Quotes About Society

No one with feeds thinks about it," she said. "When you have the feed all your life, you're brought up to not think about things. Like them never telling you that it's a republic and not a democracy. It's something that makes me angry, what people don't know about these days. Because of the feed, we're raising a nation of idiots. Ignorant, self-centered idiots.

And everyone understood that Stalin was one thing and the country was another.

The Nazis asked carefully about when precisely people stopped helping one another in the streets, about how many people were being arrested for cannibalism.

Horror stories like this — and the issue of Leningrad cannibalism as a whole — could not be talked about openly during the Soviet period. Such an admission of the breakdown of society was considered demoralizing. Only in 2002 were NKVD files opened so academics could discover the gruesome statistical realities of person-eating.

What is all this? What did we fight for? Why did we shed our blood, if I can't dance to my heart's content — and I'm supposed to be a leader of the new society!

I was like, Then what is it? A republic. It's a republic. Why? Because we elect people to vote for us. That's my point. So why is it like that? Because if it was a democracy, everybody would have to decide about everything. I thought about that. We could have everybody vote. From the feeds. Instantaneous. Then it would be a democracy.

The economy was in a shambles, despite Lenin's best efforts to fix it. So the Communist Party demanded that people look forward and remember that their own sacrifices would one day flower in the perfect society for their children or their children's children.

We are all suspended in a sphere of imagery and voices vying for attention. How do we know that what's going on is actually in our best interest? How can we be sure that our way of life will be preserved for the future? And do we really want it to be?

People have told me that Feed is coming true. (Many of the technologies I discussed have been explored in recent years.) But in a sense, I believe it already was the reality when I was writing. I was already dreaming in advertisements.

It's like a spiral: They keep making everything more basic so it will appeal to everyone. And gradually, everyone gets used to everything being basic, so we get less and less varied as people, more simple. So the corps make everything even simpler. And it goes on and on.

I don't know when they first had feeds. Like maybe, fifty or a hundred years ago. Before that, they had to use their hands and their eyes. Computers were all outside the body. They carried them around outside of them, in their hands, like if you carried your lungs in a briefcase and opened it to breathe.

I meant that the Chinese people are not aware of their own entrapment. They believe they live in a free society, but don't realize how much they are being monitored and controlled, how much the information they receive is restricted and warped, until they step out of line, that is, and feel the heavy hand of the state fall on them.

The law is powerless against a crowd.

If you're unlucky enough to have been born with a cunt, you'll be monitored wherever you go. Men control our vaginas; the state controls our wombs. You can try to lock up your body, but the government still owns the key. That's just women's fate.

Meili pitchers herself in Heaven Township again, sitting in a safe and peaceful yard, knitting quietly while inhaling deep breaths of the chemicals that prevent women conceiving. She doesn't know how long it will take to travel from the fertile mountains of Nuwa to the sterile fields of Heaven Township, but at least she now has a sense of where happiness lies.

If a panda gets pregnant, the entire nation celebrates. But if a woman gets pregnant, she's treated like a criminal.

Que afinal o que importa não é haver gente com fome porque assim como assim ainda há muita gente que come (Pastelaria, Mário Cesariny)

Man is at his most stubborn when his religious, socioeconomic, or political beliefs need change.

Don't roach me, funker," she said. "And don't shirk off in your electro-steamer. This mopsy wants to poke." --Mack Reynolds, _Commune 2000 A.D._, 1974

I am glad that I am not a man, for if I were I should have to marry a woman.

I can't imagine what it is like to be raised in a society where their only statues that exist are to you and your father.

The magic of America is that we're a free and open society with a mixed population. Part of our security is our freedom.

We live in an image society. Speeches are not what anybody cares about what they care about is the picture.

While democracy in the long run is the most stable form of government, in the short run, it is among the most fragile.