Quotes About Society

A great way to be left alone on the subway is to appear to be deep in conversation with a small knife.

Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies.

On the day that we do discover that we are not alone, our society may begin to evolve and transform in some incredible and wondrous new ways.

We are the most amazing creatures that this world has ever produced, but we seem to also have this herd mentality; we seem to be the most stupid, also.

The single most amazing phenomenon is the discrediting of idealism.

So much of our culture is bought and manufactured - not to say great art can't come out of that. Some art is really amazing that is manufactured and sold, like action movies and stuff.

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

There's not a lot of people expressing anger in the culture. They're expressing a lot of hyper-exaggerated sexuality.

Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

We can shoot rockets into space but we can't cure anger or discontent.

Do you get the anger that is out here?

We are all to some extent the products of an exploitive society, and it would be foolish and self-defeating to pretend that we do not bear its stamp.

People who thus set their lives against destruction have necessarily confronted in themselves the absurdity that they have recognized in their society.

Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health—and create profitable diseases and dependences—by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving.

It is well established among us that you may hold up your head in polite society with a public lie in your mouth or other people's money in your pocket or innocent blood on your hands, but not with dishwater on your hands or mud on your shoes.

If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself. As the master, or as a member of the dominant race, he has felt little compulsion to acknowledge or speak of it; the more painful it has grown the more deeply he has hidden it within himself. But the wound is there, and is a profound disorder, as great a damage in his mind as it is in his society.

An education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries.

For too long the ideal role of the individual in our society—the role the talented young have aspired to almost by convention—has been that of the specialist. It has surely become as plain as it needs to be that what we need most now are not the specialists with their narrowed vision and short-range justifications, but men of sympathy and imagination and free intelligence who can recognize and hold themselves answerable to the complex responsibilities of a man's life in the world.

We long ago gave up the wish to have things that were adequate or even excellent; we have preferred instead to have things that were up-to-date.

War prevails over peace, I imagine, finally because it brings an apparently simple end to the great burden of civilized thought.

Once the revolution of exploitation is under way, statesmanship and craftsmanship are gradually replaced by salesmanship.

we think it ordinary to spend twelve or sixteen or twenty years of a person's life and many thousands of public dollars on "education" —and not a dime or a thought on character.

The War was just as busily studying the purpose of The Economy, which is to cause people to purchase what they do not need or do not want, and to receive patiently what they did not expect.