Quotes About Society

In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

A group photo of the top ten journalists in America on any given day would be a monument to human ugliness.

This is the generation that went to war for Mom, God and Apple Butter, the American Way of life. When they came back, they crowned Eisenhower and then retired to the giddy comfort their TV parlors to cultivate the subtleties of American history as seen by Hollywood.

No one HAS to do something he doesn't want to do for the rest of his life. But then again, if that's what you wind up doing, by all means convince yourself that you HAD to do it. You'll have lots of company.

A nation can assume that the phrase "under God" in its Pledge of Allegiance shows that its citizens believe in God when all it really shows is that they believe in believing in God.

For of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently – though as little of one, if they were to be good and happy members of society, as possible. For particulars, as everyone knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers, but fret-sawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.

That's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.

The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what we are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others.

We're not in prison, we're not junkies and we're not Young Tories...it's no small achievement.

It occurred to me then, as it has before, that that is what men are really for. Both sexes can do one thing specially well; women can give birth and men can kill.

Peddle one of the least harmful drugs humanity's ever discovered, and you get twenty years. Peddle something that kills a hundred thousand a year... and you get a knighthood.

Perhaps he just got fed up acting normal and decided to act crazy instead, and they locked him up because he went too far.

Aye,' McCann said ruefully, 'if yer rich yer just eccentric; if yer poor yer a nutcase an they stick ye in the bin.

The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others.

Civilization depends on continually making the effort, of never giving in. It needs to be cared for by men of goodwill, protected from the dark.

Men reacted as they always did; some with an extreme of generosity, giving what little they could spare to strangers; others behaved with an equal and opposite extreme of harshness, demanding outrageous things in exchange. Honest men became thieves, honest women prostitutes, criminals became saints, all driven onward by an idea of what they were leaving behind.

There might be cheats or possible cheats amongst them, men who beat their wives, men with perverse instincts, greedy men, cowardly men, lying men; but the elegance of the room invested each one with a kind of aristocracy.

Her breasts were showing and Mr. Player, who was a very strong Quaker, didn't think that was quite proper.

I do believe I'm tight,' she said, 'how disgraceful. Please, James, don't be ashamed of me. I did so want to be gay. And I am gay.

It's to the effect that America has progressed from infancy to senility without having passed through a period of maturity.

America's a civilized country. More or less.

5 ....... NIGGER HEAVEN

there was no beatnik movement in Germany because there were now no traditions to revolt against;

Here's the wrong part: we don't live in a capitalistic society. We work in a capitalist system. We live in a democratic society. And just to make sure, I checked what the Preamble to the Constitution had to say about capitalism, as I seemed to remember it being more of a statement of basic human rights than an economic manifesto. Here is what it says about capitalism: nothing.