Quotes About Society

And the thorny crown of this sad conception was that she whom he really did prefer in a cursory way to the rest, she who knew herself to be more impassioned in nature, cleverer, more beautiful than they, was in the eyes of propriety far less worthy of him than the homelier ones whom he ignored.

Ich finde, wenn Kinder geboren werden, die man nicht haben will, dann sollten sie gleich tot gemacht werden, ehe sie Seelen kriegen, und man sollte sie gar nicht groß werden und herum laufen lassen!

I have been thinking, she continued, still in the tone of one brimful of feeling, that the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies...

But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds of convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her, was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess's fancy—a cloud of moral hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason.

we know very well women scarcely ever jilt men; 'tis men who jilt us.

That's why I say that a woman so charming as yourself, Miss Everdene, is hardly a blessing to her race.

Es muy difícil para una mujer expresar sus sentimientos en un lenguaje que, principalmente, sirve para que los hombres expresen los suyos.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs. My

I have been thinking that the social moulds civilisation fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies....

As to our going on together as we were going, in a sort of friendly way, the people round us would have made it unable to continue. Their views of the relations of man and woman are limited, as is proved by their expelling me from the school. Their philosophy only recognizes relations based on animal desire. The wide field of strong attachment where desire plays, at least, only a secondary part, is ignored by them—the part of—who is it?—Venus Urania.

I have been looking at the marriage service in the Prayer-book, and it seems to me very humiliating that a giver-away should be required at all. According to the ceremony as there printed, my bridegroom chooses me of his own will and pleasure; but I don't choose him. Somebody gives me to him, like a she-ass or she-goat, or any other domestic animal.

Of all the ingenious and cruel satires that from the beginning till now have been stuck like knives into womankind, surely there is not one so lacerating to them, and to us who love them, as the trite old fact, that the most wretched of men can, in the twinkling of an eye, find a wife ready to be more wretched still for the sake of his company. Edward hastened to despatch his

If these two noticed Angel's growing social ineptness, he noticed their growing mental limitations. Felix seemed to him all Church; Cubbert all College...Each brother candidly recognized there were a few unimportant scores of millions outside in civilized society, persons who were neither University men nor churchmen; but they were to be tolerated rather than reckoned with and respected.

Es difícil para una mujer definir sus sentimientos en un lenguaje creado principalmente por el hombre para expresar los suyos.

Yes: there; wives be such a provoking class o' society, because though they be never right, they be never more than half wrong.

tis a talent of the female race that low numbers should stand for high, more especially in matters of waiting, matters of age, and matters of money.

the absence of any expression or trait denoting that they wished to get on in the world, enlarge their minds, or do any eclipsing thing whatever — which nowadays so generally nips the bloom and bonhomie of all except the two extremes of the social scale.

Poor darlings-to suppose myself the most miserable being on earth in the sight o' such misery as yours! [...] She was ashamed of herself for her gloom of the night, based on nothing more tangible than a sense of condemnation under an arbitrary law of society which had no foundation in Nature

He [Mr. Melbury] knew that a woman once given to a man for life took, as a rule, her lot as it came and made the best of it, without external interference; but for the first time he asked himself why this so generally should be done.

Women may be bad, but they are not so bad as men in these things!

He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan—a system of ethics above all others calculated to win popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society; and the possibility of the favour gained being transitory had reference only to the future. He

Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books.

He told me once that, whenever it was 'feasible,' he preferred to eat the rude. 'Free-range rude,' he called them.

Now that ceaseless exposure has calloused us to the lewd and the vulgar, it is instructive to see what still seems wicked to us. What still slaps the clammy flab of our submissive consciousness hard enough to get our attention?