Quotes About Society

We live in a disposable society. It's easier to throw things out than to fix them. We even give it a name - we call it recycling.

First I would probably place men at the bottom of the food chain. On a grander scale, I would say they're reacting to change. Feminism has got to be part of that.

CARTER This isn't meant as a … you know, to make up for what I said or whatnot, but … my mom was fat. Is. LaBute, Neil (2004-11-29). Fat Pig: A Play (p. 48). Faber & Faber. Kindle Edition.

MAN 3 . . . fuck, I'm glad I'm a guy! You know? MAN 5 Yeah, why's that? Pause. MAN 3 . . . because then I don't have to date 'em.

The whole problem with news on television comes down to this: all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on page of a newspaper. And the world cannot be understood in one page.

Nothing could be more misleading than the idea that computer technology introduced the age of information. The printing press began that age, and we have not been free of it since.

The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.

People of a television culture need "plain language" both aurally and visually, and will even go so far as to require it in some circumstances by law. The Gettysburg Address would probably have been largely incomprehensible to a 1985 audience.

Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way that Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible, and therefore irrelevant.

One way of looking at the history of the human group is that it has been a continuing struggle against the veneration of "crap.

Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration

Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.

If parents wish to preserve childhood for their own children, they must conceive of parenting as an act of rebellion against culture.

All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

We rarely talk about television, only about what's on television

As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant.

With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.

In America, the least amusing people are its professional entertainers.

The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether. To

There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first—the Orwellian—culture becomes a prison. In the second—the Huxleyan—culture becomes a burlesque. No

In the American Technopoly, public opinion is a yes or no answer to an unexamined question.

We might say that a technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind.

Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. That is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago.