Quotes About Society

I have always found it puzzling that men believe it perfectly acceptable to take their pleasure where they may without guilt or recriminations, but when women do the same, they are branded whores and trulls.

Charles Goodyear had patented the first rubber condom in 1844, and by the 1870s, there was such widespread use of intrauterine devices and diaphragms that the number of women dying in childbirth had dropped by 30 percent in twenty-five years.

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose.

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.

The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.

Money is just the poor man's credit card.

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.

If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.

Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.

Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.

Our technology forces us to live mythically

I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it. In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon. Every man of good will is the enemy of society.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.

We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don't have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free.

Many people like people but many people don't like people who are mad and dumb