Quotes About Society

A few letter-writers had taken refuge in doorways, their old voiceprinters wrapped in sheets of clear plastic, evidence that the written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here.

imaginary futures are always, regardless of what the authors might think, about the day in which they're written.

Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.' Case

it's somehow gone sideways in a puff of what we today would call globalization, to be replaced by some less dangerous combine of large corporations and city-states.

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.

Neuromancer] is about the present. It's not really about an imagined future. It's a way of trying to come to terms with the awe and terror inspired […] by the world in which we live.

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.

Coldiron is concerned about the townspeople not being priced out of chili dogs, but willing to condone dosing religious protesters, however repellant, with something that turns them into homicidal erotomaniacs?

Heroin, declared Durius Walker, Rydell's colleague in security at the Lucky Dragon on Sunset. It's the opiate of the masses.

Indeed, today, reliance on broadcasting is the very definition of a technologically backward society.

modelos de información: las señales que un particular creaba inadvertidamente en la red mientras observaba los asuntos mundanos y aun así indefinidamente múltiples de una sociedad digital

William Gibson

Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.

By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky.

We're not savages. We're English.

Which is better -- to be a pack of painted Indians like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is? Which is better -- to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill? Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?

The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable.

Are we savages or what?

I'm frightened. Of us.

Maybe, he said hesitantly, maybe there is a beast. The assembly cried out savagely and Ralph stood up in amazement. You, Simon? You believe in this? I don't know, said Simon. His heartbeats were choking him. [...] Ralph shouted. Hear him! He's got the conch! What I mean is . . . maybe it's only us. Nuts! That was from Piggy, shocked out of decorum.

Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.

We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages.

In our country for all her greatness there is one thing she cannot do and that is translate a person wholly out of one class into another. Perfect translation from one language into another is impossible. Class is the British language.

Uno tiene miedo porque la gente siempre tiene miedo.