Quotes About Society

Britain is characterized not just by its independence but, above all, by its openness.

What isn't for everybody shouldn't be for anybody: the world's opera houses are the reasons we have cardboard cities.

The opera in Los Angeles is excellent.

I'm not glamorous, I don't have a look, I don't know anything about opera, I have no Italian, and I'm too old.

Once, the arts were opera, ballet, classical music, and everything else deemed highbrow.

We tend to forget that in those days before the Internet and HBO and Imax and 3-D cinema, opera was the thing. Opera and theatre. If you were a man of the world and you mingled among the happy few, you would be at the opera.

Writing opera off as intrinsically elitist is absurd.

When you accept the way things are, there's really no other way to operate than the way you've been conditioned to. You live in America: you're free to vote, you go vote, and you continue to see the problems of being a nationalistic society. You don't really know what to do because you're conditioned to feel that's just the way things are.

We are now operating a school system in America that's more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King.

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.

The way people in democracies think of the government as something different from themselves is a real handicap. And, of course, sometimes the government confirms their opinion.

I think marriage is a cultural thing - it's my opinion that nature doesn't tell someone to get married.

Conscience is, in most men, an anticipation of the opinions of others.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.  Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!

Oh, I love London Society! It has immensely improved. It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what Society should be.

Women treat us [men] like humanity treats gods—they worship us and keep bothering us to do something for them.

You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages.

JACK Your duty as a gentleman calls you back. ALGERNON My duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree.

But don't you think one can be happy when on is married? Perfectly happy. But the happiness of a married man, my dear Gerald, depends on the people he has not married. But if one is in love? One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being poor.

Civilization is not by means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt.

A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it.

If a woman cannot make her mistakes charming, she is only a female.

I am not in favour of this modern mania for turning bad people into good people at a moment's notice.