Quotes About Society

There is a certain panic, at least if you're raised Mormon, to being single at 31. But what they don't tell you is that it can also be kinda great.

If you go to a party populated by the NPR crowd and you start talking about JonBenet Ramsey, people will look at you as if you had forgotten your pants.

'Pretty' is not the amount of makeup on your face or the shirt you're wearing or the size of your pants - that is false.

A man could come in the room with his hair not cut, not done, pants around his ankles and people still gon' be like, 'Oh, that's his style. It's cool.' Being a woman, you have to be on your P's and Q's at all times, because not only do you have to keep up your appearance for men, but other women judge you so hard.

The rich and the well-born, according to the Federalist Papers, was greatly feared by the founders.

In the papers, they were talking about how 'Friends' is now sort of really homophobic, transphobic and so on. That, for me, is a very, very - it's actually a puritanical position, which I think of as conservative.

I see fashion as going on par with all the other cultural institutions here. Ballet, theater, opera - I don't see fashion differently.

'Parable of the Sower' is capital-I Important. Put it on the literary fiction shelf. Put it on the Holy Crap fiction shelf. Put it on every shelf. This is one of the all-time great American novels.

Despite the fact that human beings think that they have escaped the evolutionary paradigm, they've done nothing of the kind, and so we should expect the belief systems that people hold to mirror the evolutionary interests that people have.

When they're growing up, if you tell kids God exists, they believe it. It's the same with the techno-cultural society. They believe in it - that it's the road to paradise, that there are no limits.

An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed.

The thing about 'Dark Knight' is its objective is to set Batman into your world, so that you can imagine the moral dilemmas he faces are exactly parallel to moral dilemmas that you would face in this world, today, if you were out there fighting crime dressed like a bat.

In India, tradition is paramount. Husband-wife relationship is okay. They do not allow girls to go out.

The country makes me more paranoid, you know? I think the crazy people out there are little crazier.

High culture is paranoid about sentiment. But human beings are intensely sentimental.

Drugs seem to turn people into paranoid bores. Why would anyone want to go there?

I think aging and maturing is really interesting, and it's a shame that Americans are so panicky and paranoid about it.

There are more than 200,000 people in Maputo who are nothing more than parasites.

What I want is to have people's notion of adulthood no longer be so defined by being a parent. There is some kind of conventional wisdom that you're not really a mature person until you become a parent.

There is, I think, far too much guilt generally in society around parenthood, about whether or not you breastfeed or whether or not you bottle feed. We know the evidence is very strong in favour of breastfeeding and the benefits of that, but it shouldn't mean we make people feel bad if they can't do that for some reason.

With respect to parenting, biological age is not, for men, the concern it is for women.

We've been civilized from the beginning. In the desert, it's a baroque city like Paris or Rome.

We made it known that we were trying to show the reality of France. People think of Paris as the city of love or the city of light, but where you got love you got hate, where you got light you got darkness.

It sounds ghoulish, but it would have been fascinating to be in Paris in 1789 and watch the revolution begin. I can't even imagine what the energy must have been like that year with all of that change crackling in the air.