Quotes About Society

our technology and our economic system seem to produce the present bad situation: millions of people feel themselves poor and powerless; millions feel that music is something to be made only by experts.

I felt that the elegance of pop music was that it was reflective: we were holding up a mirror to our audience and reflecting them philosophically and spiritually, rather than just reflecting society or something called 'rock and roll.'

Well-adjusted has come to mean unaffected. – Theodore Rubin

Perhaps never before has humankind been so alienated from so many of its normal feeling states, as it is in the twenty-first century. Never before have so many human beings been so emotionally deadened and impoverished.

addictive distraction that plagues modern industrial societies is a result of people being taught and forced to reject, pathologize or punish so many of their own and others' normal feeling states.

My theory is that everything went to hell with Prohibition, because it was a law nobody could obey. So the whole concept of the rule of law was corrupted at that moment. Then came Vietnam, and marijuana, which clearly shouldn't be illegal, but is. If you go to jail for ten years in Texas when you light up a joint, who are you? You're a lawbreaker. It's just like Prohibition was. When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society. You see?

the modern age the definition of a "racist" is a conservative who is winning an argument.

Collin, the man who cannot be killed off, whose identity is both branded on him and rendered illegible, challenges, or defies, the very coherence of such an entity, suggesting the possibility that the very subject of The Human Comedy, human society itself, is at bottom an illusion if not a fraud.

the polite and polished superstructure of society must never be seen in relation to the substructure of money-grubbing and exploitation that allows it to exist.

Goriot was "a grease spot in his daughters' drawing rooms." Once they squeezed the money out of him he's discarded "like a lemon peel" in the gutter. The moral drawn by the Duchesse: "Society is a mudhole. Let's try to remain up on the heights.

American men are so embarrassed about napping," she said. "They think it is some sort of feminine indulgence. I detest a man who can't nap.

I have traveled widely. I have seen this country in its infancy. I tell you what it will become. The public squares will be occupied by an uneducated class who will not be able to quote a line of Shakespeare.

serial killings were something else—something that happened only in America, like unemployment and homelessness and corruption—the kind of things that they showed you on the television news or that you read about in the international pages of Pravda.

Roman citizenship became universal when it was no longer a privilege but a burden

The rich aren't like us; they pay less taxes.

I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best - it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money - provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it.

A hundred years ago Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter was given a A for adultery. Today she would rate no better than a C-plus.

Three hundred years ago, during the Age of Enlightenment, the coffee house became the center of innovation.

The honest work of yesterday has lost its social status, its social esteem.

In the same decades that saw the rise of mass incarceration, the number of beds available in state mental hospitals across the country dropped from 339 beds per 100,000 people in 1955 to under 20 beds per 100,000 people by 2015. There are now ten times as many mentally ill people in our prisons and jails as there are in state mental institutions.

White privilege is not an overt act of racism but the simple observation that people of white skin are historically and culturally dominant, and therefore seen as the standard or norm.

No More Salvation by Society

If you want to understand how a government works, the laws tell you.

Civilization was a blessing you never truly appreciated until it threatened to collapse around you.