Quotes About Society

I know how the world works. Business decisions are not made for the good of the people, but for the sake of profit, loyalty and expedience.

The city becomes a financial battery farm and the suburbs do the same for families.

We're breeding an army of psychotics.

Crazy leaders teach us crazy habits.

hate what I see around me, Arthur. The urban middle class destroyed, the working poor exploited, the vulgar rich elevated to eminence, the underclass demonised, the wasteland of celebrity held in veneration.

The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.

An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he's working on these days. 'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.

An individual deficient in the sense of humor represents more of a challenge to our idea of the human than a person of subnormal intelligence

How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?

The only known cure for poverty is emancipation of women

Joseph Heller knew how the need to belong, and the need for security, can make people accept lethal and stupid conditions, and then act as if they had imposed them on themselves.

mass indoctrination of uneducated young men with such ideas is in itself a lethal danger to society and to international order.

The United States makes large claims for itself, among them the claim that the nation is the model for a society based simultaneously on democracy and multiethnicity. It's certainly no exaggeration to say that on the success or failure of this principle much else depends. But there must be better ways of affirming it than by clinging to an insipid parody of a two-party system that counts as a virtue the ability to escape thorny questions and postpone larger ones.

Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers.

The two things he most valued, which is to say liberty and equality, were not natural allies.

why has the blowjob had a dual existence for so long, sometimes subterranean and sometimes flaunted, before bursting into plain view as the specifically American sex act?

The argument about ethics and morality will have to go on in a post-religious society, just as it had to go on when religion was regnant and was often ordering good people to agree to evil things such as torture, slavery, or cruelty to children.

The pluralism of religion is attributable to the fact that man created God and not the other way around. If you accept the posture that man makes gods, there is no mystery in the proliferation of gods and religions that has always existed in human society. If

the few heroic sluts on this great working-girl turf

religion continues to pose an urgent threat to public health.

You must feel not that you want to but that you have to. It's worth emphasizing, too, because there is a relationship, inexact to be sure but a relationship, between this desire or need and the ambition to rely upon internal exile, or dissent; the decision to live at a slight acute angle to society.

one of the great failures of human civilization has been its refusal to pay proper attention, or a proper wage, to those who perform the hard but essential primary task of growing our food.

The various forms of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people to be equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful. —EDWARD GIBBON, DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

The argument that religious belief improves people, or that it helps to civilize society, is one that people tend to bring up when they have exhausted the rest of their case.