Quotes About Society

Every institution is affected by the culture in which it lives and especially the culture in which it was born. That includes my church and denomination as well as yours.

If I went home, I was a loser. If I went inside, I was a criminal. So basically, I had no choice. The inside of the building smelled musty,

A lot of our entertainment throws into detail the stagnation and illness of how we live today-it's sad and it's sick... and it's profitable.

Truth is stranger than fiction, which is why reality TV is so popular."

Humor is the mechanism by which we sort out the gray area of what can and can't be said. A humorless society, community, or group of friends likely has large problemas lurking just beneath the surface.

Collective consciousness, an evolutionary innovation unlike any other, creates cognitive emergence.

modernity is doing something to us at a deeply fundamental level, and the fact that we don't understand it is alarming.

You are a nice person, and you're also full of anger. You're a walking tangle of contradictions. That's okay. Most of us are like that. Women, most of all. How could we not be? People want us to be sexy warriors who roll over and play dead on command. They want us to be flirty burlesque dancers in burkas, aggressive conquistadors with cookies in the oven, Dorothy Parker meets Dorothy Gale, Sandra Bernhard meets Sandra Dee, Kristen Stewart meets Martha Stewart.

We are encouraged to believe in our dreams, but we are assumed to dream in the same limited palette as everyone else. We are to view ourselves as unique snowflakes only as it facilitates more efficiently melting ourselves into bottled spring water.

A century ago, survival was the main event. Longing was an accepted part of existence. Today, the inability to achieve happiness or fit in with the herd is treated as a kind of moral failure.

Our culture exerts a constant pressure on us that severs our relationship to ourselves and each other.

Being a woman was a trap. Something would bring you down before you turned twenty-three. The only time the world shows you any favor, or cuts you any slack, is during that very brief period of courtship where the world is trying to fuck you for the first time.

What sort of brainwashing, he had wondered, had created a world in which people worked fifty or sixty hours a week, every week, no matter how beautiful the day outside, no matter what thoughts they were having? Where would the paintings come from? The novels and sculptures? The music?

I loved the idea of a subversive world where mental illness was defined as just another version of normal, and education was how you made your way in the world, not something that began or ended.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits. —Mark Twain

At home, there is no middle way. You're male or you're female. There's no in between. You conform or you hide. You conform or you're wrong. If you dress like a girl, then you have to be a girl, all girl, and if any part of you's not, that's not okay.

This is a medical issue, but mostly it's a cultural issue. It's a social issue and an emotional issue and a family dynamic issue and a community issue.

We don't need something to have happened to talk about it, though. Teenage girls don't get enough credit for this, their ability to see the potential import of everything, no matter how insignificant it seems, and analyze it endlessly. It's written off—we're written off—as silly, but it's the opposite. We understand instinctively that change is slow. If you're not paying attention, you'll miss it.

In 1982 President Ronald Reagan called for a war on drugs: by 1990 more men were in federal prisons on drug charges alone than had comprised the entire 1980 federal prison population for all crimes combined.

I resent it being a truth universally acknowledged, no matter what era I find myself in, that a single woman of thirty must be in want of a husband.

It's bad enough to be a baby-making machine with no epidural in sight in exchange for the state-sanctioned title of 'Mrs' before one's name. But to be a 'Miss' with an ever-increasing brood of children, just waiting for the man to grow weary of stretch marks and spit-ups? No thank you?

Here is an unbroken space in which a woman and a man may with the full sanction of society, practically make love to each other with their eyes, their fleeting touch, and the display of their bodies. Emblem of marriage, indeed.

by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum.

As musicians and artists, it's important we have an environment - and I guess when I say environment, I really mean the industry, that really nurtures these gifts. Oftentimes, the machine can overlook the need to take care of the people who produce the sounds that have a lot to do with the health and well-being of society.