Quotes About Society

In New York, you've got Donald Trump, Woody Allen, a crack addict and a regular Joe, and they're all on the same subway car.

Civilisation has, indeed, become a slaughtering-car crowned by a grinning effigy of Comfort, before which man blindly and voluntarily hurls himself in his own ignorance.

It could be so beautiful here if the Americans themselves had not made it so ugly with their big buildings, their millions of cars, and noise.

You are not the car you drive.

What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?

Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.

You have an interesting set of morals," he observed. "Breaking out of jail is okay. But steal a car, and you sound totally outraged.

It's a shame cars don't run on cognitive dissonance.

It became clear when I got in my car that Persians are only really good for two things. Oil and hummus.

The car, the furniture, the wife, the children - everything has to be disposable. Because you see the main thing today is - shopping.

The cement in our whole democracy today is the worker who makes $ 15 an hour. He's the guy who will buy a house and a car and a refrigerator. He's the oil in the engine.

They used to take your horse and if they were caught they got hung for it. Now they take your car, and if they are caught it's a miracle.

I'm part of the consumer culture. I was part of the baby boom generation. I have a car when I shouldn't, a couple of computers; I can't be anti-consumerist in that sense.

We don't judge people for dying in car crashes. But we do judge people when they die of suicide.

If you drive a car, I'll tax the street; if you try to sit, I'll tax your seat; if you get too cold, I'll tax the heat; if you take a walk, I'll tax your feet.

the car, by bisecting the human outline, diminishes it, producing a race of half-people in a motion not of their own making

We are the first nation in the history of the world to go to the poorhouse in an automobile.

The same computers that make it impossible for you to cheat on your income tax can ensure that the blood of your group is in the ambulance that picks you up from a car smash.

Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.

Not harming ourselves or others in the beginning, not harming ourselves or others in the middle, and not harming ourselves or others in the end is the basis of enlightened society. This is how there could be a sane world. It starts with sane citizens, and that is us. The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.

You're either a child or a woman, and neither of them have any idea how to relax.

To be completely ignorant of the collective past seems to me to be another state of amnesia; you would be untethered, adrift in time. Which is why all societies have sought some kind of memory bank, whether by way of folklore, story-telling, recitation of the ancestors--from Homer to Genesis. And why the heritage industry does so well today; most people may not be particularly interested in the narrative of the past, in the detail or the discussion, but they are glad to know that it is there.

Laszlo's histrionics, which induce pursed lips and heavy silences in Lisa or in Sylvia, have been for me the breath of alien other worlds; they evoke the tumultuous unfettered society of Eastern Europe - languages I do not speak, cities I do not know, saints and tyrants and forests and vampires, a past that is more myth than history and all the better for it.

My body has conditioned things, to some extent. The life of an attractive woman is different from that of a plain one. My hair, my eyes, the shape of my mouth, the contours of breast and thigh have all contributed.