Quotes About Society

We see men and women who work as hard as they possibly can and still fall behind a little more every month. We see lives that look nothing like those lived by billionaires in eighteen-thousand-square-foot condos, because these people don't live in some fairy tale—they live in today's reality. *

forty million people are trying to figure out how to pay off a combined $1.4 trillion in student loan debt.

Sometimes it feels like we're all living in a Prozac nation. The United States of Depression.

The measure of mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society, is our level of productivity, our attention to responsibility, our ability to plain and simple hold down a job.

At first, I was shocked that Diane could even suggest this family reunion [on television], and then I realized this is just the way of the world, or at least the way of fin de siecle America. Not only would the next revolution be televised, but so would every other little stupid thing. It was already happening: Television reunions between adopted children and their birth parents...

I don't think it's really about being bitchy or demanding or cold or calculating: those characteristics, after all, can be attached to most women with even the paltriest of evidence. I think, quite frankly, that the world simply does not care for the complicated girls, the ones who seem too dark, too deep, too vibrant, too opinionated...

The whole offensive culture of dieting seems invented as yet another way to make women smaller and weaker - to make us become less, quite literally. The starving self symbolizes a diminishing person, and really we ought to strive to be more, to have more strength and muscle and inner resolve - which is what we get from working out or playing a sport, and what we lose when we live in hunger.

We will likely soon be living in a society that confuses disease with normal life if the panic and rush to judgement and labeling do not slow down a bit.

We will very likely soon be living in a society that confuses disease with normal life if the panic and rush to judgement and labeling do not slow down a bit.

Shoving the ends at him, I headed for the common. It wasn't far away: a green, tree-lined oasis, brightened with many seasonal varieties of Coca-Can discardus, Crisp-packetus-cheese-and-onionus, and the occasional, fragrant dog turd underfoot.

In this privatized world, what sort of cultural conversation can there be? What can one of us possibly say to another about our experience except Today I visited the museum of me, and I liked it.

As it is, the profusion of commodities is a genuine and powerful compensation for oppression.

The guidance of a cultured human being will always beat the click of a mouse.

What is it about men that makes women so lonely?

Television is like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn't change people's habits. It just kept them inside the house.

Television has brought back murder into the home -- where it belongs.

A glimpse into the world proves that horror is nothing other than reality.

Ethics is too fundamentally important a factor in civilization to depend upon a theological or a legal excuse; [pg 035] ethics must conform to the natural laws of human nature.

Law was always made by the few and in general for the purpose of preserving the "existing order," or for the reestablishment of the old order and the punishment of the offenders against

Dogmatic theology is, by its very nature, unchangeable. The same can be said in regard to the spirit of the law. Law was and is to protect the past and present status of society and, by its very essence, must be very conservative, if not reactionary. Theology and law are both of them static by their nature.5

What is achieved in blaming a man for being selfish and greedy if he acts under the influence of a social environment and education which teach him that he is an animal and that selfishness and greediness are of the essence of his nature?

Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities.

In after-dinner talk,Across the walnuts and the wine.

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.