Quotes About Society

And the ladies, selecting with dainty and discriminating fingers and a little greedily, all declared that Mr. Pontellier was the best husband in the world. Mrs. Pontellier was forced to admit that she knew of none better.

It seemed to be a law of society that hair must be parted and brushed.

A characteristic which distinguished them and which impressed Mrs. Pontellier most forcibly was their entire absence of prudery.

How can it be men would put up with such an arrangement?' 'Why do some people demand it of women but not of men? It is just another way of doing things. As my father would have said, folk will have their customs according to their nature and their surroundings.

there'll never be equality of the sexes till men can get pregnant;

what do I deserve? Sylvia contests. Why is the woman always expected to give up on life? She's a writer, not a teacher. She can; she does. She is the arrow, not him, nor him, nor him, these men who would have her be charming and quiet, reciting the names of insects in Latin, stirring something at a stove.

it is not menopause itself that is the problem but menopause as its experienced under the patriarchy.

Why must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? It's as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman's life from first period to menopause, and she needs a note from God not to say yes to every zygote that knocks on her door.

Pregnancy and childbirth are not only physical and medical experiences, after all. They are also social experiences that, in modern America, just as when abortion was criminalized in the 1870s, serve to restrict women's ability to participate in society on equal footing with men.

You would almost think the people who have always opposed women's independence and full participation in society were still at it. They can't push women all the way back, but they can use women's bodies to keep them under surveillance and control.

don't think women have the right to a self. They are supposed to live for others. Qualities that are seen as normal and desirable in men—ambition, confidence, outspokenness—are perceived as selfish and aggressive in women, especially when they have children.

Our society encourages women to place a very high value on maternity as an essential part of female identity, both a high moral calling and the deepest source of satisfaction on earth. It's not easy to redefine motherhood as handing your baby over to a stranger.

Many feminist legal scholars, including Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, have argued that the Supreme Court should have legalized abortion on grounds of equality rather than privacy.6 Pregnancy and childbirth are not only physical and medical experiences, after all. They are also social experiences that, in modern America, just as when abortion was criminalized in the 1870s, serve to restrict women's ability to participate in society on equal footing with men.

I believe...that education is not only the most important societal problem but the most interesting.

The whole effort for the past one hundred years has been to remove the moral responsibility from the individual and make him blame his own human wickedness on his society, but he helps to make his society, you see, and he will not take his responsibility for his part in it.

Only a lunatic would want to be president. These lunatics are created deliberately by those who wish to be presided over. You've seen it a thousand times. We create a leader by locating one in the crowd who is standing up. This may well be because there are no chairs or because his knees are fused by arthritis. It doesn't matter. We designate this victim as a 'stand-up guy' by the simple expedient of sitting down around him." ARTURISM:

Only a lunatic would want to be president. These lunatics are created deliberately by those who wish to be presided over.

Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied

In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular.

The insouciance of youth doesn't stay, but shades into "eccentricity," as people say when they are trying to be kind, until finally you become just another lonely crackpot. But I've always been this way. The strangeness just used to seem more fashionable, probably.

A woman can never be too rich or too thin or too young, truly.

I couldn't really mean what my poems said. Could any sane person really oppose hope, romance, love, marriage, children, family: the most basic materials of human society? Was I—the cool and composed sweetheart of the smart set, the Girl Poet made flesh—secretly a monster for entertaining such suspicions?

Maybe there's a natural order in all this: New things pop up at the edges, but the middle's where the money is. I did that dance myself over the years. I got rich doing it. And now here I am, an old white lady in a fur coat on a Murray Hill sidewalk, eavesdropping on passersby, wondering what I'm missing.

Times Square, much like these TV ads, expects little of us, if not quite the worst. Instead of treating one like an overgrown six-year-old with impulse control issues and a huge piggy bank ready for the smashing, as the ads do, it treats one like an enormous genital. A penis with a wallet, if one prefers.