Quotes About Society

Since I am a man, my heart is three or four times less sensitive, because I have three or four times as much power of reason and experience of the world -- a thing which you women call hard-heartedness. As a man, I can take refuge in having mistresses. The more of them I have, and the greater the scandal, the more I acquire reputation and brilliance in society.

The rat, which transported bubonic plague, and the louse, which carried typhus, were despised but accepted presences in almost every human society, although the latter could travel places (such as the Arctic) where even the rat couldn't survive.

There is something so INEVITABLE about seven-and-twenty; it is decidedly on the wrong side of the decade for a lady, particularly an unmarried one.

We cannot expect the men we appoint to govern us, to be better than ourselves.

The chief rule of British Society: Sleep where you like, but be in your own bed by morning.

If you tell someone you're divorced they don't even blink, but tell them you've never been married and they wonder what's wrong with you.

virginity certainly wasn't a

We all think we have our problems, but thank God we don't have husbands who don't support the Guggenheim.

Like most visions of a 'golden age', the 'traditional family' evaporates on closer examination. It is an ahistorical amalgam of structures, values, and behaviors that never coexisted in the same time and place.

Another limit on intimate marriage in the nineteenth century was that many people still held the Enlightenment view that love developed slowly out of admiration, respect, and appreciation of someone's good character. Coupled with the taboos on expressions of sexual desire, these values meant that the love one felt for a sweetheart often was not seen as qualitatively different from the feeling one might have for a sister, a friend, or even an idea.

Despite the rhetorical reverence our society accords motherhood and fatherhood, in reality the everyday work of parenting garners little social respect and even less practical support.

In some strata of Greek and Roman society the engineer was actually denigrated, higher esteem being accorded to poets, playwrights and sculptors. According to Plutarch, Archimedes was praised for refusing to contaminate his theoretical and mathematical science with practical applications, although under extreme pressure at the siege of Syracuse in Sicily he did design practical machinery.

the impulse toward excessive self sacrifice comes from women's history, not their nature. The reason self-sacrifice seems so natural for women in Western culture is that centuries ago, we were handed the role of sacrificing and suffering for the benefit of the entire society—and we're still doing it.

I'm only afraid of getting fat.

In a consumption-oriented society, your identity is tied more to what you consume than to what you produce. "Consumerism" as a belief system accepts consumption "as the way to self-development, self-realization, and self-fulfillment.

I'm not a gentleman, I'm a nobleman, a distinction I suspect you understand very well.

His ridiculous Victorian ideas reminded me that my sense of worthlessness was a reasonable response to a society bent on limiting the sphere of women.

Technology tries to prevent us from asking deeper questions. The megatechnology society believes that there is a technological solution to every problem. This would be correct only if the world were a machine.

I put forward as a general definition of civilization, that a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art, Peace.

An economy where advertisers thrive while journalists and artists struggle, reflects the values of a society more interested in deception and manipulation than in truth and beauty

Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can exist apart from religious principle.

influence which is given on the side of money is usually against truth.

... a widespread secularization increasingly descends into a moral, intellectual, and spiritual nihilism that denies not only the One who is the Truth but the very idea of truth itself.

After all, a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him.