Quotes About Society

it will require a struggle to try to make America reality-based again.

The early advocates of universal literacy and a free press…did not foresee…the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal….In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." —ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World Revisited (1958)

MIT economist David Autor has written, "but a serious challenge in determining who owns it and how to share it. Our chief economic problem will be one of distribution

From the 1940s through the '70s—when our richest citizens were paying rates of 70 and 80 and 90 percent on the millionth dollars they earned each year—U.S. productivity and GDP per person and median household income after inflation all doubled.

If omnipotent sadists had set out to take an extremely good, well-functioning piece of our political economy and social structure and make it undemocratic and oppressive, this is what their scheme would've looked like.

He tells me I'm "the ultimate poster child for my generation—you have everything you could possibly want, sky's the limit, then you decide you've got to burn down the joint, you do all this lunatic shit, then you suddenly change your mind and decide, 'Nah, America's not so bad after all—waiter, I'll have another chardonnay,' tuck in to this sweet life, and get away with it all scot-fucking-free.

Starting in the 1970s, the Friedman Doctrine and its extrapolations freed and encouraged businesspeople and the rich to go ahead and conform to the left-wing caricatures of them, to be rapacious and amoral without shame.

In America from the late 1960s on, equality came to mean not just that the law should treat everyone identically but that your beliefs about anything are equally as true as anyone else's. As the principle of absolute tolerance became axiomatic in our culture and internalized as part of our psychology—What I believe is true because I want and feel it to be true—individualism turned into rampant solipsism.

less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes.

We're so trendy we can't even escape ourselves.

I feel this society somewhere has lost its sense of what art is. Art is expression. In expression, you need 100% full freedom and our freedom to express our art is seriously being fucked with. Fuck, the word 'fuck' has many connotations as does the word 'art'.

I don't find music being less important than, like, politics.

Society questions the police and their methods, and the police say, Do you want the criminals off the street or not?

Die Welt zerfällt in Groß- und Kleingedrucktes.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

One of the few good things about modern times If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

Who is the greater criminal: he who robs a bank or he who founds one? (Three Penny Opera)

Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through these changes. Societies without change aren't authentic; they're just dead

Una persona, en la sociedad, desempeña una determinada función de acuerdo con su capacidad. Y el dinero es la recompensa. Ahora, piensa en una persona que tenga la facultad de enamorarse de alguien. ¿Qué habría de malo en que le pagasen si esa persona se enamorara valiéndose de las facultades que tiene?

Por más que hayamos progresado, los sentimientos verdaderos de las personas no han cambiado.

And the American people…" His voice faded for a moment. "They faint if someone uses insensitive language in their presence and half of them couldn't run up a set of stairs if you put a gun to their heads. What'll happen if the real shit hits the fan?