Quotes About Society

I hear they whip you for stealing. Or put you in jail, or sell you into slavery, or kill you, depending on the town and what mood they're in.

In Valentine's experience, normality was always a pretense, people acting out what they thought were their expected roles

marriage is not a covenant between a man and a woman... Marriage is a covenant between a man and woman on the one side and their community on the other. To marry according to the law of the community is to become a full citizen; to refuse marriage is to be a stranger, a child, an outlaw, a slave, or a traitor. The one constant in every society of human kind is that only those who obey the laws, tabus, and customs of marriage are true adults.

With gay marriage, the last shreds of meaning will be stripped away from marriage, with homosexuals finishing what faithless, selfish heterosexuals have begun.

Human is human," said Issib. "But civilized—that's the gift of the Oversoul. Civilization without self-destruction.

when everybody believes that everybody's actions are the result of free choice, and takes and gives responsibility accordingly, the result is civilization.

The law didn't make witch trials happen. It was the hunger for witch trials that got them to make up the law.

If good people weren't so trusting of bad ones, the human race would have died out long ago—most women never would have let most men near them.

but this is the culture of China. There is no nation other than China, no society and traditions worth preserving other than those found in China, no people more important than the Chinese.

There were not enough women among them, but they began to work out social patterns that would maximize reproduction and keep from having too many males without a hope of mating. Within a generation or two, if babies came in the usual proportions, half male and half female, the normal human pattern of monogamy could be restored.

Even if there is no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society.

Science fiction is not about the future. Like all other fiction, it is about the present. It simply uses different techniques to show us who we are, who we might be, and whom we ought to become.

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God.

Crying is for plain women. Pretty women go shopping.

How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.

Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely—or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. You have that moment now. Choose!

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.