Quotes About Society

When people such as Malinowski went to the Trobriand Islands, they were coming from a society that was more powerful than the one they were studying. In the City of London, financiers were far more powerful than journalists or anthropologists; the challenge was how to "study up.

Cultural patterns in the media mattered too.

Like most women, I've spent far too much time shuffling around this mortal coil looking for non-horror-show toilets. Few of my male counterparts partake of this quest. Instead, with the cheerful insouciance of Labrador puppies, they regard the earth as their urinal.

Given that the shared understanding of truth has been central to language, religion and society, when we ignore small lies, we inflict damage on the larger truth. This is not holiness we're talking about, but wholeness and integrity.

Not only do women hold up half the sky; we do it while carrying a 500-pound purse.

The holidays make her feel as if she's supposed to be in a cuddle, since everybody else suddenly seems paired off, like mittens, slippers or AA batteries.

There's a price to be paid when you raise your daughter to be nice, and she's not the only one who's going to pay it. You'll be right there beside her, trapped by inconvenience, inflexibility and double standards.

What doesn't polite society, in all seriousness, want to discuss? Sex, money, political corruption, bodily functions, religion, loss and despair? These have been the very subjects attracting writers of comedy since Aristophanes penned "Lysistrata" as a vehicle for the young Joan Rivers.

Venetian laws last but a week. They keep making new laws because no one follows the old ones…. Or enforces them.

What happens when self-erasure has been the norm for so long that the You cannot find its way back to I?

No matter what I give, I will always fall short of what I—daughter, mother, wife—am supposed to be.

I was a mother, whereas he would have been a father, and whether those two labels SHOULD mean the same thing - to the culture, to the parent in question, to the children themselves - in practice they usually do not.

Fear makes people lawless. If indifference is hate's opposite, then compassion is fear's.

But the flu was expunged from newspapers, magazines, textbooks, and society's collective memory. Crosby calls the 1918 flu "America's forgotten pandemic," noting:

Giovanni Boccaccio wrote in his Decameron that people, afraid of contamination by the rotting corpses, would drag the dead outside their houses and leave them in front of their doors to be picked up, like so much garbage.

Society doesn't want to look inside it's dark soul. Children always come forward with the truth, whether it's ugly or beautiful. And we've become an ugly society. Our kids are mirroring that and no one wants to take the blame.

I understand why society, especially American society, is gravitating toward fairy tales, given our economy. We've been exploring the world of witches and wizards for years. We've been exploring the world of vampires for years. Clearly the public - I mean, I feel like all of this was ushered in by 'Harry Potter' - in my own fannish beliefs.

Tanta gente se las ingeniaba para ignorar la miseria, aceptando las desigualdades como ley de vida. Y así habían sido las cosas desde siempre, pensaba. ¿Quién se atrevía a soñar en cambiar todo aquello?

Revolutionary law number one," someone said. "Capitalism has cheated us. Books are not to be bought, they are to be repossessed." "This is robbery," I said. "Let's not kid ourselves. And don't do that to me again. You scared me to death." "It's not robbery. Books are ideas. They should be able to circulate freely within society. At no price at all, or for pennies. Knowledge is universal. It belongs to all of us.

Aos olhos da autoridade - e, talvez, está tenha razão - nada se assemelha melhor ao terrorista que o homem comum.

Governments must be conformable to the nature of the governed; governments are even a result of that nature.

In that dark night which shrouds from our eyes the most remote antiquity, a light appears which cannot lead us astray; I speak of this incontestable truth: the social world is certainly the work of man.

no creo que nunca en esta ciudad han sido los hombres y las mujeres tan fastidiosos y molestos como hoy, y no hay nadie en la calle que no me desagrade como la mala ventura; y no creo que haya mujer en el mundo a quien más fastidie ver a la gente desagradable que a mí, y por no verla me he venido tan pronto.

While farmers generally allow one rooster for ten hens, ten men are scarcely sufficient to service one woman.