Quotes About Society

EMIC realities are the realities created by people communicating with each other. It's one of the major discoveries of the social sciences in the last 80 years that a very large percentage (nobody has found a way of mathematically estimating it, but a very large percentage) of what we experience is EMIC reality. A large percentage of what we experience just exists because our society has talked it into existence.

Businessmen learn the way businessmen are supposed to be. Professors learn the way professors are supposed to be. Construction workers learn how construction workers are supposed to be. They spend their lives trying to be what they're supposed to be and being scared they aren't. Quiet desperation.

Sartre claimed that hell is other people," I said. "He never saw no TV game show," Hawk said.

Back down to the ghetto again," I said. "Good for you," Hawk said. "Give you a chance to be a minority." "I like you," I said. "I am a minority.

Wouldn't you think," Marcy said, "with all that money and all that time on their hands, nobody works, that these women could manage to look better than they do?" "Well it's not like they all married Tom Selleck," Jesse said.

A pig is a pig," she said. "Whether he's public or private, he works for the same people." "Next time you're in trouble," I said, "call a hippie.

Don't you think we're oversexed?" "You're the shrink," I said. "You tell me." "Yes," she said. "I believe we are." "What should we do about it?" I said. "Encourage the pathology," Susan said, and smiled her rebelangel smile at me.

Who was a queen and loved a poet once Humpbacked, a dwarf? ah, women can do that!

They tell you to do your thing but they don't mean it. They don't want you to do your own thing, not unless it happens to be their thing, too. It's a laugh, Goober, a fake. Don't disturb the universe, Goober, no matter what the posters say.

They tell you to do your thing but they don't mean it. They don't want you to do your thing, not unless it happens to be their thing, too. It's a laugh, a fake. Don't disturb the universe, no matter what the posters say.

They tell you to do your thing but they don't mean it. They don't want you to do your thing, not unless it happens to be their thing, too.

the subject is so important, and with such vast implications for society… The damage that psychopaths do to the global economy, and human civilization in general, is incalculable.

But isn't the behavior of psychopaths maladaprive? The answer is that it may be maladaprive for society but it is adaptive for the individuals themselves.

This book confronts psychopathy head-on and presents the disturbing topic for what it is—a dark mystery with staggering implications for society; a mystery that finally is beginning to reveal itself after centuries of speculation and decades of empirical psychological research.

Historically, both Marxist and liberal intellectuals, in their efforts to remake societies after Soviet and Western models, have tragically underestimated these traditional loyal ties existing below the level of the state.

The age of comparative anarchy is upon us.

Huntington argues that it is a partial truth, not a total truth, that America is a nation of immigrants; America is a nation of Anglo-Protestant settlers and immigrants both, with the former providing the philosophical and cultural backbone of the society.

The American narrative is morally unresolvable because the society that saved humanity in the great conflicts of the twentieth century was also a society built on enormous crimes—slavery and the extinction of the native inhabitants.

the "sum of virtue," Hobbes writes, "is to be sociable with them that will be sociable, and formidable to them that will not."1

Democracy and morality are simply not synonymous

The aftermath of creedal passion is cynical indifference followed by the return of conservatism; creedal passion holds government and society to standards that they simply cannot meet. Nevertheless, Huntington believes, creedal passion is at the core of America's greatness. By holding officials and institutions to impossible standards in a way no other country does, the United States has periodically

many of the young people who are, in fact, progressive have been emigrating en masse for jobs and new lives abroad, leaving the reactionary ones behind.

spent his adult life concerned much more with the imperfections of American society than with America's place in the world. Books are misused when the reader lacks context.

wanted to know how five years of Nazism followed by four and a half decades of Stalinism had affected this landscape and the people who inhabited it.