Quotes About Society

All is interdependent in a civilized society; it is impossible to reform any one thing without altering the whole. Therefore, on the day a nation will strike at private property, under any one of its forms, territorial or industrial, it will be obliged to attack them all. The very success of the revolution will impose it.

We have the temerity to declare that all have a right to bread, that there is bread enough for all, and that with this watchword of Bread for All the revolution will triumph.

The mitigated individualism of the collectivist system certainly could not maintain itself alongside a partial communism

As long as worthless paper-money - whether called assignats or labour notes - is offered to the peasant-producer it will always be the same. The country will withhold its produce, and the towns will suffer want, even if the recalcitrant peasants are guillotined as before. We must offer to the peasant in exchange for his toil not worthless paper-money, but the manufactured articles of which he stands in immediate need.

If the present situation should continue much longer, the very word 'socialism' will turn into a curse, as did the slogan of 'equality' for forty years after the rule of the Jacobins. —letter to Lenin, March 1920

Society is thus bound to remain divided into two hostile camps, and in such conditions freedom is a vain word.

If all the men and women in the countryside had their daily bread assured, and their daily needs already satisfied, who would work for our capitalist at a wage of half a crown a day, while the commodities one produces in a day sell in the market for a crown or more?

Why has woman's work never been of any account? Why in every family are the mother and three or four servants obliged to spend so much time at what pertains to cooking? Because those who want to emancipate mankind have not included woman in their dream of emancipation, and consider it beneath their superior masculine dignity to think "of those kitchen arrangements," which they have put on the shoulders of that drudge—woman.

But capital goes wherever there are men, poor enough to be exploited.

In fact, we know full well today that it is futile to speak of liberty as long as economic slavery exists.

As soon as laws are necessary for men, they are no longer fit for freedom.

The young always have the same problem — how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

Why get married? For human beings, marriage is such an unnatural state. If you want monogamy, it has been said, you should marry a swan.

I became one of the stately homos of England.

All the golden societies of the past to which historians point and turn their wistful smiles have had what patience-players would call a discard pile. They operated on two levels with a slave class who worked, ate, slept, and died and a leisured class who reclined on one elbow and spoke. Naturally it is from this latter group that we learn what life at that time was like. It often makes charming reading but we can hardly take it to be the whole truth.

I have known female whores who spoke very bitterly of their calling. "If they don't like my face, they can put a cushion over it. I know it's not that they're interested in." But to the boys this profession never seemed shameful. It was their daytime occupations for which they felt the need to apologize. In some instances, these were lower class or humdrum or, worst of all, unfeminine. At least whoring was never that.

Whereas in the twentieth century, there was a distinction between men and women, in the twenty-first century the lines of gender will become more and more blurred.

It is universally agreed that men are neither heterosexual nor homosexual; they are just sexual.

As my friends became older, many of them married and moved out of Soho into the suburbs where their failure would be less apparent.

Sooner or later the time comes for almost everybody when, although he has sworn to himself he will never utter such sentiments, he declares that the country is going to the dogs, that life has become louder, public manners cruder, and art totally incomprehensible. When, he asks himself, will it all end?

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It's cheaper.

I started imagining this whole different world. It was a society of musicians, a family I hoped I could belong to one day.

By 2000, politics will simply fade away. We will not see any political parties.

Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.