Quotes About Society

Alone among the animals, we humans insist that our food be not only "good to eat"—tasty, safe, and nutritious—but also, in the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss, "good to think," for among all the many other things we eat, we also eat ideas.

It is too late in the day-there are simply too many of us now-to follow Thoreau into the woods, to look to nature to somehow cure or undo culture.

Apparently it is easier, or at least a lot more profitable, to change a disease of civilization into a lifestyle than it is to change the way that civilization eats.

Claude Lévi-Strauss described the work of civilization as the process of transforming the raw into the cooked—nature into culture.

Lawns are a form of television.

Mare parte din atractivitatea lan?ului trofic industrial ?ine de facilitatea lui: le ofer? oamenilor ocupa?i un mod de a delega altora g?titul (?i conservarea alimentelor).

there are now millions of people who spend more time watching food being cooked on television than they spend actually cooking it themselves.

These days 19 percent of American meals are eaten in the car.

How did we ever get to a point where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner menu?

In the end, women did succeed in getting men into the kitchen, just not their husbands. No, they've ended up instead with the men who run General Mills and Kraft, Whole Foods and Trader Joe's.

For an American like me, growing up linked to a very different food chain, yet one that is also rooted in a field of corn, not to think of himself as a corn person suggests either a failure of imagination or a triumph of capitalism.

Yet the organic label itself—like every other such label in the supermarket—is really just an imperfect substitute for direct observation of how a food is produced, a concession to the reality that most people in an industrial society haven't the time or the inclination to follow their food back to the farm, a farm which today is apt to be, on average, fifteen hundred miles away.

Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the eighteenth-century gastronomist, drew a useful distinction between the alimentary activity of animals, which "feed," and humans, who eat, or dine, a practice, he suggested, that owes as much to culture as it does to biology.

Consumerism is at once the engine of America and simultaneously one of the most revealing indicators of our collective shallowness.

We live in a media world simultaneously obsessed with technology and personality.

A private sin is not so prejudicial in this world, as a public indecency.

Almost any fault, sin or crime is considered more leniently if there's a touch of class involved.

The greatest sin of the academic left is that it has become fundamentally aristocratic, writing in bizarre jargon that makes cliches seem abstruse. If you can't explain your ideal to a fairly intelligent 12-year-old, it's probably your own fault.

Nations cannot endure in sin.

It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.

Since politics fundamentally should be a moral enterprise, the church in this sense has something to say about politics.

No doubt many people working in race relations sincerely want to make things better. But by constantly drawing attention to race and policing ordinary behavior, they risk making things worse.

Why is it that the hot chicks never can sing?

The WP now is not like the WP of the past. Especially after Aljunied, Hougang and Punggol East, I think we are appealing to a very broad section of Singapore society, as any party that is establishing itself at the national level has to do.