Quotes About Society

I traveled from city to city in those days, and the view from within the ghettos was terrible and terrifying. While white people in the periphery were arming themselves against the day when they would have to defend themselves from attack by blacks (and really believed someone was fomenting a racial war in which black people would rise up and attack them), black people mostly without arms huddled inside the ghettos feeling that they were surrounded by armed whites.

He kept himself in line with popular opinion, which meant popular prejudice.

It's a vicious cycle, Mr. Griffin, and I don't know how we'll get out of it. They put us low and then blame us for being down there and say that since we are low we can't deserve our rights.

But since racism always hides under a respectable guise - usually the guise of patriotism and religion - a great many people loathed us for knocking holes in these respectable guises. It was realization that racial injustice was for the good of all society, not just for the good of the oppressed.

I remained in my room more and more each day. The situation in Montgomery was so strange I decided to try passing back into white society.

He had heard her say, so many times, that a society that approved of making abortion illegal was a society that approved of violence against women; that making abortion illegal was simply a sanctimonious, self-righteous form of violence against women- it was just another way of legalizing violence against women, Nurse Caroline would say.

In this dirty-minded world you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore, or fast on your way to becoming one or the other.

In this dirty minded world, you are either someone's wife or someone's whore.

Is it a democratic society that condemns people to the accident of conception? What are we-monkeys? If you expect people to be responsible for their children, you have to give them the right to choose whether or not to have children. What are you people thinking of? You're not only crazy! You're ogres!

Gender mattered a whole lot less to Shakespeare than it seems to matter to us.

Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate the headlines, are pure fat.

People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.

I guess [Mrs. Reagan is] one of those many American adults of a certain advanced age who believe that the root of all evil lies in the area of young people's self-abuse. Someone should tell Mrs. Reagan that young people-- not even young people on drugs-- are not the ones responsible for the major problems besetting the world!

Most men don't mind if another woman watches. It's the women who are watching who don't want to be seen.

This mannerism of what he'd seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice people—because, surely, Wally was nice—would say a host of critical things about someone to whom they would then be perfectly pleasant. At. St. Cloud's, criticism was plainer—and harder, if not impossible, to conceal.

Wallace Worthington would have reminded Wilbur Larch of someone he might have met at the Channing-Peabodys', where Dr. Larch went to perform his second abortion – the rich people's abortion, as Larch thought of it. Wallace Worthington would strike Homer Wells as what a real King of New England should look like.

In the sixties, dear Bill, we did not say 'top' and 'bottom' - we said 'pitcher' and 'catcher'...

Murder, more murders, still more murders! The Germans take murder more seriously than we do—I mean, as literature," Uncle Johan explained

En este mundo de cochina mentalidad", piensa Jenny, "eres la esposa de alguien o la puta de alguien; o vas camino de convertirte en una de las dos cosas. Si no encajas en ninguna de las dos categorías, todo el mundo trata de hacerte creer que algo te pasa.

Quería trabajar y vivir sola. Eso me convirtió en sexualmente sospechosa. Después deseé tener un hijo sin que para ello tuviera que compartir mi cuerpo ni mi vida. También eso me convirtió en sexualmente sospechosa.

In this dirty-minded world," Jenny thinks, "you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore—or fast on your way to becoming one or the other. If you don't fit either category, then everyone tries to make you think there is something wrong with you.

Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge.

La gente, persino le brave persone - ché certo Wally era una brava persona - facevano un sacco di critiche a qualcuno con cui poi si mostravano perfettamente affabili.

Jenny was not surprised to hear that prostitution was legal; she was surprised to learn that it was illegal in so many other places. "Why shouldn't it be legal?" she asked. "Why can't a woman use her body the way she wants to? If someone wants to pay for it, it's just one more crummy deal.