Quotes About Society

Britain beat us to the abolition of slavery; the Isle of Man, New Zealand, and Finland all decided to give women the vote well before the United States. Eventually, we got smart and borrowed these egalitarian innovations.

That's the trick of free market economic theory: it doesn't just ask you to only be selfish and not care about others. It tells you that by being selfish, you are helping others. And, in fact, by trying to directly help others, you will hurt them.

The benefits of globalization do not trickle down automatically. It takes politics to make sure that there is a benefit.

I do have a big problem with the idea of music as a form of communication unless it's political - and that's where it's tricky because a lot of music is political, even if it's not overtly so. But my music isn't that; it's about a feeling.

Talking about weight at all - even your own - has become increasingly tricky, especially if you dare to say that you would quite like to lose a few pounds.

I don't want to make generalisations here, but I think that most women and maybe men are not comfortable with being overweight. It's a tricky issue.

The book is actually called 'A Mentor Leader, a Different Way to Lead.' It really talks about my experience in the way I tried lead our football team, things that I learned from, basically, the coaches that I played for and my parents about leadership. And it is a little bit different, counter to maybe what society says about great leaders.

I can't belong to groups. I've tried. I behave normally, but people don't look at me normally.

Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.

In a society that tries to standardize thinking, individuality is not highly prized.

The caste system may be more highly developed in countries like India or England, but every tier of society in almost every culture tries to dominate a group it perceives as beneath it.

Ryan Murphy, he basically tries to find something that's a pulse, a pressure point in our culture, and he grabs it, and he squeezes it. I think 'Freak Show' has a lot to do with the entertainment industry and the way we entertain ourselves: the objectification of people and the lengths we'll go for our own amusement.

How can we choose to selectively follow what we find comfortable and attack anybody who tries to break free from the norms that we choose to set?

But someone like Claude Chabrol tries to make a connection between the society in which we live and the social reasons which make monsters out of some people.

While Saudi Arabia tries to usher in the post-oil era, its citizens struggle to adjust to a more diversified capitalist society.

What becomes fascinating is the way the culture industry doesn't deny it and doesn't try to mitigate it, but tries to sell its products as a way of liberating oneself.

I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities.

It's unsurprising that while Americans and Donald Trump are working to re-establish the rule of law and rebuild civil society in America, CNN once again flies off the handle and tries to make everything about race in order to keep Americans divided.

A woman will always be made to feel like a criminal, whatever choice she makes, however hard she tries. Mothers feel like criminals. Non-mothers do, too.

When a country's government is involved in something, no filmmaker tries to make a film on it.

I don't think people experiment enough with clothing because society tries to tell them what they can and can't wear. I love playing around with different aesthetics and/or mixing around aesthetics to create a totally new look.

A smart society recognises the benefits of treating problems before they escalate, either through helping people quit smoking or moving them out of mould-blighted bedsits. A compassionate society also tries to limit human misery and suffering wherever possible.

We live in a very mollycoddled society where the slightest bit of discomfort is seen as wrong, but that discomfort is there for a reason. It's supposed to trigger some form of action, some form of change, a realization of a truth - something, and I think the self-help world has you believing that you should be happy all the time.

For a lot of white people, just suggesting that being white has meaning will trigger a deep, defensive response. And that defensiveness serves to maintain both our comfort and our positions in a racially inequitable society from which we benefit.