Quotes About Society

Over 50 per cent of all American crime over the last 75 years has been blamed on drugs, because drugs are the single most convenient scapegoat for a society that is unable to blame itself. When it comes to explaining the presence of those drugs themselves, blame is still not placed on American consumers, but on the foreign supplies who grow the stuff. In America, there are no villains - only victims.

La société démocratique, où toutes les fonctions sont formellement ouvertes à tous, suscite les espoirs et les ambitions. Elle multiplie en conséquence, à tous les niveaux le nombre des déçus et des humiliés.

Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.

I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.

Half the world is redoing its kitchens, the other half is starving.

The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it.

People in free societies don't have to fear the pathology of the state. We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking machines that we have no final authority over. The frenzy is barely noticeable most of the time. It's simply how we live.

We] saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought. We didn't say, What kind of casserole will that make? We said, What kind of garbage will that make?

That's the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.

People weren't saying Oh wow anymore. They were saying No way instead and she wondered if there was something she might learn from this.

Their bumper sticker read GUN CONTROL IS MIND CONTROL. In situations like this, you want to stick close to people in right-wing fringe groups.

If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we're talking about when we use the word identity has reached an end.

What people discard could make a nation

Devices make us pliant. We want to please them. The machine was his only hope of deliverance after what he'd done, what he'd loosed into the crowd. A way out of death.

Then they're always trying to sell you something. Everything is based on forcing people to buy. If you can't buy what they're selling, you're a zero in the system.

I want to immerse myself in American magic and dread.

He liked to mingle with shopping mall crowds. "I'm counting on you to tell me, Jack." "Tell you what?" "You're the only person I know that's educated enough to give me the answer." "The answer to what?" "Were people this dumb before television?" One

When hell fills up, the dead will walk the streets.

It's like World War III. Everything is white. They'll take our bright colors away and use them in the war effort.

lonely-chrome America.

She used to say to him, If people knew what I was thinking they would put me away forever. But they would put us all away, he said. They have put us away. we are put away for our thoughts, one way or another. We have put ourselves away, he said.

It's hard to be beautiful. You have an obligation to people. You almost become public property. You can lose yourself and get almost mentally disturbed on just the public nature of being beautiful. Don't think I haven't thought about it. You can get completely lost in that whole dumb mess. And anyway who's to say what's beautiful and what's ugly?

What about the Americans?" "Eerie people. Genetically engineered to play squash and work weekends.

To have true socialism, he said, we first establish capitalism, totally and heartlessly, and then destroy it by degrees, bury it in the sea.