Quotes About Society

Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov

We mustn't be envious, comrades. There's twenty-two dachas4 in all, and only seven more being built, and there's three thousand of us in Massolit.' 'Three thousand one hundred and eleven,' someone put in from the corner. 'So you see,' the Bos'n went on, 'what can be done? Naturally, it's the most talented of us that got the dachas . . .

mnogo je važnije pitanje: jesu li se ti gra?ani promijenili iznutra? ...

Pa što - zamišljeno je rekao taj - ljudi kao ljudi. Vole novac, ali tako je uvijek bilo... ?ovje?anstvo voli novac, ma od ?ega on bio napravljen, od kože, od papira, od bakra ili zlata. Lakomisleni... Što ?eš... I milosr?e ponekad zastruji u njihovim srcima... Obi?ni ljudi... Op?enito uzevši, podsje?aju na prijašnje... Samo ih je stambeno pitanje pokvarilo...

Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov

the liquidation of the intelligentsia

Note, my good doctor," said I, "that without fools, society would be a very tiresome place!

djetinjasto osje?anje, nema zbora, ali kad god se udaljimo od društvenih obzira i približimo prirodi, i nehotice postajemo djeca; sve što je ste?eno otpada s duše i ona opet postaje onakva kakva je bila neko? i kakva ?e, zacijelo, opet jednom biti.

Así es la gente! Todos son iguales: conocen de antemano todos los aspectos dañinos de una acción, ayudan, aconsejan e incluso la aprueban, al ver que no hay otro remedio, pero luego se lavan las manos y dan la espalda, con indignación, a quien tuvo el valor de cargar con toda responsabilidad. ¡Todos son así, hasta los más bondadosos, hasta los más inteligentes...!

Hoy somos todos iguales, todos unidos por la común indiferencia hacia nuestro trabajo. Esta indiferencia hacia nuestro trabajo. Esta indiferencia ha pasado a ser pasión. La única gran pasión colectiva de nuestro tiempo.

To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.

The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.

Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.

Optimism is the opium of the people.

People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.

Aren't we living in a world where heedless men only desire decapitated women?

Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.

Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.

Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions: - (1) an elevated level of general well being which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities (2) a high degree of social atomization and , as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals; (3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life.

He thought: that's certainly how it starts. One day a person puts his legs up on a bench, then night comes and he falls asleep. That's how it happens that one fine day a person joins the tramps and turns into one of them.

Look around you. Of all the people you see, no one is here by his own wish. Of course, what I just said is the most banal truth there is. So banal, and so basic, that we've stopped seeing it and hearing it.

In the kingdom of kitsch you would be a monster