Quotes About Society

People who would soon be seen in New York reading French books were seen here reading Italian.

are a good thing for America, they help keep the homosexuals off the streets.

What do you mean do I go around with narcotics signing petitions painting slop writing books full of dirty words with a beard?

A nation," he heard himself say, "consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation.

I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign.

Hollis thought he looked like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone). Like someone who'd be invited quail shooting with the vice-president, though too careful to get himself shot.

Authoritarian societies are inherently corrupt, and corrupt societies are inherently unstable. Rule of thieves brings collapse, eventually, because they can't stop stealing.

So now, in her day, he said, they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit, like she sort of already knew, figured everybody did, except for people who still said it wasn't happening, and those people were mostly expecting the Second Coming, anyway.

the windows of army surplus stores constituted hymns to male powerlessness.

There are no backwaters where things can breed—our connectivity is so high and so global that there are no more Seattles and no more Haight-Ashburys. We've arrived at a level of commodification that may have negated the concept of counterculture.

Now that is the real thing, the straight goods from the mass unconscious, friend; that little girl is a witch. There's just no place for her to function in this society. She'd have seen the devil, if she hadn't been brought up on The Bionic Man and all those Star Trek reruns.

Nothing before the 2020s has ever seemed entirely real, to me. Hard to imagine they weren't constantly happy, given all they still had. Tigers, for instance.

Perhaps he has been too long in the pay and the company of those who order the wider world. Those whose mills grind increasingly fine, toward some unimaginable omega-point of pure information, some prodigy perpetually on the brink of arrival. Which he senses somehow will never now arrive, or not in the form his career's employers have imagined.

The Thirties dreamed white marble and slip-stream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming.

unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone's whores and the crisp naval uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with precise rows of tribal

I have often raised an eyebrow at hearing him sing, as I push a cart down some Safeway aisle, of the spiritual complexities induced by he admixture of Cuervo Gold, cocaine, and nineteen-year-old girls (in the hands of a man of, shall we say, a certain age). At which point I look around Frozen Foods and wonder: Is anyone else hearing this?

People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?" "Why?" asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown's part. "Because they have better stuff," Brown had replied. "No other reason.

The girl in 3.7 seemed engrossed in her phone. "What's she doing?" "Candy Crush Saga. Nondigital surveillance is weaponized boredom.

A pair of predatory-looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The

carbon ribbon. There were

Reality television. It merged with politics. Then with performance art." They walked on. "I think that already happened, back home

The Fanta has a nasty, synthetic edge. She wonders why she bought it. The tabloid doesn't go down any better, seemingly composed in equal measure of shame and rage, as though some inflamed national subtext were being ritually, painfully massaged, for whatever temporary and paradoxical relief this might afford.

The color of its skin reminded him of Zone's whores;

abs you could do laundry on, the