Quotes About Society

James Lee Burke

James Lee Burke

In Montana I knew a twenty-one-year-old kid who killed two people before he got to prison, then killed or helped kill five more during a riot. He had to be awakened from a sound sleep the afternoon of his execution. The

Like many my age, I believe people in groups are to be feared and that arguing with others is folly and the knowledge of one generation cannot be passed down to the next.

I was not simply tired of the world's iniquity. I was tired of greed in particular and the ostentatious display of wealth that characterizes our times, and the justifications for despoiling the earth and injuring our fellow man.

Joe Molinari's role in life had been being used by others, as consumer and laborer and voter and minion, which, in the economics of the world I grew up in, was considered normal by both the liege lord in the manor and the serf in the field.

What we do is punish the people who are available," she said.

James Lee Burke

What had the sheriff said, something to the effect that most people's public roles were pure bullshit? I wondered if he should not be given an endowed chair at the local university.

You hate rich people, Dave.

slave system presented no obstacle to the growth of industrial capitalism as an economic system

formidable obstacle to the establishment of industrial capitalist democracy

Whereas underprivileged strata of society religiously hope for a better future, the overprivileged, disavowing any idea of transcendence, "live for the present by exploiting their great past.

Learned institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.

I had thoroughly been a girl so long by then that I'd grown to like it, got used to it, got used to not having to lift things, and have folks make excuses for me on account of me not being strong enough, or fast enough, or powerful enough like a boy, on account of my size. But that's the thing. You can play one part in life, but you can't be that thing. You just playing it. You're not real.

Everybody went to jail in the Cause eventually. You could be the tiniest ant able to slip into a crack in the sidewalk, or a rocket ship that flew fast enough to break the speed of sound, it didn't matter. When society dropped its hammer on your head, well, there it is.

When society dropped its hammer on your head, well, there it is. Soup

and on it went, the whole business of the white man's reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.

But secular-ism, more than any other single word, aptly describes the mental framework and value structure of the people of our time.

Let it be understood that we cannot go outside of this alternative: liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors its worst members.

Therefore, poets do not 'fit' into society, not because a place is denied them but because they do not take their 'places' seriously. They openly see its roles as theatrical, its styles as poses, its clothing costumes, its rules conventional, its crises arranged, its conflicts performed and its metaphysics ideological.

Boy, you just can't kill people like you used to

You know things have gone bad when military marches pass for pop music.

In a manner of speaking. As we intend for you to found a dynasty. And that dynasty will rule society until it has progressed enough to- Overthrow the dynasty in a revolutionary, blood filled coup! Iggy said eagerly. We all looked at him. Just saying. He sheepishly took a bite of cookie.