Quotes About Society

History is a record of human nature in action.

Wars are fought by teenagers, you realize that. They really ought to be fought by the politicians and old people who start these wars. (Interview with Don Swaim of CBS Radio-1986)

For the last time: 'The law may upset reason but reason may never upset the law, or our whole society will shred like an old tatami.

Without privacy, civilized life could not exist.

How could such a pretty girl become known as the Hag, she wondered. It must be hateful to become old in face and body when you're young at heart and still strong and tough—so unfair for a woman.

It's a hard life for a woman, Felicity," he had said before. And she had said, "Any life is hard for a woman.

When the Dragons belch, all Hong Kong defecates.

For a woman, old age is never pretty.

Only merchants have money to waste, and what are they but parasites who create nothing, grow nothing, make nothing but feed off another's labor? Definitely they should all walk, neh? In this we are very wise.

the motor industry, because of its countless allied industries, being the core of any capitalist society.

no man ever willingly marries his mistress.

I knew the men were probably terrible people who whistled at pretty girls, treated their wives like servants, and voted for Nixon every chance they got, but as far as I was concerned, they beat the hell out of a Volvo-load of liberals for hard work and good times.

When even the bartenders lose their romantic notions, it's time for a better world.

As Marine Corps aviator Samuel Hynes would observe, "They go to war because it's impossible not to. Because a current is established in society, so swift, flowing toward war, that every young man who steps into it is carried downstream.

Some men get the world, some men get ex-hookers and a trip to Arizona.

Exley thinks I bought law school with bribe money. I said four men, shotguns, Junior Stemmons as co-boss. Exley: "Jackets and ties; this will end up

Stoner learned that men killed women for lawn mowers and crockpots.

I had to talk to people. All people scared me.

Elmer was scared. He ran a call-girl ring. He peddled flesh to the L.A. elite. He made biz calls from the Vice squadroom.

They saw the O.J. job as a crass microcosm. It was cocaine and tit jobs. It was health club narcissism and the two-way bondage of five-figure monthly alimony payments. The bottom-level audience defined the crime. They wanted O.J.'s meretricious lifestyle. They couldn't have it. They settled for a skanky morality play that told them that lifestyle was venal.

He cheats on his income tax." Dudley ha! ha! ha!'d. "So do I, so does my friend Malcolm and so would our grand savior Jesus Christ should he return and settle in America.

If we would have civilization and the exertion indispensable to its success, we must have property; if we have property, we must have its rights; if we have the rights of property, we must take those consequences of the rights of property which are inseparable from the rights themselves.

That of all the 'oracies (aristocracy and democracy included) hypocrisy is the most flourishing.

We live in a world of endless transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true.