Quotes About Society

Odio i belli, non hanno fatto niente per meritarlo, è la società ad avere stabilito che lo sono. Pensate se al mondo fossero i brutti a essere giudicati belli, se quelli come noi fossero considerati degli adoni! La bellezza è un valore, e i valori hanno soltanto la forza che gli attribuiamo.

I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?

Marriage is supposed to be a partnership. Good-looking people marry good-looking people and the others take what's left.

In fact she knew perfectly well (Norman again), but to her everybody's name was immaterial, as indeed was everything else, their clothes, their voice, their class. She was a genuine democrat, perhaps the only one in the country.

the more institutions and freedoms and benefits one can take for granted – of which in my view free state-supported galleries and museums come high on the list – the more civilised a society is.

La gente, aveva concluso Dusty, può fare a meno di tante cose; il problema è che non riesce a non andare a comprarle.

Still Mrs. ransom felt [remarking on daytime talk shows], they were all better than she was. For what none of these. whooping, giggling (and often quite obese) creatures seemed in no doubt about was that at the basic level at which these programs were pitched people were all the same. There was no shame and no reserve and to pretend otherwise was to be stuck up and a hypocrite.

With regret, he realized that despite his intensive studies there was still much about this world and its dominant Larian society that he did not know. And of course he had not been able to bring with him anything of an advanced nature, like a vorec, which would have allowed him to look up the answers to such questions.

Why would people ever think, when thinking deprives them of "the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved

Cashier: Yes, can I help you? Tee-Ay: Yeah, I need a rattle. Cashier: Aisle eight. Tee-Ay: I'm looking for the kind that'll give a fatherless black baby a future, you got any of those? Cashier: Girl, if we sold those, do you think I'd be workin' here?

Somehow, we need to create a new habit of mind, as individuals and as a society. We need a mental attitude that values and protects stillness, privacy, solitude, slowness, personal reflection; that honors the inner life; that allows each of us to wander about without schedule within our own minds.

As with the destruction of the environment, no one intended to rob us of our interior lives. Each of us once swallowed that first bite of the wired world, then the second. Then we were addicted. Soon, we couldn't remember what we had lost. Our children, of course, were born into the wired world, never knowing any other way of life. All this in the name of "progress.

Roschach's Journal: October 12th, 1985 Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout Save us!... and I'll look down and whisper No.

Sexually progressive cultures gave us literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust.

Equality and freedom are not luxuries to lightly cast aside. Without them, order cannot long endure before approaching depths beyond imagining.

Nite Owl II: But the country's disintegrating. What's happened to America? What's happened to the American dream? The Comedian: It came true. You're lookin' at it.

The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout 'SAVE US!'...and I'll look down and whisper 'No.

I love you, but why must you love the law? 'Tis plain for all to see that she's a whore...that virtuous persons have no need to woo; that villains screw, then studiously ignore.

What does fighting crime mean, exactly? Does it mean upholding the law when a woman shoplifts to feed her children, or does it mean struggling to uncover the ones who, quite legally, have brought about her poverty?

Once a man has seen society's black underbelly, he can never turn his back on it. Never pretend, like you do, that it doesn't exist.

Blake understood. Treated it like a joke, but he understood. He saw the cracks in society, saw the little men in masks trying to hold it together...he saw the true face of the twentieth century and chose to become a reflection of it, a parody of it. No one else saw the joke. That's why he was lonely.

I leave the human cockroaches to discuss their heroin and child pornography.

Everybody is becoming [a superhero]. In the past I've tried to say, 'Look, we are all crappy superheroes,' because personal computers and mobile phone devices are things that only Bat Man and Mr Fantastic would have owned back in the sixties. We've all got this immense power and we're still sat at home watching pornography and buying scratch cards. We're rubbish, even though we are as gods.

Orwell was almost exactly wrong in a strange way. He thought the world would end with Big Brother watching us, but it ended with us watching Big Brother.