Quotes About Society

The world seemed divided into girls with boyfriends and girls without them.

So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the burning marl. Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people!

People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?

A madman's ravings are absurd in relation to the situation in which he finds himself, but not in relation to his madness.

It's the well-behaved children that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don't say a word, they don't hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on, they make society pay dearly.

People who live in society have learned to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. Is that why my flesh is naked? You might say - yes you might say, nature without humanity… Things are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea.

Men get the war they deserve.

Society demands that he limit himself to his function… There are indeed many precautions to imprison a man in what he is as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly elude his condition.

Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face. Or perhaps it is because I am a single man? People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?

Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face ... People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked? You might say -- yes you might say, nature without humanity.

If [literature] should turn into pure propaganda or pure entertainment, society will slip back into the sty of the immediate -- which is to say, the memoryless existence of hymenoptera and gastropods. None of this is so important, to be sure. The world can get by nicely without literature. But without human beings it can get by better yet.

The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is--other people!

Everything happens to every man as though the whole human race had its eyes fixed upon what he is doing and regulated its conduct accordingly.

I glance around the room. What a comedy! All these people sitting there, looking serious, eating. No, they aren't eating: they are recuperating in order to successfully finish their tasks. Each one of them has his little personal difficulty which keeps him from noticing that he exists; there isn't one of them who doesn't believe himself indispensable to something or someone.

el infierno son los otros.

Perhaps it is impossible to understand one's own face. Or perhaps it is because I am a single man? People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked? You might say--yes, you might say, nature without humanity.

Revolutionary man must be a contingent being, unjustifiable but free, entirely immersed in the society that oppresses him, but capable of transcending this society by his effort to change it. Idealism mystifies him in that it binds him by rights and values that are already given; it conceals from him his power to devise roads of his own. But materialism also mystifies him, by depriving him of his freedom. The revolutionary philosophy must be a philosophy of transcendence.

I was neither a grandfather, nor a father, nor even a husband. I didn't vote, I scarcely paid any taxes; I couldn't lay claim to the rights of a tax-payer, nor to those of an elector, nor even to the humble right to honour which twenty years of obedience confer on an employee. My existence was beginning to cause me serious concern. Was I a mere figment of the imagination?

It is that, in a given society which is defined through its mode of production by institutions governing human relations, human life is ethically livable or that, if we prefer, man is always possible.

Quand les riches se font la guerre, ce sont les pauvres qui meurent.

Most people don't go to work and beat up a 13-year-old. It's a really freaky thing.

You can't expect to work for the Daily Mail group and have the rest of society treat with you respect as a useful member of society, because you are not.

If you wish at once to do nothing and be respectable nowadays, the best pretext is to be at work on some profound study.