Quotes About Society

Do you know, one of the greatest problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas? Now, thoughts and ideas, that interests me.

Socialists cry "Power to the people", and raise the clenched fist as they say it. We all know what they really mean - power over people, power to the State.

en realidad iba directamente al núcleo de la cuestión de cuál debía ser el papel del Gobierno en una sociedad libre. Era tarea del Gobierno establecer un marco de estabilidad —ya fuera estabilidad constitucional, el cumplimiento de la ley, o la estabilidad económica

All collectivism is always conducive to oppression: it is only the victims who differ.

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money

Dad once defined leadership as the art of persuading people to do what they should have done in the first place. If they bullheadedly refuse to take this advice, there is not much the leader can do, in a free society.

expenditure on food does not increase in the same ratio as income, but becomes relatively lower. People learn to expect that food will be cheap; money is for spending on other things.

In buying "light" food we can pay more for what costs less to produce in the first place, eat less and so measure up to the desired norm, and receive as an added bonus the suggestion that our behaviour is "enlightened.

Yet table manners have a great deal to recommend them as a subject for analysis. To begin with, since they are each culture's own way to encourage and manage the sharing of food, they are essential for the foundation and survival of every human society without exception. Once we recognize this fact, we may agree that explaining eating rituals is a serious and desirable enterprise.

Perhaps the most important realization of all, although it is an uncomfortable one, is that the social ills attendant upon mechanized farming are the fault of the whole of society, and not only of the growers. The growers, after all, are trying to provide us with the two things we now demand: food which costs an unprecedentedly small proportion of our income, and the availability of the full range of all the varieties of food at all seasons of the year.

Les riches, pas davantage que les pauvres, ne pouvaient se soustraire à la mort, même si leurs funérailles attiraient généralement plus de monde.

They tell me they do not believe that people are either black or white-- if that were so, then mixed-race children would all be gray instead of a myriad lovely warm shades of natural brown.

Am I a man, or a contract? What sort of society decides that special papers are needed even by beggars?

All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations.

When will women not be compelled to view their bodies as science projects, gardens to be weeded, dogs to be trained? When will a woman cease to be made of pain?

The societies kids naturally form are tribal. Gangs, clubs, packs. But we're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb.

Shall I tell you something I've been noticing? The mistrust this society has for women. All kinds of experts and officials are terrified because so many women are working. They really think that women have to be coerced into having babies and raising kids.

A great deal has been written about the forthrightness of the moderns shocking the Victorians, but there is no shock like the one which the forthrightness of the Victorians can give a modern.

heavily tattooed women can be said to control and subvert the ever-present 'male gaze' by forcing men (and women) to look at their bodies in a manner that exerts control.

Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can't imagine you.

White people wanted to be white just as much as we did. They worked just as hard at it. They failed more often. But they could pass, so no one objected.

Young, good-looking white women were the most desirable creatures in the world. It was hard not to want to imitate them; it was highly toxic too, as we would learn.

Sarah Pomeroy, in her careful study, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves