Quotes About Society

Abel came to the sad conclusion that he was watching a once-great civilization slide toward the abyss. The masses wanted the state to provide for them in every way, and the politicians who promised the most largesse were the ones who were elected. They in turn gave the people what they wanted, which then placed an ever-increasing burden on the most productive members of society.

And America? It was being taken over by corrupt politicians, a mainstream media bent on whipping up divisions, and an Internet full of crazies.

The hugely uneven distribution of wealth itself was forcing the country toward a boiling point. Add

In the America of today, values and principles had been replaced by partisanship.

Darling, we're all whores under the skin, whether we give ourselves by calculation or by desire. It's just that some of us demand a higher price than others.

All thinking (is) an effort to make thought escape from the thinker's mind past all obstacles as completely as possible: all society is an attempt to seise and influence and coerce each thought as it appears and force it to yield to another.

I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore.

All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.

At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever

They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.

Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. (...) Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul.

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. They are driven by instincts which are not within their control.

And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. (...) almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. (...) [women in fiction were] not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that

Women made civilisation impossible with all their "charm " all their silliness.

With a brain working and a body working one could keep step with the crowd and never be found out for the hollow machine, lacking the essential thing, that one was conscious of being.

She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.

Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

To give a truthful account of London society at that or indeed at any other time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian. Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it - the poets and the novelists - can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does not exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma - a mirage.

To communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province.

Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English!

Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?

Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you.

Women's rights, that antediluvian topic.