Quotes About Society

racial reasoning discourages moral reasoning.

Hence, for liberals, black people are to be included and integrated into our society and culture, while for conservatives they are to be well behaved and worthy of acceptance by our way of life. Both fail to see that the presence and predicaments of black people are neither additions to nor defections from American life, but rather constitutive elements of that life.

That was the use of knives for women: to cut food for the men who killed with their knives… who killed those women's husbands, their sons, and their daughters.

but she did nothing to make her face prettier, since it was her opinion that beautiful women might be desired but were never respected, certainly not feared.

No one will sing it, Meggie. People don't like their heroes to need help, particularly not from women and children.

It was funny how I could feel all alone and under surveillance at the same time.

That's why you never hear politicians talking about 'citizens,' it's all 'taxpayers,' as though the salient fact of your relationship to the state is how much you pay. Like the state was a business and citizenship was a loyalty program that rewarded you for your custom with roads and health care.

That would be like telling people not to send nudes. It doesn't work.

Per poco Salima non scoppiò a ridere. Se lo faceva lei era un crimine, se lo metteva in vendita un'azienda era un prodotto. Qualsiasi cosa poteva diventare un prodotto.

What the fuck do we need money for? So long as you keep on pretending that money is anything but a consensus hallucination induced by the ruling elite to convince you to let them hoard the best stuff, you're never going to make a difference. Steve, the problem isn't that people spend their money the wrong way, or that the wrong people have money. The problem is money. Money only works if there isn't enough to go around—

The great mystery of being a human being is trying to figure out WTF all those other human beings are doing.

No, I mean I'm sorry that you've inherited such a miserable, collapsing Old Country. A place where rich Bankers own everything, where you've got to be grateful for a part-time job with no benefits and no retirement plan, where the most health insurance you can afford is being careful and hoping you don't get sick, where --

I was willing to bet that if I were a dude coming back to the Sofitel late at night with a couple of underage hookers, no one would bat an eye, state of emergency or no state of emergency. But let a lady try and show some sisterly solidarity, and suddenly it was ENFORCE ALL THE POLICIES. Fuck that.

we're problems to be solved, not citizens. That's why you never hear politicians talking about 'citizens,' it's all 'taxpayers,' as though the salient fact of your relationship to the state is how much you pay.

there aren't any 'jobs' left. Just financial engineering and politics. I'm not qualified for either. For one thing, I can't say 'meritocracy' with a straight face.

Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-art was a goat.

I figured some people have edges that don't allow them to slot neatly into the holes society expects them to fit into, that was all.

The second-century satirist Juvenal calculated that "musicians and popular athletes earn more in a day than the teacher does in a year (Sat. 7.175-177, 240-243).

It was expected that men would marry, and it was assumed something was wrong if they didn't. Later rabbis often quoted the saying, "He who has no wife dwells without good, without help, without joy, without blessing, and without atonement" (Gen. Rab. 17.2)!

The amount of testimony from those who have experienced the supernatural, whose lives have been changed for the better, and/or who have contributed good to society over the last two thousand years within a Christian context—such accumulating testimony dramatically outweighs what has been experienced and accomplished by any other ideology and dramatically outweighs the evils done in the name of Christ as well.

In the United States of 1850, the Industrial Revolution had amped up labor to an astonishing all-time high of 3,650 hours, based on seventy-hour weeks and fifty-two weeks per year.

You think civilization is some horrible, polluting human invention that separates us from the state of nature. But civilization doesn't separate us from nature. Civilization protects us from nature.

The truth was that I didn't know which I was. I wasn't allowed to claim the thing I felt and I didn't feel the thing I was supposed to claim.

And really, wasn't this endless ruminating over my own likability in itself a thing only a woman would do? Did Bill—or Ted Cruz or Rand Paul—ever ponder their likability, or did they simply go after what they wanted? Did Bill ever stop to think about which of us was more qualified, did he question his own motives for entry into the race? The idea was laughable.