Quotes About Society

Tässä kommunistien ja kapitalistien näkemykset käyvät yksiin: molemmat ajattelevat saman paradigman mukaisesti, että talous on jokaisen yhteiskunnan keskeisin alue. Itse en ole samaa mieltä. Hitaasti hiipivä identiteettikriisi, joka liittotasavaltaa on kohdannut, on vähintään yhtä vaarallinen.

The split in his social existence made itself felt in his personality structure as well. Mozart's entire musical activity, his whole training as a virtuoso performer and composer, were shaped by the music canon of the hegemonic court societies of Europe. [...] At the same time, in his personality structure, especially as far as his social relations were concerned, he remained a man of the petty bourgeois ...

It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part.

The Zionists indeed learnt well from the Nazis. So well that it seems that their morally repugnant treatment of the Palestinians, and their attempts to destroy Palestinian society within Israel and the occupied territories, reveals them as basically Nazis with beards and black hats.

What's the greatest problem in America today? Is it ignorance or is it apathy?" One time a student answered, "I don't know, and I don't care!

difference between sociology and morality. Sociology is descriptive; morality is prescriptive.

Ever since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher lightened all the regulations for making money, the gap between the haves and have not has grown. Inspired by a 1980's Hollywood movie, the mantra for Wall Street became "greed is good.

Queria passar mais uns minutos no mundo que não fosse dominado pela hierarquia e o snobismo e a vingança.

Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no 'normal,' because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously.

When exactly did every housewife in America become a whore?

Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons, but they will never be the athletic ruling class.

Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary. The postmodern mother of invention is desire; we don't really "need" anything new, so we only create what we want.

We are losing the ability to understand anything that's even vaguely complex.

Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake. Every comparison becomes impractical. This is why the impractical has become totally acceptable; impracticality almost seems cool.

But this is how popular culture works: You allow yourself to be convinced you're sharing a reality that doesn't exist.

If a society improves, the experience of growing up in that society should be less taxing and more comfortable; if technology advances and efficiency increases, emerging generations should rationally expect to work less. If new kids aren't soft and lazy, something has gone wrong.

I don't understand this whole thing about computers and the superhighway," sci-fi novelist Ray Bradbury told an audience of college students in 1995. "Who wants to be in touch with all of those people?

If you want to experience a free-flowing discourse devoid of limitation, you need to seek the darkest fringes of the Internet (and none of that anonymous bile can bleed back into proper society, because the interpretation always ends up being worse than the original sentiment).

As recently as the grunge era, there remained a bohemian cachet in casually mentioning that you didn't own a TV. But nobody thinks like that anymore. Today, claiming you don't own a TV simply means you're poor (or maybe depressed). In one ten-year span, high-end television usurped the cultural positions of film, rock, and literary fiction.

the increasingly common ideology that assures people they're right about what they believe.... is, however, socially detrimental . It hijacks conversation and aborts ideas. It engenders a delusion of simplicity that benefits people with inflexible minds. It makes the experience of living in a society slightly worse than it should be.

Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us.

There are entrenched ideas (both positive and negative) about what the internet is, conceded even by those who disagree with the veracity of the assertions: the way it refigures politics and social organization, the degree to which it alters the experience of adolescence, its contradictory ability to connect and estrange simultaneously, and its overall acceleration of the news cycle.

Modern people hate American Beauty for the same reason people in 1999 loved American Beauty: It examines the interior problems of upper-middle-class white people living in the late twentieth century—the kind of people who voted for Bill Clinton twice and (perhaps) saw fragments of their own lives within the problems he created for himself. And it was, in all probability, the last time in history such problems would be considered worthy of contemplation.

whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take the fall for this.