Quotes About Society

In the first six months of 1892 the city experienced nearly eight hundred violent deaths. Four a day.

I think Rome at its worst had nothing on Chicago during those lurid days.

Mistrust must be sown of the plutocratic ruling caste, and fear must be instilled of what is about to befall. All this must be laid on as thick as possible

The old world was passing. P. T. Barnum died; grave-robbers attempted to steal his corpse. William Tecumseh Sherman died, too. Atlanta cheered. Reports from abroad asserted, erroneously, that Jack the Ripper had returned. Closer at hand, a gory killing in New York suggested he might have migrated to America. In Chicago the former warden of the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet, Major R. W. McClaughry, began readying the city for the surge in crime that everyone expected the fair to produce

Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs.

As the crowd thundered, a man eased up beside a thin, pale woman with a bent neck. In the next instant Jane Addams realized her purse was gone. The great fair had begun.

The Fringes of Power; the work

Marxism, however, is not primarily a theory of class structure; it is above all a theory of class struggle.

Everybody offers to buy one a drink; but nobody ever dreams of buying one a sandwich.

Society just doesn't care about young people anymore, even if we are the future.

There's a lot of telepathy, not individual telepathy so much as group telepathy, mind beating on mind, chaining you into a convention of business humdrum.

We have graft today. A hundred years ago we had graft. We probably have more today than we had a hundred years ago. For three generations now people have been following reformers, fighting all sort of graft.—And what has it brought them, sweetheart? Not a damn thing, except more graft than when they started

Abruptly, she settled down against his shoulder with a little wriggling motion. "I'm getting my wires crossed," she admitted. "In order to get anywhere in this world, a woman is supposed to be feminine and leave the thinking to the males. They like it better that way.

Some say our national pastime is baseball. Not me. It's gossip

I never leaf through a copy of National Geographic without realizing how lucky we are to live in a society where it is traditional to wear clothes.

When humor goes, there goes civilization

The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up. They don't believe it is empirically true to the problems of their lives and times.

Today we are living the grotesque spectacle of the poisoning of the earth by the nineteenth-century hero system of unrestrained material production. This is perhaps the greatest and most pervasive evil to have emerged in all of history, and it may even eventually defeat all of mankind. Still there are no twisted people whom we can hold responsible for this.

Modern man became psychological because he became isolated from protective collective ideologies. He had to justify himself from within himself.

children are trained to want to do as the society says they have to do.

culture consists in the sum total of efforts we make to avoid being unhappy

Very few of us ever find our authentic talent—usually it is found for us, as we stumble into a way of life that society rewards us for.

Chapter Nine SOCIAL ENCOUNTERS: THE STAGING OF THE SELF-ESTEEM ERVING GOFFMAN (1959, p. 13) "Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in a correspondingly appropriate way … he automatically exerts a moral demand upon others, obliging them to value him.

every human being is… equally unfree, that is, we… create out of freedom, a prison….