself within the rules that those who know have laid down for your behavior, and don't try to be anything else.

I despise your quick answers, your slogans in the subways, and most of all I despise your lack of good manners: you'll never have 'em as long as you exist.

That ain't honest, Mr. Raymond, making yourself out badder'n you are already -' 'It ain't honest but it's mighty helpful to folks. Secretly, Miss Finch, I'm not much of a drinker, but you see they could never, never understand that I live like I do because that's the way I want to live.