Quotes About Society

human being has no natural rights of any nature.

The American male is convinced that he is a great warrior, a great statesman, and a great lover. Spot checks prove that he is as deluded as she is. Or worse. Historo-culturally speaking, there is strong evidence that the American male, rather than the female, murdered sex in your country.

Major Reid smiled cynically. "I have never been able to see how a thirty-year-old moron can vote more wisely than a fifteen-year-old genius . . . but that was the age of the 'divine right of the common man.' Never mind, they paid for their folly.

By the sixties everyone talked about his "rights" and no one spoke of his duties—and patriotism was a subject for jokes.

Seems a funny way to run things. But of course I've never paid taxes." "You just think you haven't. You started the day you were born. We may eliminate death someday but I doubt if we'll ever eliminate taxes.

we are even developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations.

Whoring is like military service, Ira—okay in the upper brackets, not so good lower down.

The Society for Creative Euthanasia

Dominance of males over females seems to be one of the symptoms.

I wonder how harmless, such people are? To what extent civilization is retarded by the laughing jackasses, the empty-minded belittlers?

value,' has two factors for a human being: first, what he can do with a thing, its use to him . . . and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him. There is an old song which asserts 'the best things in life are free.' Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century;

but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.

Distrust the obvious, suspect the traditional . . . for in the past mankind has not done well when saddling itself with governments

No, not exactly. Damn it, why couldn't she have married a white man? We brought her up better than that.

educational" killings

It [now] seems to me that every time we manage to establish one freedom, they take another one away. Maybe two. And that seems to me characteristic of a society as it gets older, and more crowded, and higher taxes, and more laws.

their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of 'rights' . . . and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.

Whores perform the same function as priests, Ira, but far more thoroughly.

something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: "Please pass this so that I won't be able to do something I know I should stop.

A multimillionaire who is young and female stands as much chance of getting a good husband as that well-known tissue-paper dog had of chasing that asbestos cat through Hell.

Culture can only function if we live out the unwanted elements symbolically. All healthy societies have a rich ceremonial life. Less healthy ones rely on unconscious expressions: war, violence, psychosomatic illness, neurotic suffering, and accidents are very low-grade ways of living out the shadow. Ceremony and ritual are a far more intelligent means of accomplishing the same thing.

We have been told over and over that you can't change human nature, but the study of emic realities shows quite the contrary, that almost anything can become human nature if society defines it as such.

The individual act of obedience is the cornerstone not only of the strength of authoritarian society but also of its weakness.

There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped. We are all absolutely free. If everybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled — by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. All existing society is based on keeping those fears alive, to control the masses. Ten people who know would be more dangerous than a million armed anarchists.