Quotes About Society

It's probably part of my naïveté that I don't want to put the issue in political terms when it's probably irreducibly political. Something has happened where we've decided on a personal level that it's all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites.

The people who are rebelling meaningfully don't buy a lot of stuff.

Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans.

This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.

I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.

A U.S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness: The happy pleasure of the person alone, yes?

Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed

Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to.

U.S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness:

Drug addicts driven to crime to finance their drug addiction are not often inclined toward violent crime.

Ibid. on using the verb to be in this culturally envenomed way, too, as in 'I'll Be There For You,' which has become the sort of empty spun-sugar shibboleth that communicates nothing except a certain unreflective sappiness in the speaker.

Sono l'unica persona al mondo ad essere convinta che la causa del numero crescente di fatti di cronaca in cui persone all'apparenza assolutamente normali cominciano a sparare con pistole automatiche nei centri commerciali, nelle agenzie di assicurazione, nelle cliniche private e nei McDonald's dipende anche dal fatto che posti del genere sono ben noti vivai di propagazione del Sorriso Professionale?

That you just naturally want what we, your fathers, work night and day to make sure you want? Grow up, for Christ's sake. Join the world. We produce what makes you want to need to consume. Advertising. Laxatives. HMO's. Baking soda. Insurance. Your fears are built—and your wishes, on that foundation.

Subjects locked away in institutions and written off as casualties of peace.

David Foster Wallace

The Great White Male is rap's Grand Inquisitor, its idiot questioner, its Alien Other no less than Reds were for McCarthy.

The more she wants to be accepted by the world, the more she's beaten back by her heightened perception of her own difference.

and the tumescence of O.N.A.N.ism.

U.S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness: 'The happy pleasure of the person alone, yes?

they can all stand quiescent in airless venues for extended periods, their eyes' expressions that unique NYC combination of Zen meditation and clinical depression, clearly unhappy but never complaining.

Breasts are uniformly zeppelinesque and in various perilous stages of semiconfinement.

Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to. Nobody sees this as a good change.

This is PCE's core fallacy—that a society's mode of expression is productive of its attitudes rather than a product of those attitudes 63 —and of course it's nothing but the obverse of the politically conservative SNOOT's delusion that social change can be retarded by restricting change in standard usage.

David Foster Wallace