Quotes About Society

There is no human society without some musical tradition. Although the traditions are very different, some principles can be found everywhere.

Societies have religion because social cohesion requires something like religion. Social groups would fall apart if ritual did not periodically reestablish that all members are part of a greater whole.

If people feel a conflict between their inclinations and a norm that is followed by everybody else, it is a conflict within their heads.

Most accounts of the origins of religion emphasize one of the following suggestions: human minds demand explanations, human hearts seek comfort, human society requires order, human intellect is illusionprone.

Social exchange is certainly among the oldest of human behaviors, as humans have depended on sharing and exchanging resources for a very long time.

Sad but true that nothing puts a woman in her place more effectively than a chivalrous gesture performed in a certain manner.

Silence becomes a woman…

If you live in a society that wishes you didn't exist, anything you do to make yourself happy disrupts its attempts to wipe you out, or at the very least, make you invisible.

In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.

They succeeded not only in making me normal but also in making me dull .

Because our nation is stupid and Hollywood is coarse, there is no one to tell us of the deep and extraordinary beauty of older women. I now see them all around me and am filled with a fierce joy that one of them has come to live in my house.

A nation of unhappy teachers makes for a sadder and more endangered America.

Yet all around me, in the grinning faces of my students, I could see a crime, so ugly that it could be interpreted as a condemnation of an entire society, a nation be damned, a history of wickedness—these children before me did not have a goddam chance of sharing in the incredible wealth and affluence of the country that claimed them, a country that failed them, a country that needed but did not deserve deliverance.

thought that, at birth, American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.

A convicted thief was sentenced to have his hand cut off. A liar lost his tongue. Repeated offenders were killed. Banishment was also a common sentence. In spite of these severe laws, songs praised Sundiata for his fairness in dealings with the privileged as well as the poor, the strong as well as the weak.

we are here confronted with an irreducible oddity about all human societies: all are strung around figments of the human imagination.

It is probably safe to say that in strongly hierarchical societies the only people to whom something approaching nationalist sentiments can be attributed in pre-modern times is the ruling elite, and then only at times.

He even got an old moral lesson hammered home anew: the poor go to gaol for the same crimes with which the rich aren't even charged.

What was it about a woman—a certain kind of woman—standing at the mercy of men—righteous, civic-minded men, with the moral force of public outrage on their side—that could sometimes be secretly, shamefacedly titillating?

She had seen just now what she had only sensed before, that the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what she and Carol had together seemed no longer love or anything happy but a monster between them, with each of them caught in a fist.

Society's law was lax compared to the law of conscience

I tell him his business, all business, is legalized throat-cutting, like marriage is legalized fornication.

The law was not society, it began. Society was people like himself and Owen and Brillhart, who hadn't the right to take the life of another member of society. And yet the law did. And yet the law is supposed to be the will of society at least. It isn't even that. Or maybe it is collectively, he added, aware that as always he was doubling back before he come to a point, making things as complex as possible in trying to make them certain.

Perhaps identity, like hell, was merely other people.