Quotes About Society

If your motives aren't clean, money itself becomes evil. But When we don't have money enough evil, the world tells us we're losers. So what determines our place in society is not how much kindness is in our hearts but how much evil is in our wallet.

A sense of immediacy prevails in the society of enjoyment to such an extent that events seem meaningless—as if they occur outside of any context that might allow us to decipher them. What is lacking is a sense of universality that would mediate particular events and render them comprehensible.

In the act of seeing through the symbolic fiction and thereby failing to recognize its efficacy, the cynic does not escape its influence. In fact, this influence is all the more powerful for its having become wholly inconspicuous, which is precisely what befalls the subject in the society of enjoyment.

In fact, desire is sustained dissatisfaction. This state of sustained dissatisfaction is the normal state for subjects within a society of prohibition. Prohibition produces dissatisfied, desiring subjects, subjects who remain securely within the confines of the social order.

The symbolic order thrives on the deprivation of the subjects belonging to it: it creates a bond of lack. In this way, prohibition works to create coherence within society. The prohibition of enjoyment holds the social order together through the shared dissatisfaction it produces.

No society can include us without simultaneously alienating us from it. My belonging in a society always breaks down, which enables me to turn against this society when it takes a direction that I cannot accept. This is why I am free. Freedom is not a value of belonging, of being a member of a free society. Freedom becomes apparent as a value when we experience our nonbelonging, a nonbelonging that is universal because it applies to everyone, even those who most feel like they fit in.

This is why one cannot think the society of prohibition without the imaginary housing the image of the denied enjoyment. This image is what allows subjects in the society of prohibition to sustain themselves in the midst of their dissatisfaction.

Love seems like a capitalist plot.

The capitalist epoch is the first in human history that permits individuals to view themselves as isolated entities with no inherent connection to their fellow beings.

subjects to continue to go on. Capitalist society's packaging of love as romance aims at eliminating the disruptiveness of love while sustaining its passion. This is an impossible task, and the love of the capitalist subject is always a diminished love insofar as it's safer.

The appeal to identity is capitalism's secret sauce.

Here is perhaps the chief indication that we are in the midst of a society of enjoyment: even the attempt to restore prohibition follows the logic of the demand for enjoyment, albeit in the guise of opposing it. When we resurrect the father today, he doesn't appear in the form of the symbolic father, the barrier to enjoyment. Instead, he appears in a form consonant with the society of enjoyment.

Just as the word and its absence of enjoyment are central in the society of prohibition, the image and its illusion of present enjoyment are central in the society of enjoyment. This shift in primacy from the word to the image corresponds, in the terms of psychoanalysis, to a change in emphasis from the symbolic order to the imaginary. This means, most obviously, that images have more of an effect on us today than words, that we are increasingly dealing with images rather than words.

It was the people who tried to seem normal all the time who were really messed up

Was it a weakness of man that made him want to ignore the darker side of his fellow human beings?

Alexey Alexandorivich had seen nothing striking or improper in the fact that his wife was sitting with Vronsky at a separate table, in eager conversation with him about something. But he noticed that to the rest of the party this appeared to be something striking and improper. He made up his mind that he must speak of it to his wife.

Currency is… a shared delusion in the minds of all men, a necessary delusion if civilised society were not to fall… yet so many lives, so many cities and kingdoms and nations, ultimately depend on hoping that no man ever stops to wonder why he values discs of a shiny yellow metal so highly…"   -

Education is the foundation of a better society, one that values diversity, critical thinking, and a commitment to social justice.

a scene in which Bruno talks to his prostitute girlfriend about life in America (under the Nazis, Bruno says, they beat you and cursed you, but in America, "They do it ever so politely, and with a smile")

You can never overestimate the intelligence of the American public.

Ever more patients complain of a feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness, which seems to derive from two facts. Unlike an animal, man is not told by instincts what he must do. And unlike man in former times, he is no longer told by traditions what he should do. Often he does not even know what he basically wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism), or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).

Only 10 percent were middle class. The

Jokes about Crazy Cat Ladies seem harmless enough, but at their core is a disturbing echo of the hysterical witch superstitions of the Middle Age.

We British are used to being ruthless, of course, but only the men. The women aren't. We don't grab. We shouldn't . But we have to, to make some room for ourselves.