Quotes About Society

in a boy like Bigger, young, unschooled, whose subjective life was clothed in the tattered rags of American "culture," this primitive fear and ecstasy were naked, exposed, unprotected by religion or a framework of government or a scheme of society whose final faiths would gain his love and trust; unprotected by trade or profession, faith or belief; opened to every trivial blast of daily or hourly circumstance. There

I had long ago emotionally rejected the world in which I lived and my reaction was: Well, this is the system by which people want the world to run whether it helps them or not.

That cigar-chomping hemorrhoidal bigot who sits astride the riding mower on the two and a quarter acres beside you, he is smart enough to spend his IRA on this stock, so why can't you? Do you want him to have something you do not?

Violent crimes had increased from 120 per 100,000 in 1962 180 per 100,000 by 1964.

A truly free society protects all faiths, and true faith protects a free society.

Once, the eye of God watched people, now it was the camera lens.

Fat people weren't supposed to eat anything, but they were especially not supposed to eat confectionery

Didn't you hear, Jackson?" Julia said. "The class war's over. Everyone lost.")

The coat was forties-style, made from Canadian beaver at a time when people didn't think about whether or not it was wrong to wear fur. Although Gloria would no longer wish to wear the skin of another animal on top of her own, the way she looked at it now, the beavers were already long dead and had lived the happy, uncomplicated life of Canadian beavers before the war.

As we say in this part of the world," he said to the Discovery, "there's nowt so queer as folk.

a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly. Ursula

You're trying to shore up a civilization that's in its death throes," Hugh said, as casually as if he were remarking on the weather. "There's really no point.

Buying and selling, that's all people did. You could buy women, you could buy kids, you could buy anything. Western civilization had had a good run but now it had pretty much shopped itself out of existence.

It was a woman's job to try and improve a man. It was a man's job to resist improvement. That was the way the world worked, always had, always would.

dystopia, a reliably clean, well-lighted place.

common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly.

A woman in her sixth decade, dressed in everyday drab, is more invisible than a librarian.

We're all primitives underneath, that's why we had to invent God, to be the voice of our conscience, or we would be killing each other left, right and centre.

What had happened to women? Jackson wondered. They made him feel almost prudish. (Obviously not prudish enough to have resisted the dubious charms of one of them.) More and more these days, he had noticed, he felt like a visitor from another planet. Or the past. Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn't just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere at the bottom of an unknown ocean.

Lily was a Fabian, a society suffragette who risked nothing

Our spirits are full of possibilities, yet we tie ourselves down to socially-prescribed names and categories so we're acceptable to more people. We take on identities that no one has to think about, and that's probably how we become and why we remain men and women.

Isn't it amazing the lengths we'll go to in order to maintain the illusion that there are only two genders, and that these genders must remain separate?

Edna lived a dual life - that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions

She says a wedding is one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth.