Quotes About Society

Political life loves some volatility.

I'll never look down on and I love running into actors who say 'Oh yeah, I did a soap.' I say 'Tell me which one!' It's like being a member of a secret society.

When a man gives his opinion, he's a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she's a bitch.

Men become much more attractive when they start looking older. But it doesn't do much for women, though we do have an advantage: make-up.

The real joke that history played on American women is not the one that makes people snigger, with cheap Freudian sophistication, at the dead feminists. It is the joke that Freudian thought played on living women, twisting the memory of the feminists into the man-eating phantom of the feminine mystique, shriveling the very wish to be more than just a wife and mother.

If a woman had a problem in the 1950's and 1960's, she knew that something must be wrong with her marriage, or with herself. Other women were satisfied with their lives, she thought. What kind of a woman was she if she did not feel this mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor? She was so ashamed to admit her dissatisfaction that she never know how many other women shared it.

Gradually, without seeing it clearly for quite a while, I came to realize that something is very wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives today.

A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she 'adjust' to prejudice and discrimination.

Since, beginning with the same premise and examining the same body of anthropological evidence, she now arrives at a slightly different sexual role for women, one might seriously question the basis upon which she decides the roles a woman should play -- and finds it so easy to change the rules of the game from one decade to the next.

Women who had once wanted careers were now making careers out of having babies.

The problem that has no name — which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities — is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.

In 2013 more than 40 percent of adoptions in the US were transracial in nature, up from 28 percent in 2004.

Privilege goes unnoticed, and all but the most blatant acts of racial bigotry are ignored.

Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn't turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were.

It was an odd situation. For a century and a half, men got rid of their own hair, which was perfectly comfortable, and instead covered their heads with something foreign and uncomfortable. Very often it was actually their own hair made into a wig. People who couldn't afford wigs tried to make their hair look like a wig.

The pleasant fact is that the British are not much good at violent crime except in fiction, which is of course as it should be.

In countless small ways the world around us grows gradually shittier. Well, I don't like it at all.

It seems madness to think that a society would rate marginal economic growth above a livable earth, but there you are. I had always assumed the reason to build a bigger economy was to make the world a better place. In fact, it appears, the reason to build a bigger economy is, well, to build a bigger economy.

America has given us a pretty decent modern world and doesn't always get enough thanks for that. But for reasons that genuinely escape me, it has also become spectacularly accommodating to stupidity. Where

It is perhaps little wonder that the end of Victorianism almost exactly coincided with the invention of psychoanalysis.

if you wish to end up as a moderately advanced, thinking society, you need to be at the right end of a very long chain of outcomes involving reasonable periods of stability interspersed with just the right amount of stress and challenge (ice ages appear to be especially helpful in this regard) and marked by a total absence of real cataclysm. As

began to feel that queasy guilt that you can only know if you have lived among the English—a terrible suspicion that any pleasure involving more than a cup of milky tea and a chocolate digestive biscuit is somehow irreligiously excessive.

The Statute of Artificers of 1563 laid down that all artificers (craftsmen) and laborers "must be and continue at their work, at or before five of the clock in the morning, and continue at work, and not depart, until between seven and eight of the clock at night"—giving an eighty-four-hour workweek.

There is almost no area of British life that isn't touched with a kind of genius for names.