Quotes About Society

In Whitman's writings in and about New Orleans, the kind of man Whitman was attracted to can be found scattered over almost every page, be they oyster vendors, omnibus drivers, or street toughs. Their type struck Whitman's fancy — personally and politically.

The new society at last, proportionate to Nature, In man of you, more than your mountain peaks or stalwart trees imperial, In woman more, far more, than all your gold or vines, or even vital air. Fresh come, to a new world indeed, yet long prepared, I see the genius of the modern, child of the real and ideal, Clearing the ground for broad humanity, the true America, heir of the past so grand, To build a grander future.

As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.

What has been forgotten.... is never something purely individual.

Historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept is not progress but actualization.

Not architecture alone but all technology is, at certain stages, evidence of a collective dream.

The camera is getting smaller and smaller, ever readier to capture fleeting and secret moments whose images paralyse the associative mechanisms in the beholder.

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.

What figure does the man of letters cut in a country where his employer is the proletariat ?

Daß es so weiter geht, ist die Katastrophe. Sie ist nicht das jeweils Bevorstehende sondern das jeweils Gegebene.

The point is that in society everybody must answer the question of what he is—as distinct from the question of who he is—

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

Duhamel calls the movie "a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a 'star' in Los Angeles.

A Dostoeivski le interesaba la psicología; sacó a la luz la parte criminal que hay en el hombre. A Brecht le interesa la política; saca a la luz la parte criminal que hay en el negocio.

L'expérience de notre génération: le capitalisme ne mourra pas de mort naturelle

Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of "human material," the claims to which society has denied its natural material. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.

When you're young, you make mistakes. The big thing that's different now is that when I was a kid, you could survive your mistakes. We didn't have guns. Today, kids have access to guns. The same kids that would have been in trouble and gotten a stern talking-to are now going to jail for fifteen or twenty years. Instead of bloody noses there are bodies lying in the street with chalk outlines around them. The values are basically the same, but it's easier to mess up.

I remember him telling me that engineering was the highest level of importance you could reach in the world," Steve Wozniak later recalled. "It takes society to a new level.

The riches of a country are to be valued by the quantity of labor its inhabitants are able to purchase, and not by the quantity of silver and gold they possess." The

La ventaja competitiva de una sociedad no vendrá de lo bien que se enseñe en sus escuelas la multiplicación y las tablas periódicas, sino de lo bien que se sepa estimular la imaginación y la creatividad.

That was back when state governments valued education and realized the economic and social value of making it affordable.

One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other 'My little computer said such a funny thing this morning!' " he japed in 1951.

Those who met with greater economic success in life were responsible to help those in genuine need; but those who from lack of virtue failed to pull their own weight could expect no help from society.

The computer will never be as important to society as the copier."73