Quotes About Society

When I entered the film school at the Prague Academy in the '50s, it was the hardest time in the Communist countries. The ideological control of the society was almost absolute.

When a woman shouts, she isn't usually praised for it. She's condemned as aggressive and coarse.

America preaches integration and practices segregation.

I'm not the kind of writer who's able to block out the world around me. I'm mindful of our own haves and have-nots, how our culture often blames and punishes the have-nots. I worry about our precarious economic and political climate.

Cultural change always precedes political change.

The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It's really precious, and it's really easy to lose.

The development of oil and gas resources depends more on capital than labour, and exporting oil and gas neither generates maximum returns from these precious resources nor creates large numbers of jobs within the local economy. As a result, the benefits are typically not shared broadly across society.

I like writing about popular culture. It helps to place people. I think you can be really, really accurate if you know enough about it, and place people precisely.

I write a lot about race precisely because I don't believe it's real.

Clearly, many branches of science need an exquisite precision of timekeeping and the infinitesimal decimals of calibration, so space launches, for example, are not scheduled for leap-second dates. But society as a whole neither needs that obsessive time measurement nor is well served by it.

If I had a son, I want him to be able to grow up in a world where he would not be called a sexual predator for trying to kiss someone.

I don't think anyone can be more of a predator than a human being.

As long as we have have predatory capitalism, we'll have guns because the gun industry loves to make money out of guns.

With sad, depressing predictability, the children of today's underclass become tomorrow's criminals and dropouts.

Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

With 'Arrested Development,' we tried showing the deep disdain that connects a family. We wanted to hold up a mirror to American society. And, just as predicted, America looked away.

It is our common experience as human beings that the results of social forces seem to admit only of 'probabilistic' predictions.

Seriously, American pop culture must be the most predominant force on the planet, next to pollution and poverty.

I don't want to say that women who do use makeup or get breast implants or have fake nails are insecure. They're entitled to that, and they should do that if that's what they want to do. But for me, there are no answers. It's just a matter of preference and choice and fetish.

So persuasive is the power of the institutions we have created that they shape not only our preferences but actually our sense of possibilities.

In a world of niches, we are enchained by our own consumer preferences.

The Left have always preferred the state to the family.

I think it's important that we challenge the idea that women who have babies are not fit for work and don't have value. There is massive pregnancy discrimination, in parliament and right across society.

We are genuinely in a world that criticises women even when they are going through the biggest physical challenge of their life: pregnancy.