Quotes About Society

It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of every emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves.

There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.

What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.

Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.

Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.

Civic participation depends on creativity, an (aesthetic) knack for reframing experience, and on a corollary freedom to adjust laws and practices in light of ever-new challenges. Without art, citizenship would shrink to compliance, as if society were a closed text. Reading lessons would stop at the factual "what is," rather than continue to the speculative "what if.

What was that old story about how women had a better chance of being abducted by aliens than they did getting married after forty?

The importance of novels and short stories in our society is great. Fiction supplies the only philosophy that many readers know; it establishes their ethical, social, and material standards; it confirms them in their prejudices or opens their minds to a wider world. The movies have not undermined the influence of fiction. On the contrary, they have extended its field, carrying the ideas which are already current among reader to those too young, too impatient, or too uneducated to read.

many are crippled for knowing an impressive word who would have had no such trouble if they had lived in a simpler and less self-indulgent society.

An alternative method is this: from time to time give yourself a day on which you say "Yes" to every request made of you which is at all reasonable. The more you tend to retire from society in your leisure, the more valuable this will be.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I would rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.

Men are beginning to realize that they are not individuals but persons in society, that man alone is weak and adrift, that he must seek strength in common action.

Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.

A philosophy of work is essential if we would be whole men, holy men, healthy men, joyous men. A certain amount of goods is necessary for a man to lead a good life, and we have to make that kind of society where it is easier for men to be good.

If the way of spiritual childhood became general, who does not see how easily would be realized the reformation of human society. . .

most people do not participate in the making of culture.

The man in our society is the breadwinner the woman has enough to do as the homemaker, wife and mother.

He thought wryly of the current political metaphor, "the two ends are hot and the middle is cold," a very Chinese way of saying that change was passionately wanted at both the top and the bottom of the society, but sitting squarely in the middle in many areas were Mao's bureaucrats, threatened by the progressive changes, indignant, clinging in fury to the old status quo.

The people still waited with infinite patience for the democracy that had been promised them

Money isn't the root of all evil; the love of money isn't the root of all evil; the NEED for money is the root of all evil.

Some people's blameless lives are to blame for a good deal.

The rule seemed to be that a great woman must either die unwed ... or find a still greater man to marry her. ... The great man, on the other hand, could marry where he liked, not being restricted to great women; indeed, it was often found sweet and commendable in him to choose a woman of no sort of greatness at all.

Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.

Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.