Quotes About Society

At a more serious level, the desirability of aligning our actions with the more powerful laws of nature, society, and psychology, in order to lead a productive life, is a central theme in many works, particularly the ancient Chinese classic, Tao te Ching.

The pendulum had swung too far, as always, and now was swinging back, and the horror of intolerance had been loosed upon the land.

It seems to be a social axiom that as misery and privation increase for the many, the few rise ever higher in luxury and comfort, feeding on the misery.

Your kind of politics is dead. They are dead because any tinhorn with a loud mouth and a brassy front could gain power by appeal to mob psychology. And you haven't got mob psychology anymore. You can't have mob psychology when people don't give a damn what happens to a thing that's dead already—a political system that broke down under its own weight.

Men died for that approval, sacrificed for that approval, lived lives they loathed for that approval. For without it a man was on his own, an outcast, an animal that had been driven from the pack.

Sport, they called it, but that had been nothing more than a softer name for the bloodlust that man had carried

The rich and powerful like to appear conformist, God-fearing, vaguely naïve and permanently jolly because they are none of those things.

I was a stranger in the strange land of the rich and was coming to see that they do things differently there.

Especially politics; that was the best trough to wallow in. You could get your snout, eyes, head and front hooves in that mess of muck and have a fine old time splashing around. It was an inexhaustible subject to devour, a swill with a little of everything in it, because everything, according to Judd, was political.

What I do know is that I have never found clowns remotely funny. I am not alone in this, I think. More people find clowns disturbing or distressing rather than raucously amusing. Is it that the nature of human existence has changed so radically in the last century or so that what was funny to our grandparents and great-grandparents is now tragic or terrifying?

Women had always existed: they had lived, a species to themselves, with the demons. But they had wanted playmates: and together they had made men. What an error, what a cataclysmic miscalculation.

Sanity is a movable feast. One man's madness is another's politics.

Over the years, Americans in particular have been all too willing to squander their hard-earned independence and freedom for the illusion of feeling safe under someone else's authority. The concept of self-sufficiency has been undermined in value over a scant few generations. The vast majority of the population seems to look down their noses upon self-reliance as some quaint dusty relic, entertained only by the hyperparanoid or those hopelessly incapable of fitting into mainstream society.

Mi madre me enseñó que el mercado era una oscura y siniestra máquina que trituraba y devoraba cien destinos por cada individuo afortunado al que recompensaba

El maquillaje puede ser una falsedad, pero no si todo el mundo lo lleva. Si todo el mundo va maquillado, el maquillaje se convierte en en la manera en que son las cosas. Y que es la verdad sino la manera en que son las cosas?

Because of the way society sets them up, women never again experience the need to develop independence - until some crisis in later life explodes their complacency, showing them how sadly helpless and undeveloped they've allowed themselves to be.

In Georgia] A cheerful anarchy reigned.

The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent on its Outsiders. Many Outsiders unify themselves, realize themselves as poets or saints. Others remain tragically divided and unproductive, but even they supply soul-energy to society; it is their strenuousness that purifies thought and prevents the bourgeois world from foundering under its own dead-weight; they are society's spiritual dynamos.

The Outsider's case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretence, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for Truth.

A society manufactures the heroes it requires.

Men start off good and then the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death.

Two people, two hands, and two songs, in this case Big Shot and Bette Davis Eyes. The lyrics of the two songs provided no commentary, honest or ironic, on the proceedings. They were merely there and always underfoot, the insistent gray muck that was pop culture. It stuck to our shoes and we tracked it through our lives.

You can change the law but you can't change people and how they treat each other. Nickel was racist as hell—half the people who worked here probably dressed up like the Klan on weekends—but the way Turner saw it, wickedness went deeper than skin color. It was Spencer. It was Spencer and it was Griff and it was all the parents who let their children wind up here. It was people.

Men start off good and then the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day.