Quotes About Society

A nation is a society united by delusions about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbors.

We can't hire gentlemen to serve as policemen," Williams acknowledged, "for $1.25 a day.

An innovation is one of those things that society looks at and says, if we make this part of the way we live and work, it will change the way we live and work.

What we do as a society is seek simple answers.

Originally, I had planned to study tourism and revolution, which seemed to me to name the two poles of modern consciousness--a willingness to accept, even venerate, things as they are on the one hand, a desire to transform things on the other.

More people have sex in Chevrolets than during Star Trek recent findings suggest which I can't understand...

I'm a woman. Guilt is our birthright.

He was no respecter of institutions simply because they boasted antiquity. He believed, like all good radicals, that everything ought to be examined anew by each generation. What served society should be retained, and what did not should be discarded without sentiment or reserve.

I'm a woman. Guilt is our birthright. Guilt if we want to be mothers, guilt if we take the Pill instead or choose to abort. Guilt if we stay home with our kids or guilt if we work. Guilt if we sleep with a man, guilt if we say no. Guilt if we're lucky enough to survive for no good reason.

It was the viscount, with impeccable manners and deplorable timing.

Ah, do not mistake solitude for loneliness," he advised. "A man may be lonely in a crowd, or he can be quite content in the society of the natural world.

Americans and their guns," he muttered.

He has a country house in Surrey, a daughter to educate and launch into Society, a wife to keep. He has kept pace for twenty years with an American millionaire, underwriting his own expeditions. What if he has gone to the well once too often?

Have I shocked you? Remember I was born in a different time, Miss Speedwell. Virginity is Queen Victoria's legacy. The rest of us are not quite so blinkered," she told me. "Take my advice and get rid of yours as fast as you can.

It was as close as an aristocratic Englishman could come to expressing real emotion, but it was enough for the princess. She pressed his hand.

I have traveled alone. I am unmarried, I live without a chaperone, and I work for a living. These are not the actions of a lady,

It is the best of a bad lot," he admitted. "Would you prefer 'Sodomites'?" "Hardly. That smacks of Evangelicalism, and you know my feelings on forcible religion," I reminded him.

We are educated out of common sense, curiosity, and any real merit. We are made to be decorative and worthy of display, with occasional forays into procreation and good works, but nothing more.

Guilt if we want to be mothers, guilt if we take the Pill instead or choose to abort. Guilt if we stay home with our kids or guilt if we work. Guilt if we sleep with a man, guilt if we say no. Guilt if we're lucky enough to survive for no good reason. I'm so damned sick of it. I've never been so tired of anything in my life. I just . . . I just want to go to sleep forever.

In my experience, Americans were very friendly and very fond of their firearms.

It makes you realize how basically everything we do comes down to a) mating or b) competing for resources. It's just like Animal Planet, only we've got Cover Girl and Victoria's Secret instead of colored feathers and fancy markings, and the violence occurs at the Nordstrom's Half-Yearly Sale.

Niceness is expected of her, not honesty.

It's some twisted, limited, grocery-store mentality, where people have to be dairy products or vegetables or frozen foods for us to be able to understand them and feel safe. Maybe we've just become such mega-consumers that we can't deal with anything that's slightly inconvenient (basically, anything that requires thought). I was the tofu amidst the Baking Products and Cleaning Supplies.

He's all right. He's fine," Dad says, his usual line whenever Oliver gets hurt. It means: Go away. Don't baby him. Don't show too much compassion. The other dads do this too. It's some kind of group hysteria, based on some fatherly fear that says compassion equals homosexuality.