Quotes About Society

how sex roles are determined by the forces around us rather than our genes.

People try much less hard to make a marriage work than they used to fifty years ago. Divorce is easier.

Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.

Till society is very differently constituted, parents, I fear, will still insist on being obeyed because they will be obeyed, and constantly endeavor to settle that power on a divine right which will not bear the investigation of reason.

I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour.

Children, I grant, should be innocent but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness.

I mean, we all know the dangers of starving, but bulimia? That can't be that bad. It's only bad when you get really thin. Who worries about bulimics? They're just gross.

Starving is the feminine thing to do these days, the way swooning was in Victorian times.

I cannot help but think that, had I lived in a culture where "thinness" was not regarded as a strange state of grace, I might have sought out another means of attaining that grace

when a woman is thin in this culture, she proves her worth, in a way that no great accomplishment, no stellar career, nothing at all can match.

It has been argued that food and eating have replaced sex as our foremost cultural taboo.7 To some extent I agree with this but would point out that the taboo is not against food, or sex, or flesh, but against a loss of control.

In our society those who are in reality superior in intelligence can be accepted by their fellows only if they pretend they are not.

Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, a good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-dressed, well-groomed, and unaggressive.

If American men are obsessed with money, American women are obsessed with weight. The men talk of gain, the women talk of loss, and I do not know which talk is the more boring.

When language and thought atrophy, when complexity wanes and everything becomes more and more the same, we run great risks in society politic-- whether from extremists in a religion or a political organization or, less obviously, from advertisers.

In the first quarter of our century we daily conflate information with knowledge and knowledge with wisdom—with the resulting diminution of all three.

We seem to be moving as a society from a group of expert readers with uniquely personal, internal platforms of background knowledge to a group of expert readers who are increasingly dependent on similar, external servers of knowledge. I want to understand the consequences and costs of losing these uniquely formed internal sources of knowledge without losing sight of the extraordinary gifts of the abundant information now at our fingertips.

But what if our capacity to perceive is actually decreasing because we are confronted with too much information, as the philosopher Josef Pieper once wrote?

The political correctness of diversity as a core value essentially cheats some children out of their right to be fully engaged in American society.

Regrettably, we live in a society that has become habituated to the quick-fix solutions that are implied in pathologizing labels such as "depression," "anxiety," "bad marriage," "bad job." At times, of course, these classifications are useful, at least for diagnostic purposes.

The children never troubled themselves about whether they were fixable or not, as they did not consider themselves broken in the first place. You may decide for yourself what to think about it, but it is worth remembering that often people who are told they need fixing are perfectly fine as they are. It is our own narrow notion of how things ought to be that is truly in need of repair.

Hard-hearted people may be no fun to sit next to at parties, but they are just as entitled to earn a living as the rest of us. Fortunately-for them, at least-the need for insurance adjusters, tax collectors, theater critics, and the like continues to this very day.

Extravagance of desire is the fundamental cause which has led the world into its present predicament. Fast rather than slow, more rather than less—this flashy "development" is linked directly to society's impending collapse.

The more people do, the more society develops, the more problems arise. The increasing desolation of nature, the exhaustion of resources, the uneasiness and disintegration of the human spirit, all have been brought about by humanity's trying to accomplish something. Originally there was no reason to progress, and nothing that had to be done. We have come to the point at which there is no other way than to bring about a "movement" not to bring anything about.