Quotes About Society

The injustice done to an individual is sometimes of service to the public.

You think people hate a fat person? Try a fat person who's trying to get thin.

Something must have happened, your mother speculated. In her mind a woman with no child could only be explained by vast untrammeled calamity. Maybe she just doesn't like children. Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.

These were the early Clinton years but the economy was still sucking an eighties cock...

But you know exactly what kind of world we live in. It ain't no fucking Middle-earth.

Hers was the generation that would launch the Revolution, but which for the moment was turning blue for want of air. The generation reaching consciousness in a society that lacked any. The generation that despite the consensus that declared change impossible hankered for change all the same.

That's the kind of culture I belong to: people took their child's black complexion as an ill omen.

That's white people for you. They lose a cat and it's an all-points bulletin, but we Dominicans, we lose a daughter and we might not even cancel our appointment at the salon.

I grew up in a post-dictatorship dictatorship society. The axis of likability is how dictatorships survive. Becoming popular is part of what dictatorships hijack to remain in power. For me to write things from the same toxic axis that made stronger the dictatorship that completely disfigured my family and my society, it just wasn't going to happen.

But this isn't human! When has this country ever been human, Abelard? You're the historian. You of all people should know that.

Creen que la gente odia a los gordos? Pues imagínense a un gordo que trata de adelgazar. Provocaba el balrog en cualquiera. Las muchachas más dulces del mundo le decían las cosas más horribles, las señoras mayores farfullaban, Eres repugnante, repugnante, e incluso Melvin, que nunca había demostrado ninguna tendencia anti Óscar, empezó a llamarlo Jabba the Hutt, solo porque le dio la gana. Era pura locura.

When you're sixteen a body like this is free; when you're forty it's a full-time occupation.

A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left.

Freedom of movement is the very essence of our free society -- once the right to travel is curtailed, all other rights suffer.

The war—the real war, the one that had been going on for a thousand years and would go on for a thousand thousand more—the war between Us and Them, between the Haves and the Have-Nots, between my gods and your gods, whoever you are—would be fought by men like Richards: men with faces you didn't notice

You know, I've never asked why it doesn't offend your feminist principles for me to carry this beast for you." I look at it as exploiting the oppressor," she said, with a sweet smile.

on meth." Matthews shook his head. "Just what we fuckin' need.

the Waldorf-Astoria crystallized the improbable and fabulous. It was more than a mere hotel. It was a vast, glittering, iridescent fantasy that had been conjured up to infect millions of plain Americans with a new idea—the aspiration to lead an expensive, gregarious life as publicly as possible.

those before-and-after shots of women undergoing the knife and accepting poison to change themselves — the lines on their faces repaved like old roads, their bulbous noses whittled into aristocratic ridges.

For even though the rest of the city--no, the rest of the country--starved and searched fruitlessly for work and slept in a humpy in the park, society's finest could still squander their money however they saw fit. The unemployed, they would say, were lazy. If they worked harder, they'd do as well as Mr. Harry Moneypants was doing, who'd earned his vast fortune by having the foresightedness of selecting rich parents, who had, in their time, also cleverly selected rich parents.

Finally, Christians were accused of being subversive, for they refused to worship the emperor and thus destroyed the very fiber of society. The apologists answered that it was true that they refused to worship the emperor or any other creature, but that in spite of this they were loyal subjects of the empire. What the emperor needs—they said—is not to be worshiped, but to be served; and those who serve him best are those who pray for him and for the empire to the only true God.

For women's tears are but the sweat of eyes.

All things may be bought in Rome with money.

Nothing is more intolerable than a wealthy woman.