Quotes About Society

Is life worth living in the jaws of society's trash can for misfit minds? What can I possibly achieve or contribute to mankind in this steel and concrete box with a damn loud laughing wall that moves? Just give up?

Até um homem de mente fraca quer ser como os outros homens. Uma criança pode não saber como se alimentar, ou o que comer, mas ela conhece a fome.

On the sidewalk, a discarded refrigerator with its face ripped off, and on the curb an old mattress with wire intestines hanging out of its belly.

Dovevo combattere? Dargliela vinta? Soccombere al terzo mondo per sfuggire alle tragiche realtà che sono al di là della mia porta di acciaio? Ma vale la pena di vivere inghiottiti dal bidone della spazzatura che la società riserva alle menti disadattate?

If we have the good fortune to be allergic to submission, to forms, to dogmas, to beliefs, to infallibility, to the idea of forming an artificial family isolated from society, and if we desire above all to live life deeply, perfectly integrated in society, then Tantra has something marvelous to offer to us. But Tantra requires a maturity, an independence, and a willingness not to conform.

The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison.

You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live... I think there are many among you who would be glad to release the world from captivity... This is what prevents them: They're unable to find the bars of the cage.

T]he price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.

In effect, you're saying that if you knew how you oughtt to live, then the flaw is man could be controlled. If you knew how you ought to live, you wouldn't be forever screwing up the world. perhaps in fact the two things are actually one thing. Perhaps the flaw in man is exactly this: that he doesn't know how he ought to live.

They put their shoulders to the wheel during the day, stupefy themselves with drugs or television at night, and try not to think too searchingly about the world they're leaving their children to cope with.

Yes,I'm afraid you're right. Trial and error isn't a bad way to learn how to build an aircraft,but it can be a disastrous way to learn how to build a civilization.

If you go to Singapore or Amsterdam or Seoul or Buenos Aires or Islamabad or Johannesburg or Tampa or Istanbul or Kyoto, you'll find that the people differ wildly in the way they dress, in their marriage customs, in the holidays they observe, in their religious rituals, and so on, but they all expect the food to be under lock and key. It's all owned, and if you want some, you'll have to buy it.

Putting food under lock and key was one of the great innovations of your culture. No other culture in history has ever put food under lock and key - and putting it there is the cornerstone of your economy.[...] Because if the food wasn't under lock and key, Julie, who would work?

It's not MAN who is the scourge of the world, it's a single culture. One culture out of hundreds of thousands of cultures. Our culture.

There must be something terribly wrong with me that I'm unable to find joy in the world of work. He always wrote. And of course all his friends were forever saying to him What's wrong with you that you can't get this wonderful program? Perhaps you understand for the first time now that my role here is to bring you this tremendous news, that there's nothing wrong here with YOU. You are not what's wrong.

There is enormous pressure on you to take a place in the story your culture is enacting in the world— any place at all.

We had been taken from The Wild and brought together in one place, because, for some strange reason, people found us interesting.

This is of course a startling idea, the idea that laws could be anything but invented - but that's exactly the point to be made about tribal laws. Tribal laws are never invented laws, they're always received laws.

I find that the longer I live, the more I worry about people and the less I worry about rules.

We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don't have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free. MARSHALL SAHLINS

Every one of the Leavers' ways came into being by evolution, by a process of testing that began even before people had a word for it. No one said, 'Okay, let's form a committee to write up a set of laws for us to follow.' None of these cultures were inventions. But that's what all our lawgivers give us--inventions. Contrivances. Not things that have proved out over thousands of generations, but rather arbitrary pronouncements about the one right way to live.

the story of our agricultural revolution as told by some of the earliest victims of that revolution.

a tribe is nothing more than a coalition of people working together as equals to make a living.

You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.