Quotes About Society

Only the young and the beautiful should be allowed to fuck.

Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it.

Sometimes, though, I feel that pushing books is a whole lot like pushing medicine. Think of books as pills. I have pills that cure ignorance and pills that cure boredom. I have pills to elevate moods and pills to open people's eyes to the awful truth: uppers and downers as they were. I sell pills to help people find themselves and pills to help them lose themselves when they require escape from the pressures and anxieties of life in a complex society...

You are an ignorant schoolgirl. You think civilization is a good thing.

For the ethical, political activism was seductive because it seemed to offer the possibility that one could improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one's perceptions and transforming one's self. For the unconscionable, political reactivism was seductive because it seemed to protect one's holdings and legitimize one's greed. But both sides were gazing through a kerchief of illusion.

What I'm saying is simply that every totalitarian society, no matter how strict, has had its underground. In fact, two undergrounds. There's the underground involved in political resistance and the underground involved in preserving beauty and fun--which is to say, preserving the human spirit.

Civilization is a mutant beast that emerged from the shattered egg of primitive stability.-Sissy Hankshaw

The longer Ellen Cherry thought about it, the more convinced she became that the mission of the artist in an overtechnologized, overmasculinized society was to call the old magic back to life. Could it be done? Yeah, you pessimistic wimps, it could. Could she do it? Probably not, but she could give it a whirl.

Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route.

Morality depends on culture. Culture depends on climate.

there are countless ways to live upon this tremendous sphere in mirth and good health, and probably only one way - the industrialized, urbanized, herding way - to live here stupidly, and man has hit upon that one wrong way

Christ said that illumination is found only by putting everything one has in jeopardy. Thou, of all humans, should understand the courage that is required to reject the secure blessings of society in order to woo the unpredictable ecstasies of the solitary soul. It is true that Christ had little enthusiasm for dance or copulation, that he took 'right' and 'wrong' too seriously and set himself apart from the natural world

Our society gives its economy priority over health, love, truth, beauty, sex and salvation; over life itself. Whatsoever is given precedence over life will take precedence over life, and will end in eliminating life. Since economics, at its most abstract level, is the religion of our people, no noneconomic happening, not even one as potentially spectacular as the Second Coming, can radically alter the souls of our people.

Sometimes one gets the idea that life thinks it's still living in Paris in the thirties.

Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they're condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It's a cruel, repetitious bore.

Claude could simply not imagine the couples he met at parties or passed on the street ever being locked in carnal embrace.

And the message, no matter how entertainingly couched, is invariably the same: to be special, you must conform; to be happy, you must consume.

A myth, you ought to know, is a metaphoric method of describing, dramatizing, and condensing historical events and psychological states that are otherwise too complicated to be digested or appreciated by the prevailing society.

The underworld persists because society needs it, insists upon it, supports it (at the same time that it denies and persecutes it, of course).

The moon invented natural rhythm. Civilization uninvented it.

it's hardly headline news that the corporate state and its media are using the latest gadget-com and gimmick-tech to dumb us down as steadily as if they were standing on a stool and pounding our brains with a frozen ham.

You know that I've always been proud of the way nature singled me out. It's the people who have been deformed by society that I feel sorry for. We can live with nature's experiments, and if they aren't too vile, turn them to our advantage. But social deformity is sneaky and invisible; it makes people into monsters – or mice.

Freedom has long proven too heady an elixir for America's masses, weakened and confused as they are by conflicting commitments to puritanical morality and salacious greed.

It is dullness and not evil that begets totalitarianism.