Quotes About Society

Violence, in all its forms, is integral to the everyday functioning of capitalist society—for it is only through a mix of brute coercion and constructed consent that the system can sustain itself in the best of times. One form of violence cannot be stopped without stopping the others.

Those "others" are largely female. For in capitalist society, the organization of social reproduction rests on gender: it relies on gender roles and entrenches gender oppression.

Because society would rather we always wore a pretty face, women have been trained to cut off anger.

Do women dress for men or women? I've always wondered why that eternally provocative question is put in terms of approval - as if the heart of the matter, the answer, were indeed a question of approval by either sex. But the question is never satisfactorily answered because it is incorrectly posed. It's disapproval, the fear of it, that motivates most women, and with disapproval it doesn't matter where it comes from.

the psychoanalytic notion that going down on a man is symbolically similar to breastfeeding; that it is a regressive form of sexuality. (..) the notion that a woman who likes to perform fellatio is "really" in search of maternal succor (..). Perhaps a Freudian case might be made for the unconscious wish on some women's part to drink a man's semen in order to take into themselves the status the male is given in our society.

If compassion and mercy are not compatible with politics," Ford said, "then something is the matter with politics.

When will you human monsters stop twisting innocent people into beasts and putting the world at risk?

Women are born actresses. They know all about adaptation; it's part of their identity as women.

tendría que reconocer cómo la dominación masculina ha hecho pasar por admirables ciertos rasgos que realmente no eran otra cosa que puntos flacos

How does a culture that prizes equality of opportunity explain, or indeed accommodate, its persistently marginalized people?

Instead of a thoroughgoing democracy, Americans have settled for democratic stagecraft.

Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity. The

Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting. We have to begin, then, with the first refusal to face reality: most colonizing schemes that took root in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British America were built on privilege and subordination, not any kind of proto-democracy

The real wonder of America's achievement, he professed, was that the "world's largest capitalist country" had "come closest to the ideal of prosperity for all in a classless society." These words strike at the heart of the matter. For Nixon, the United States was more than a land of plenty. Democratic in its collective soul, it had nearly achieved a kind of utopia.

suburbs were turned into class-conscious fortresses.

Through no fault of their own, 20 percent of the American labor force was out of work by 1932. Average men woke to find themselves as outcasts, without the emblems of American male identity: jobs, homes, the means to provide for their families.

Can a nation call itself free if it finds itself periodically on the verge of bankruptcy and starvation in the face of the fact that it possesses all the materials of the good life?

In 1949, an Australian observer described this phenomenon best. Americans had a taste for what he called a "democracy of manners," which was not the same as a real democracy. He meant that voters accepted huge disparities in wealth but at the same time expected their elected leaders to "cultivate the appearance of being no different from the rest of us.

from fathers cohabiting with daughters, to husbands selling wives, to mothers conniving illicit liaisons for daughters. The danger came from a growing population that had stopped disappearing into the wilderness. Reid was appalled by the filthy refugees living in railroad cars, an uncomfortable foreshadowing of twentieth-century trailer trash.

The words "waste" and "trash" are crucial to any understanding of this powerful and enduring vocabulary. Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity.

Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity.

In the American colonies and in England, the unmarried man of means was a scandalous figure. He was ridiculed as a hermaphrodite, as half man, half woman;

The land and the poor could be harvested together, to add to—rather than continue to subtract from—the nation's wealth.

The 1648 Laws and Liberties established two classes of an even lower order who could be divested of liberty: Indians captured in "just wars," and "strangers as willingly sell themselves, or are sold to us." The "strangers," in this case, were indentured servants from outside the colony as well as imported African slaves.44