Quotes About Society

Henry Miller's Air-Conditioned Nightmare

the politics of the far-right – what it is, the social constituencies from which it tends to draw its support and the ideological devices it uses – are intimately connected to the type of society, politics and conflicts, and insecurities bequeathed by capitalist development.

Electronic communication is one means by which the very idea of public life has been put to an end.

the built environment is one thing, how people dwell in it another.

Rico'nun 'hurda' tan?m?na uyduÄŸunu söylemek güç olsa da, o kendisinin teknik bilgi aç?s?ndan 'gerileme dönemine' girmek üzere olduÄŸunu düÅŸünüyor. Bu noktada, toplumun gençliÄŸe yapt??? vurguyla, kendisinin yaÅŸlanma konusundaki fikirleri birleÅŸiyor. Toplumsal önyarg?, kiÅŸinin içindeki güçten düÅŸme korkusunu körüklüyor.

the achievement of human autonomy has been paid for by the experience of human alienation.

From the movies that you watch to the songs on your radio. Down to the magazines placed ever so neatly in the grocery house, you know the ones with the movie stars. Since they wouldn't make any money if you already loved who you are. See there is no profit in saying you're already perfect and beautiful too.

Is not life exactly what it ought to be, in a certain sense? Isn't it only the naive who find all of this baffling? If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself?

The thing to do was to act just like others acted, live like they lived, and while they were not looking, do what you wanted.

A man will seek to express his relation to the stars; but when a man's consciousness has been riveted upon obtaining a loaf of bread, that loaf of bread is as important as the stars.

Having been thrust out of the world because of my race, I had accepted my destiny by not being curious about what shaped it

The artist and the politician stand at opposite poles. The artist enhances life by his prolonged concentration upon it, while the politician emphasizes the impersonal aspect of life by his attempts to fit men into groups.

The world of most men is given to them by their culture..

In the old days we were concerned with mobs, with thousands of men running amuck in the streets. The mob has conquered completely. When the mob has grown so vast that you cannot see it, then it is everywhere.

George Washington Cable in the nineteenth century and, in Wright's own time, William Faulkner.

I felt that without a common bond uniting men, without a continuous current of shared thought and feeling circulating through the social system, like blood coursing through the body, there could be no living worthy of being called human.

There isn't any Negro problem; there is only a white problem.

But he is product of a dislocated society; he is a dispossessed and disinherited man; he is all of this, and he lives amide the greatest plenty on earth and he is looking and feeling for a way out.

This Court should not sit to fix punishment for this boy; it should sit to ponder why there are not more like him! And there are, Your Honor. If it were not for the backwaters of religion, gambling and sex draining off their energies into channels harmful to them and profitable to us, more of them would be here today. Be assured!

How constantly and overwhelmingly the advertisements, radios, newspapers and movies play upon us! But in thinking of them remember that to many they are tokens of mockery.

And when I contemplated the area of No Man's Land into which the Negro mind in America had been shunted I wondered if there had ever existed in all human history a more corroding and devastating attack upon the personalities of men than the idea of racial discrimination.

Bob had been caught by the white death, the threat of which hung over every male black in the South. I had heard whispered tales of black boys having sex relations with white prostitutes in the hotels in town, but I had never paid any close attention to them; now those tales came home to me in the form of the death of a man I knew. I did not search for a job that day; I returned home

In many instances Christianity provides Communism with its justification. Communism is paying the unpaid bills of the Christian church.

Bigger, however, was not an exclusively black phenomenon. Wright himself declared that the turning point for him in his understanding of social reality—"the pivot of my life"—was his discovery of the ubiquitousness of Bigger: "there were literally millions of him everywhere.