Quotes About Society

Look at poor Nirupa Roy. She got substantial roles, but at 30 they made her put grey in her hair. And Achala Sachdev was all of 16 when she played 60. She quit because she got nightmares about dropping a thali and screaming, 'Nahin!' You know an actor or any other human being needs to be comfortable in her space at whatever age she is.

I'm a 1960 baby, and since I can recall, football has been like this. It's been a more important, more substantial part of American life.

Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century.

No international court can ever substitute for a working national justice system. Or for a society at peace.

Private sector cannot substitute the role of the government in primary education.

One thing that is clearly not maximized by free markets is equality. I am talking not about that pale substitute for equality known as equality of opportunity but about equality itself.

In London we give ourselves a pat on the back, rightly, for not killing one another, for our prejudice being subtle rather than lethal.

Homophobia obviously still exists, but it is a lot more subtle, and it is a lot more in the background.

But this is the great danger America faces. That we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual. Each seeking to satisfy private wants.

I can't see myself as a very domesticated person, with a suburb house and stuff like that.

To me, Los Angeles was the invention of the suburb. They figured it out and perfected it and created a city that was dependent on the automobile.

The social and physical construction of suburban America really was quite complex. It was a very elaborate system, and clearly a massive social engineering project that has changed U.S. society enormously.

What crime writers are doing connects deeper into a cultural hunger. Crime is important. When you open up a book that has a body that's dead, that matters. It matters more than a certain level of suburban angst; it really does.

Irvine, being a planned community, is really good shorthand, especially in a movie or book, for understanding suburban pressures.

Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

When the Internet really first started to hit, people felt this would be the death blow: after suburbs and long commutes and television and the death of the family dinner, this would be the last straw that would totally break society.

If you say city to people, people have no problem thinking of the city as rife with problematic, screwed-up people, but if you say suburbs - and I'm not the first person to say this, it's been said over and over again in literature - there's a sense of normalcy.

In high school, it was very fashionable to be disdainful of the bourgeois suburbs, but I secretly liked them.

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.

People who want to understand democracy should spend less time in the library with Aristotle and more time on the buses and in the subway.

No one is asking what happened to all the homeless. No one cares, because it's easier to get on the subway and not be accosted.

Our children are angry. The profanity is out in the street. It's on the buses and in the subway. Our children are trying to tell us something, and we are not listening.

An increased police presence is not a panacea for our subway safety issues, but it's a step in the right direction.

There's a popular concept of 'intelligence' as book smarts, like calculus or chess, as opposed to, say, social skills. So people say that 'it takes more than intelligence to succeed in human society.' But social skills reside in the brain, not the kidneys.