Quotes About Society

There are politics in sexual relationships because they occur in the context of a society that assigns power based on gender and other systems of inequality and privilege.

Most people in this society who aren't actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

The Men hunted money and sex. The women were hunted and captured, even the white women.

Our country feels as if it has gathered itself at a cliff and is studying the long scree of loose rock, deciding whether to slide down and descend completely again into open hatred.

Someone had to make sure that farmers, who grew more grain than their families needed, would sell food to the nonfarmers (the basketmakers, leatherworkers, and carpenters) who grew no grain themselves. Only in an inhospitable and wild place is this sort of bureaucracy—the true earmark of civilization—needed. In genuinely fertile places, overflowing with water and food and game and minerals and timber, people generally don't bother.3

Sure no woman's condition ever equalled mine: foppery, folly, avarice and hypocrisy are by turns my constant companions, and I must vary shapes as often as a player

It upsets her that I do not have a boyfriend. She claims to understand why she does not have one, but she thinks it is preposterous that I don't. Both my clothes and my solitary life being instances of my unwillingness to seek romance.

I cannot even earn a living as a whore.

There are times, too, when the law doesn't give a damn who gets caught beneath its wheels.

The English criminal code, later known as the "Bloody Code," was brutal in the late 18th century. By the time the first legal reforms were enacted in 1826, 220 crimes—many of them relatively petty crimes against property as Dickens describes in the rest of the paragraph—were punishable by death.

I could not take one more minute of trying to convince the people of Los Angeles that a workers' revolution and a complete overhaul of society was a tiny bit more exciting than getting a bit role in a Burger King commercial

Radical feminists didn't need FBI infiltration — the mechanism for sisterly cannibalization was already well under way.

Americans had to tie every radical aspiration into a puritanical knot.

Beauty has been democratised. No longer the preserve of movie stars and models but available to all. But while the invitation to beauty is welcomed, it has become not so much an option as an imperative.

We experience the wish for more perfect bodies as our own desire, as indeed it is, yet it is hard to separate out the ways bodies are seen, talked about and written about and the effect of that on our own personal perception of our own bodies and other bodies.

Because something is significantly wrong with a creature that sacrifices its children's lives to settle its differences. You can spin it any way you like... But in the end, who does it benefit? No one. The truth is, it benefits no one to live in a world where these things happen

What must it be like, I wonder, to live in a world where food appears at the press of a button? How would I spend the hours I now commit to combing the woods for sustenance if it were so easy to come by? What do they do all day, these people in the Capitol, besides decorating their bodies and waiting around for a new shipment of tributes to rill in and die for their entertainment?

People aren't so bad, really," she said. "It's what the world does to them.

Most of the Peacekeepers turn a blind eye to the few of us who hunt because they're as hungry as we are for fresh meat as anyone. In fact, they're among our best customers.

Frankly, our ancestors don't seem much to brag about. I mean, look at the state they left us in, with the wars, the broken planet. Clearly, they didn't care about what would happen to the people who came after them.

Because something is significantly wrong with a creature that sacrifices its children's lives to settle its differences.

In District 12, looking old is something of an achievement since so many people die early. You see an elderly person, you want to congratulate them on their longevity, ask the secret of survival. A plump person is envied because they aren't scraping by like the majority of us. But here is different. Wrinkles aren't desirable. A round belly isn't a sign of success.