Quotes About Society

so could not have had first-hand knowledge of how gleefully a policeman translates his orders from above. But they had no right not to know that; if they did not know that, they knew nothing and had no right to speak as though they were responsible actors in their society; for their complicity with the patriots of that hour meant that the policeman was acting on their orders, too.

Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.

But white people seem affronted by the black distrust of white policemen, and appear to be astonished that a black man, woman, or child can have any reason to fear a white cop.

And in any case, what really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro "first" will become the first Negro President. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he'll be President of.

They must continue to produce things they do not really admire, still less love, in order to continue buying things they do not really want, still less need.

Anyway, Giovanni's Room is not really about homosexuality. It's the vehicle through which the book moves. Go Tell It on the Mountain, for example, is not about a church, and Giovanni is not really about homosexuality. It's about what happens to you if you're afraid to love anybody. Which is much more interesting than the question of homosexuality.

The fact that their [the flower children's] uniforms and their jargons precisely represented the distances they had yet to cover before arriving at that maturity which makes love possible—or no longer possible—could not be considered their fault. They had been born into a society in which nothing was harder to achieve, in which perhaps nothing was more scorned and feared than the idea of the soul's maturity.

It is the peculiar triumph of society—and its loss—that it is able to convince those people to whom it has given inferior status of the reality of this decree.

It takes a holy man to make a girl a real whore.

To open your mouth in England is...to put your business in the street: You have confessed your parents, your youth, your school, your salary, your self-esteem, and, alas, your future.

Joyce is right about history being a nightmare - but it may be the nightmare from which no one *can* awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

There have been superficial changes, with results at best ambiguous and, at worst, disastrous. Morally, there has been no change at all and the moral change is the only real one.

It is very nearly impossible . . . to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind. --"They Can't Turn Back," in Mademoiselle (New York, Aug. 1960; repr. in The Price of the Ticket, 1985)     The

All men, clearly, are primitive, but it can be doubted that that all men are primitive in the same way

The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. --"The Negro Child—His Self-Image," in Saturday Review (New York, 21 Dec. 1963; repr. in The Price of the Ticket as "A Talk to Teachers," 1985)     Europe

a child's major attention has to be concentrated on how to fit into a world which, with every passing hour, reveals itself as merciless.

Look, men have been sleeping with men for thousands of years—and raising tribes. This is a Western sickness, it really is. It's an artificial division. Men will be sleeping with each other when the trumpet sounds. It's only this infantile culture which has made such a big deal of it.

High modernism implies, as we have seen, a rejection of the past as a model to improve upon and a desire to make a completely fresh start. The more utopian the high modernism, the more thoroughgoing its implied critique of the existing society.

In explaining why children often prefer to play on sidewalks rather than in playgrounds, Jacobs writes: "Most city architectural designers are men. Curiously, they design and plan to exclude men as part of normal, daytime life wherever people live. In planning residential life, they aim at filling the presumed daily needs of impossibly vacuous housewives and preschool tots. They plan, in short, strictly for matriarchal societies" (Death and Life, p. 83).

Lo stato antico, un po' come il clima, spesso costituiva una minaccia, non un beneficio.

Why the histories of states should have so persistently insinuated themselves in the place that might have been occupied by peoples merits reflection.

Zygmunt Bauman, "Living Without an Alternative

The religion of Hell is patriotism, and the government is an enlightened democracy.

Just because it's a world of thieves out there don't mean there ain't no rules to it.