Quotes About Society

If you behaved nicely, the communists wouldn't exist.

If then, merely out of regard to population, it were right that paederasts should be burnt alive, monks ought to be roasted alive over a slow fire. (Offences Against One's Self

What does it say about your society that it admits only those who do not care very much to belong? For a start, it suggests that the English don't much care to be liked. They prefer the company of other misanthropes. Since no misanthrope worth the name would actually want to join a club, eager applicants must be snubbed.

Authors like Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd or Julian Barnes engage with metropolitan subject-matter, but the books that sell by the container-load are historical romances. The upper classes may have lost their political power, but they still manage to set the social tone and determine the aspirations of the ambitious.

The coming together of the Communications Internet, the Energy Internet, and the Logistics Internet in an Internet of Things provides the cognitive nervous system and physical means to integrate all of humanity in an interconnected global Commons that extends across the entirety of society.

One cannot be free from the stresses of a speed- and size-obsessed culture, until you are free from the materialistic addictions, time-famine mindset, and comparative impulses that created it in the first place.

All these attempts to impose order and fairness on a naturally random and unfair universe endorse the borderline's futile struggle to choose only black or white, right or wrong, good or bad. But the world is neither intrinsically fair nor exact; it is composed of subtleties that require less simplistic approaches. A healthy civilization can accept the uncomfortable ambiguities. Attempts to eradicate or ignore uncertainty tend only to encourage a borderline society.

When the accoutrements of custom disappear, they may be replaced by a sense of abandonment, of being adrift in unchartered waters. Our children lack a sense of history and belonging—of an anchored presence in the world. To establish a sense of control and comforting familiarity in an alienating society, the individual may resort to a wide range of pathological behavior—substance addiction, eating disorders, criminal behaviors, and so on.

New York Times writer Louis Sass put it this way: Each culture probably needs its own scapegoats as expressions of society's ills. Just as the hysterics of Freud's day exemplified the sexual repression of that era, the borderline, whose identity is split into many pieces, represents the fracturing of stable units in our society.2 Though

Being poor is a mere trifle. It is being known to be poor that is the sting.

She rode a bicycle. It was unwomanly, then, to ride a bicycle. There were so many things, in those days, that were unwomanly to do. It must have been quite difficult to be a woman, and remain so day after day.

It must have been worth while having a mere ordinary plague now and then in London to get rid of both the lawyers and the Parliament.

They took him to Wagner festivals and Burne-Jones's private views. They read him all the minor poets. They booked seats for him at all Ibsen's plays. They introduced him into all the most soulful circles of artistic society. His days were one long feast of other people's enjoyments.

The only contribution of any value a private citizen can make towards the elucidation of a National upheaval is to record his own sensations.

For its own sake, a civilized community could no more disregard equity than it dare tolerate an imperfect drainage system.

I read somewhere that 77 percent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23 percent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves.

To speak of television as 'neutral' and therefore subject to change is as absurd as speaking of the reform of a technology such as guns.

What's Washington America? Enos says it's a place with no wall and no love and lots of potatoes.

What's the matter with you? Huh? Huh?' 'Why can't you be normal?' 'Why do you wanna be so different?

War became less about machine-gun chatter and spectacular explosions and more about people.

People prefer to avoid confronting deformity and when they do it's only for kicks.

Do you realize that one out of every four Americans is unbalanced? Think of your three closest friends. If they seem normal, then you are the one.

What about the war?' the young woman sitting on Chance's left said, leaning close to him. 'The war? Which war?' said Chance. 'I've seen many wars on TV.' 'Alas,' the woman said, 'in this country, when we dream of reality television wakes us. To millions the war, I suppose, is just another TV program. But out there, at the front, real men are giving their lives.

If it was true that women and children might become communal property, then every child would have many fathers and mothers, innumerable brothers and sisters. It seemed to be too much to hope for. To belong to everyone!