Quotes About Society

This is a consistent theme in stories about traveling to the future: Things are always worse when you get there. And I suspect this is because the kind of writer who's intrigued by the notion of moving forward in time can't see beyond their own pessimism about being alive. People who want to travel through time are both (a) unhappy and (b) unwilling to compromise anything about who they are. They would rather change every element of society except themselves.

According to population expert Dr. Paul Ehrlich, we should currently be experiencing a dystopian dreamscape where "survivors envy the dead," which seems true only when I look at Twitter. Yet

It was, in retrospect, a remarkably easy time to be alive. There were still nuclear weapons, but there was not going to be a nuclear war. The internet was coming, but reluctantly, and there was no reason to believe it would be anything but awesome. The United States experienced a prolonged period of economic growth without the protracted complications of a hot or cold war, making it possible to focus on one's own subsistence as if the rest of society were barely there.

The 1980 George W. S. Trow essay "Within the Context of No Context" argued that "the work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts.

the slow cancellation of the future and the fast homogenization of the past]

this is how media devolution works: It creates an archetype that eventually dwarfs its origin.

His separation from the rest of society is beyond vast. But we are not working within the parameters of reality; we are working within the parameters of televised sport. And that's a critical difference. It essentially makes Ralph Sampson a tall, emotive, representational nonhuman slave. And within these parameters, four thousand rebounds don't mean shit.

accelerated culture does not respond well to the nonobvious.

What society classifies as "credible" is almost always a product of whichever social demographic happens to be economically dominant at the time of the classification.

The uncomfortable, omnipresent reality within any conversation about representation is that the most underrepresented subcultures are the ones that don't even enter into the conversation.

Being interesting has been replaced with being identifiable

It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible. –GEORGE WASHINGTON

Worker bees can leave. Even drones can fly away. The Queen is their slave.

People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone.

Tyler lies back and asks, If Marilyn Monroe were alive right now, what would she be doing? I say, goodnight. The headliner hangs down in shreds from the ceiling and Tyler says, Clawing at the lid of her coffin.

Anymore, no one's mind is their own.

If Marilyn Monroe was alive right now, what would she be doing?' Clawing at the roof of her coffin.

It's because we're so trapped in our culture, in the being of being human on this planet with the brains we have, and the same two arms and legs everybody has. We're so trapped that any way we could imagine to escape would be just another part of the trap. Anything we want, we're trained to want.

The problem in this case was you can't be a middle-aged virgin in America without something being wrong with you. People can't conceive of a virtue in someone else that they can't conceive in themselves. Instead of believing you're stronger, it's so much easier to imagine you're weaker.

We're the culture that cried wolf.

You're safe because you're so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive of it.

Just for the record, being smeared with shit and naked in the wilderness, spattered with pink vomit, this does not necessarily make you a real artist.

We come from a generation of people who need their TV or stereo playing all the time. These people so scared of silence. These soundaholics, these quietophobics.

It's so quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you're one of those space monkeys. You do the little job you're trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don't understand any of it, and then you just die.