Quotes About Society

They were living out lives we might have been living, if we hadn't been occupied with being mental patients.

Evelyn Marie wanted to turn him into a gentleman. Well, he wanted to turn her into his mistress.

She supposed a properly bred London lady would be expected to faint in shock at the sight of a shirtless gentleman, but he looked far too delicious for her to close her eyes.

Even thought she saw tattoos everywhere, they continued to fascinate her. How bizarre to be branded like a box of cereal. Didn't people mind being counted as just one more product on a shelf? There had to be more to a person than that.

it was not so much the new machines that revolutionized the world, impressive and important as they were. The truly heroic invention was the economic, social, and political institutions in which these machines were embedded.

The modern world, indeed, has been shaped just as much by war capitalism's death as by its birth.

To stress the negative aspect of self-discipline is to contribute to the vast amount of indirect propaganda which is made, in our society, against the spiritual life.

It was as if a complex, sophisticated society of fifteen million people simply walked away from their lives one day and never came back, leaving nothing but deserted cities and abandoned architectural masterpieces in their wake.

People are cruel, and they will do anything.

Why can men be boys all of their lives, but we women must grow old while we are yet young?

Instead, Hester had been presented at court

So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.

I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.

Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled "enemy?

Why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?

I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.

I told Doreen I would not go to the show or the luncheon or the film premiere, but that I would not go to Coney Island either, I would stay in bed. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.

A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.

I feel, am mad as any writer must in one way be; why not make it real? I am too close to the bourgeois society of suburbia: too close to people I know I must sever my self from them, or be a part of their world: this half and half compromise is intolerable.

What obsession do men have for destruction and murder? Who do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled 'enemy?

to know a lot of people I love pieces of, and to want to synthesize those pieces in me somehow, be it by painting or writing. * to know that millions of others are unhappy and that life is a gentleman's agreement to grin and paint your face gay so others will feel they are silly to be unhappy, and try to catch the contagion of joy, while inside so many are dying of bitterness and unfulfillment…

A man's world is different from a woman's world and a man's emotions are different from a woman's emotions and only marriage can bring the two different sets of emotions together properly.

I am climbing to my freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just because of sex, freedom from the Florence Crittenden Homes where all the poor girls go who should have been fitted out like me, because what they did, they would do anyway..

A living doll, everywhere you look. It can sew, it can cook, It can talk, talk, talk.   It works, there is nothing wrong with it. You have a hole, its a poultice. You have an eye, its an image. My boy, its your last resort. Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.