Quotes About Society

one man with vision—an enlightened dictator. People are scared of the word nowadays. But what kind of democracy can exist side by side with so much corruption and ignorance?

he was as good as any young man, or better because young men were no longer what they used to be.

REFUSAL When you refuse to tell your weight and age, people know you're fat and old.

MEN SELDOM rub elbows with girls who wear dildoes

In short, we're seeing a shift from mass culture to massively parallel culture.

El vídeo después de la televisión La televisión no es vulgar y lasciva porque la gente que compone la audiencia sea vulgar y lasciva. La televisión es así simplemente porque las personas suelen ser muy similares en sus intereses vulgares y lascivos, y ampliamente diferentes en sus intereses refinados, estéticos y nobles. DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

In Fritz Lang's Metropolis, society is divided into two groups: one of planners and thinkers living in luxury high above the Earth, and another of workers, dwelling and toiling underground to run the machine that sustains the wealthy. The film is about the workers' revolt, but the broader point is clear. Abundance comes at a cost: scarcity elsewhere.

Then television took over, birthing the ultimate in lockstep culture.

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them. —Margaret Atwood

gentlemen's clubs—now there was a ridiculous euphemism

She knew the truth of men and women and booze: it rarely ended well for either gender, but it was the women who wound up raped.

She cringed when she saw she needed a bikini wax - and cringed that she even got them in the first place. It wasn't the pain. It was the whole idea she was raising her daughter in a world where pubic hair was a problem.

Elena believed that reportage like that might be compelling and beautiful, but it would never gain traction in the Age of the Troll. In the Age of Mass Shootings. In the Age of the Suicide Bomb in the Crowd.

A society without the means to detect lies and theft soon squanders its liberty and freedom.

The belief that rational and quantifiable disciplines such as science can be used to perfect human society is no less absurd than a belief in magic, angels, and divine intervention.

The fact that alienated people can be counted on to vent their spleen in ineffectual directions—by fighting among themselves—relieves the government of the need to deal fundamentally with the conditions which cause their frustrations

The potency of myth is that it allows us to make sense of mayhem and violent death. It gives a justification to what is often nothing more than gross human cruelty and stupidity. It allows us to believe we have achieved our place in human society because of a long chain of heroic endeavors, rather than accept the sad reality that we stumble along a dimly lit corridor of disasters. It disguises our powerlessness.

Bankrupt corporate capitalism is on its way to bankrupting the socialism that is trying to save it

Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction.

Useless DECEMBER 7, 2009     Liberals are a useless lot.

All you have to do is work hard, obey the rules, and believe in yourself. This myth is disseminated across the political spectrum. It is the essential message peddled by everyone from Oprah and the entertainment industry to the Christian Right and positive psychologists. But this promise, as the masses of underemployed and unemployed are discovering, is a fiction.16

Money has replaced the vote.

Until there is a common vocabulary and a shared historical memory, there is no peace in any society, only an absence of war... The search for a common narrative must, at times, be forced upon a society. Few societies seem able to do this willingly.

A culture," the poet W. H. Auden observed, "is no better than its woods.