Quotes About Society

In modern life we move from one insulated igloo to another...serially abstracting ourselves from nature and its impacts.

Someday, when historians perform their "why the Mayans declined" necropsy on American society, they will marvel at the way that, at a time of high anxiety about energy resources and costs, millions of elderly people took to the road in the clumsiest, most inefficient vehicles ever devised by man. The lunacy of America is all right there, in the RVs.

If only the sun-drenched celebrities are being noticed and worshiped, then our children are going to have a tough time seeing the value in the shadows, where the thinkers, probers and scientists are keeping society together.

self and society are always interfused; there is no clear place where one ends and the other begins. Subjectivity is always caught up with intersubjectivity, personal experience awash with social and political meanings.

I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.

My lesbianism is an act of Christian charity. All those women out there are praying for a man, and I'm giving them my share.

If the world were a logical place, men would ride side-saddle.

Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.?

Men have an easier time buying bathing suits. Women have two types: depressing and more depressing. Men have two types: nerdy and not nerdy.

Democracies can become corrupt when the egalitarian spirit becomes so extreme that nobody wants to acknowledge anyone else's authority: this will lead to anarchy, which will in turn be quelled by the emergence of a tyrant.

This situation changed with the patriarchal family and even more with the monogamous individual family. The administration of the household lost its public character. It was no longer the concern of society. It became private service. The wife became the first domestic servant, pushed out of participation in social production.

The modern individual family is based on the open or disguised domestic enslavement of the woman; and modern society is a mass composed solely of individual families as its molecules. Today, in the great majority of cases, the man has to be the earner, the breadwinner of the family, at least among the propertied classes, and this gives him a dominating position which requires no special legal privileges. In the family, he is the bourgeois; the wife represents the proletariat.

One of Aristotle's most interesting discoveries is that social conflicts arise from the inequality in Economic and Social conditions…

We are taught to consume. And that's what we do. But if we realized that there really is no reason to consume, that it's just a mind set, that it's just an addiction, then we wouldn't be out there stepping on people's hands climbing the corporate ladder of success.

In some circles, admitting you love Top 40 radio is tantamount to bragging you gave your grandmother the clap, in church, in the front row at your aunt's funeral, but those are the circles I avoid like the plague or, for that matter, the clap.

We have become a society of fakes, so intent copying the famous that we cannot figure out who we are.

Under President Josiah Quincy, Harvard turned its back on the citizenry as a whole to focus on the sons of the Hub's wealthy merchants and financiers.

Emerson put the development of the individual, rather than service to society, at the heart of his educational vision.

The year 1835 was the year of the "antis," when all the hostilities provoked by a changing society surged together to produce a climate hostile to free speech.

The United States has become a place where entertainers and professional athletes are mistaken for people of importance.

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.

Once a month, some women act like men act all the time.

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. Ceremonies

We are presently dealing with the accumulation of a whole society that has worshiped its light side and refused the dark, and this residue appears as war, economic chaos, strikes, racial intolerance. The front page of any newspaper hurls the collective shadow at us.