Quotes About Society

London after dark is a different place than in daylight. There is as much hustle-bustle as always, but now the gentry are out and about as well as less salubrious members of society - the inebriated, the ruffians, and the ladies looking to entice a man from the straight and narrow.

Everyone in a decadent society, Lorrain urges, is guilty. Everyone loves masking murder and everyone takes masochistic pleasure in the risk of discovery and punishment.

There is nothing unusual in the activities outside marriage, or otherwise, of women. It is our privilege. But men are required to be faithful. An Indian man discovered in the arms of another woman can be put to death on the order of his wife.

Surely they would divorce you for it." "No, why? It would be to lose everything for the man while his wife would lose nothing. In any case, it is not possible. Divorce is a thing of women.

Don't you see? A pretty girl must please the world. But an ugly girl? She's free to please herself.

You, on the other hand, wish to know things. And no one can forgive a girl for that.

Why is it, she wondered now, that boys get to do things and be things and girls only get to watch?

I could solve all the Diophantine equations, extend Newton's work on infinite series, complete Euler's analysis of prime numbers, and it wouldn't matter." She looked at Isabelle. "Ella is the beauty. You and I are the ugly stepsisters. And so the world reduces us, all three of us, to our lowest common denominator.

But an ugly girl? Ah, child, the world is made for men. An ugly girl can never be forgiven.

A pretty girl must please the world. But an ugly girl? She's free to please herself.

And so the world reduces us, all three of us, to our lowest common denominator.

But you are right, being stupid is not illegal. Otherwise half this town would be behind bars.

Why not?" she exclaimed. Translation: If you can have sex with a drug offender, why can't I have sex with the salutatorian?

The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh.

Nineteen eighty is almost here, thank God. the hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they're begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are thick and gray as shoes. We're sick of them.

Jules turned to her, incredulous. 'Do you socialize with Republicans?' "'It happens, Jules.

Nowadays, a man ill at ease in his surroundings will pull out his phone, request the Wi-Fi password, and rejoin a virtual sphere where his identity is instantly reaffirmed. Let us all take a moment to consider deeply what isolation was customary before these times arrived!

People are bored. They're dead! Go to a shopping mall and check out the faces. I did this for years—I'd drive out to the malls on weekends and just sit there watching people, trying to figure it out. What's missing? What do they need? What's the next step? And then I got it: imagination . We've lost the ability to make things up. We've farmed out that job to the entertainment industry, and we sit around and drool on ourselves while they do it for us.

The whole fucking world is upside down. Buildings are missing. You get strip-searched everytime you go to someone's office. Everybody sounds stoned, because they're emailing people the whole time they're talking to you. Tom and Nicole are with different people...and now my rock-and-roll sister and her husband are hanging around with Republicans. What the fuck!

Social media was dead, everyone agreed; self-representations were inherently narcissistic or propagandic or both, and grossly inauthentic.

Let me tell you something, dearie: the world is a closed door to an unwed mother and her illegitimate child. If

I felt no shame whatsoever in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.

Why did people have to pretend to be what they already were?

Holding my phone, looking out at twinkling Lake Michigan, I understood with sudden clarity that doing the right thing—being right—gets you nothing in this world. It's the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time. Fuck Sasha, I thought.