Quotes About Society

When I had first been hurled into the world of the 1970s I had thought I found Utopia. And now I was discovering that it was only a Utopia for some. Shaw wanted a Utopia which would exist for all.

Who told you that the world was just?' Elric

Everyone back home in Bamiyan had rifles too. I think just about every man in Afghanistan has a rifle. It

England in August 1914 was more of a state than she was during the great industrial strikes of 1911–1912.

We are full of anarchy. We take our clothes off because we shouldn't take our clothes off. And we behave worse in other countries.

The trouble with ideology, Alice, is that it hates the private. You must make it human.

We are the real countries, not the boundaries drawn on maps with the names of powerful men.

We may not have a 1984 like George Orwell's, but if the Tories have their way we will be a very carefully controlled society indeed. All very sad, especially as Labour and the left are muddleheaded and ideologically dogmatic.

what is more reductionist than to ignore the underlying dynamics of economic power and the conflict between capital and labor? What is more misleading than to treat occupational groups as autonomous classes, giving attention to every social group in capitalist society except the capitalist class itself, to every social conflict except class conflict?

A joke circulating in Russia in 1992 went like this: Q. What did capitalism accomplish in one year that communism could not do in seventy years? A. Make communism look good.

it is not socialism that subverts democracy, but democracy that subverts capitalism.

Sure, I hear about the new freedom that people are enjoying in Eastern Europe. But how do you define freedom? Millions of people in Eastern Europe are now free from employment, free from safe streets, free from health care, free from social security

The standard "trickle down" theory says that the accumulation of wealth at the top eventually brings more prosperity to the rest of us below; a rising tide lifts all boats. I would argue that in a class society the accumulation of

A steady recognition that the evils which prevent the fullness of moral development are precisely the elements which are also the source of the power that gives existence to whatever moral accomplishments we see about us may eventually lead us to a tolerance we grant to the internal-combustion engine: it is noisy and smelly, and occasionally, it refuses to start, but it is what gets us to wherever we get. We must somehow learn to understand and so to tolerate- not destroy- the free society.

Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is a literal shame, but most of us can: Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food, less than the citizens of any other nation.

That anyone should need to write a book advising people to eat food could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion. Or we can choose to see it in a more positive light and count ourselves fortunate indeed that there is once again real food for us to eat.

there are three things human beings are afraid of: death, other people, and their own minds.

our modern civilization returns exceedingly little of what it borrows. -Martin Renner

A collective spasm of carbophobia seized the country,...

People who smoked cannabis were Other, and the cannabis they smoked threatened to let their Otherness loose in the land.

worshippers of the market are a bit more realistic than worshippers of nature: they long ago stopped relying on the free market to supply us with such necessities as food and shelter. Though they don't like to talk about it much, they accept the need for society to "garden" the market.)

But I contend that most of what we're consuming today is no longer, strictly speaking, food at all, and how we're consuming it—in the car, in front of the TV, and, increasingly, alone—is not really eating, at least not in the sense that civilization has long understood the term.

For as long as the carnival of capitalism lasts, the rules of logic are repealed...

We don't die well in America.