Quotes About Society

that ambiguous area of culture where something unfailingly political, though separate from the political choices of the day, infiltrates judgment and language.

To instil into the Established Order the complacent portrayal of its drawbacks has nowadays become a paradoxical but incontrovertible means of exalting it.

photography is an ellipse of language and a condensation of an 'ineffable' society...

There are thus very engaging myths which are however not innocent.

Au Japon - dans ce pays que j'appelle le Japon - la sexualité est dans le sexe et non ailleurs ; aux États-Unis, c'est le contraire : le sexe est partout, sauf dans la sexualité. L'Empire des signes.

To be jealous is to conform...To reject jealousy is to transgress a law.

But when a myth reaches the entire community, it is from the latter than the mythologist must become estranged if he wants to liberate the myth.

Obliger a penser tout seul, voila une definition possible de la culture classique. Une civilisation n'est belle que dans la mesure ou il y a une circulation naturelle entre les oeuvres de ses grands hommes et la vie intime de ses individus et de ses foyers.

Lo que hoy es tabú es la sentimentalidad, no la sexualidad. El sujeto enamorado se siente muy solo hoy frente a lo que "la sociedad" hizo del amor.

De peur d'avoir à naturaliser la morale, on moralise la Nature, on feint de confondre l'ordre politique et l'ordre naturel, et l'on conclut en décrétant immoral tout ce qui conteste les lois structurelles de la société que l'on est chargé de défendre.

We live in a society that doesn't offer any support or appreciation for ventures that aren't clearly articulated and aligned for a goal. A writer gets past this. It's going to be a mess before you're finished, and you may not have a name for the mess or understand its utilitarian purposes. There aren't words for everything. For now, we'll call it the draft of a story.

The task of government was not to stop selfish striving—a hopeless task—but to harness it for the public good.

the government must degenerate either into an absolute and despotic monarchy or a tyrannical aristocracy.

While other Americans dreamed of a brand-new society that would expunge all traces of effete European civilization, Hamilton humbly studied those societies for clues to the formation of a new government. Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton never saw the creation of America as a magical leap across a chasm to an entirely new landscape, and he always thought the New World had much to learn from the Old.

For Jefferson, banks were devices to fleece the poor, oppress farmers, and induce a taste for luxury that would subvert republican simplicity. Strangely enough for a large slaveholder, he thought that agriculture was egalitarian while manufacturing would produce a class-conscious society.

As early as 1775, Philadelphia Quakers had launched the world's first antislavery society, followed by others in the north and south.

Ida Alice seemed determined to run through Flagler's money, gathering an expensive wardrobe and trying to buy her way into New York high society.

With an unaccustomed rhetorical flourish, he affirmed that in the near future "the dividing line will not be Mason & Dixons but between patriotism, & intelligence on the one side & superstition, ambition & ignorance on the other.

yellow-fever epidemic of 1798 that had claimed the lives of Benjamin Franklin Bache and John Fenno had also given fresh urgency to the work of the Widows Society, as many women lost their family breadwinners.

It was all very pleasant and balmy, supremely beautiful and languid, if you were white, were rich, and turned a blind eye to the black population expiring in the canebrakes.

Though Rockefeller resisted the yacht-owning fad that swept New York society in the 1880s and owned neither a boat nor private railroad car, he spared no expense for fast-trotting horses

Via com bastante clareza que mais liberdade podia conduzir a uma maior desordem e, por uma dialética perigosa, de volta à perda da liberdade.

paederasty is somehow no qualification of

can do something about crime. Not a lot, I admit, but something. Because crime, all crime, is irrational. It is opposed to the logic of life, and so it is evil. And that is why I became a cop.