Quotes About Society

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion. Had they both worn the same clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have been the same.

Look, the unseen bade him, the voice which now communicated with him who was the greatest of mankind, Septimus, lately taken from life to death, the Lord who had come to renew society, who lay like a coverlet, a snow blanket smitten only by the sun, for ever unwasted, suffering for ever, the scapegoat, the eternal sufferer, but he did not want it, he moaned, putting from him with a wave of his hand that eternal suffering, that eternal loneliness.

However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer afternoon.

But let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can.

Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters, defilers, the writers of false books, faked books, books that fill the air with decay and disease?

Possibly the greatest good requires the existence of a slave class.

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.

She came from the most worthless of classes - the rich, with a smattering of culture.

La historia de la oposición masculina a la emancipación de las mujeres quizá sea más interesante que la propia historia de la emancipación

How much, let me note, depends upon trousers; the intelligent head is entirely handicapped by shabby trousers.

The public and private worlds are inseparably connected ... the tyrannies and servilities of one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.

And if it be true that it is one of the tokens of the fully developed mind that it does not think specially or separately of sex, how much harder it is to attain that condition now than ever before. ... No age can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own ...

For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet.

Avete idea di quanti libri si scrivono sulle donne in un anno? Avete idea di quanti sono scritti da uomini? Sapete di essere l'animale forse più discusso dell'universo?

But he never looked at his daughter, and strode out of the room, leaving in the minds of the women a sense, half of awe, half of amusement, and the extravagant, inconsiderate, uncivilized male, outraged somehow and gone bellowing to his lair with a roar which still sometimes reverberates in the most polished of drawing rooms.

that England is under the rule of a patriarchy. Nobody in their senses could fail to detect the dominance of the professor. His was the power and the money and the influence. He was the proprietor of the paper and its editor and sub-editor. He was the Foreign Secretary and the Judge.

Directly anything happens—it may be a marriage, or a birth, or a death—on the whole they prefer it to be a death—every one wants to see you. They insist upon seeing you. They've got nothing to say; they don't care a rap for you; but you've got to go to lunch or to tea or to dinner, and if you don't you're damned. It's the smell of blood, she continued; I don't blame 'em; only they shan't have mind if I know it!

As for himself, when he went to go to a party, as one was sometimes obliged to, from a wish not to give offence, he walked into the middle of the room, said 'Ha! Ha!' as loud as ever he could, considered he had done his duty, and went home.

Society gives me chicken and coffee, bed and lodging, in return for a certain number of pieces of paper which were left me by an aunt, for no other reason than that I share her name.

Whatever may be their use in civilised societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.

Tinha a esquisita sensação de estar invisível; despercebida; desconhecida; de não ser mais casada, não ter mais filhos agora, apenas aquela espantosa e um tanto solene marcha com os demais, por Bond Street, ser esta Sra. Dalloway; nem mais Clarissa: Sra. Dalloway somente.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure or man at twice it's natural size. ... That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so empathetically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge.

There are one or two people I'm fond of, and there's a little good music, and a few pictures, now and then—just enough to keep one dangling about here. Ah, but I couldn't live with savages! Are you fond of books? Music? Pictures? D'you care at all for first editions? I've got a few nice things up here, things I pick up cheap, for I can't afford to give what they ask.