Quotes About Society

So, it's private appropriation on the basis of socialized production. That's the fundamental contradiction at the heart of capitalism.

To live outside the law you must be honest.

Couldn't help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land where justice is a game.

Well, I try my best to be just like I am, But everybody wants you to be just like them, They sing while you slave and I just get bored

There's no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there's only up and down and down is very close to the ground. And I'm trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics. They have got nothing to do with it. I'm thinking about the general people and when they get hurt.

Some times I think this whole world Is one big prison yeard Some of us are prisoners The rest of us are guards

Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift - look out out kid, they keep it all hid

A lot of people don't have much food on their table. But they got a lot of forks 'n knives. And they got to cut somethin'.

Johnny's in the basement Mixing up the medicine I'm on the pavement Thinking 'bout the government.

They're selling postcards of the hanging They're painting the passports brown The beauty parlor is filled with sailors The circus is in town Here comes the blind commissioner They've got him in a trance One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker The other is in his pants And the riot squad they're restless They need somewhere to go As Lady and I look out tonight From Desolation Row.

20 years of schooling and they put you on the day shift.

While one who sings with his tongue on fire Gargles in the rat race choir Bent out of shape from society's pliers Cares not to come up any higher But rather get you down in the hole That he's in.

An' though the rules of the road have been lodged, It's only people's games that you got to dodge. From It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

the housewife is not here. she is running for congress

In the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales for the disrobed faceless forms of no position. Tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts - all down in taken-for-granted situations. Tolling for the deaf an' blind, tolling for the mute, and the mistreated mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute, for the misdemeanor outlaw, chained an' cheated by pursuit. And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

My songs aren't dreams. They're more of a responsive nature… To me, when you need them, they appear. Your life doesn't have to be in turmoil to write a song like that but you need to be outside of it. That's why a lot of people, me myself included, write songs when one form or another of society has rejected you. So that you can truly write about it from the outside. Someone who's never been out there can only imagine it as anything, really.

I had not even the vaguest notion of the broken world I was living in, what society could do with you.

Democracy don't rule the world, You'd better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that's better left unsaid.

To keep the officer corps from becoming filled with sycophants who would support a particular party or person over the country, in 1802 he ordered the establishment of an Academy to train a professional cadre of officers that would draw its cadets from across the country and across the strata of society.

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

Forty-four percent of Americans did not pay federal income tax.

What an incorrigible nonentity one must be to play only one role in life, to occupy only one place in society, to always mean one and the same thing!

She had once been the belle of her circle of small tradesmen and salesmen, but now her little pig eyes with their swollen lids could scarcely open.

The forest does not change its place, we cannot lie in wait for it and catch it in the act of change. Whenever we look at it, it seems to be motionless. And such also is the immobility to our eyes of the eternally growing, ceaselessly changing history, the life of society moving invisibly in its incessant transformations.