Quotes About Society

She submitted that Western society seemed to promote longevity at any cost, whereas a shorter life vibrant to its very end was surely more desirable than blighting a fine and fruitful existence with protracted decay.

Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment. But having come so close

There's no better way to get people to cooperate in this country than by seeming a little unhinged.

Size is relative. If everyone is fat, no-one is fat

La tarea de fijar los impuestos implica calcular cuánto pueden robar dejándonos a nosotros, los pobres infelices, lo suficiente para que sigamos trabajando, así el año que viene tendrán más para robar. El gobierno cultiva ciudadanos como si fueran verduras, y hay que dejar un puñado de semillas para la próxima siembra.

Pero no te habría gustado tener una mujer gorda, ¿verdad? —Sí. ¿Y ahora? Me encantaría una mujer gorda. Ojalá te pusieses como una foca. Me gustaría que fueses enorme. De hecho, por lo que ahora sé, no entiendo por qué los médicos no aconsejan a todo el mundo que engorden unos diez kilos mientras se tiene la posibilidad de hacerlo. No quiero defender la obesidad, pero hay una razón para estar gordo. Es un recurso.

What do you make of the proposition that the definition of a truly free society is a place where you can still get away with something?

When Harriet was growing up, women were trying to immolate gender stereotypes. These days, you preserved the stereotype, the better not to correspond to it.

In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.

It's always the mother's fault, ain't it?" she said softly, collecting her coat. "That boy turn out bad cause his mama a drunk, or she a junkie. She let him run wild, she don't teach him right from wrong. She never home when he back from school. Nobody ever say his daddy a drunk, or his daddy not home after school. And nobody ever say they some kids just damned mean. ...

There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.

Insanity is a direct and appropriate response to the coercive inauthenticity of society ... it is an act, expressing the intention of the insane person to meet and overcome to coercive situation; and whether or not it succeed in this intention, it is at least an act of criticism which exposes the true nature of society

Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind," as he puts it in the essay on Partisan Review, "we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.

Fase pós-moderna da socialização, o processo de personalização é um novo tipo de controlo social desembaraçado dos processos pesados de massificação-reificação-repressão.

It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.

The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.

What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.

The modern world is reversing the old virtues of authority. They aimed deliberately to make men unworldly. They did not aim to found society on a full use of the earth's resources; they did not aim to use the whole nature of man; they did not intend him to think out the full expression of his desires. Democracy is a turning point upon those ideals in a pursuit, at first unconsciously, of the richest life that men can devise for themselves.

A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function.

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is.

Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.

A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that, transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a superior common law.

Run against the grain of a nation's genius and see where you get with your laws.

Every day, we pay lip service to democratic values and then again and again make undemocratic choices in the marketplace. Bestsellers are bestsellers because we buy them: nothing more.