Quotes About Society

After Basie married his Katie, she became one of the sidditiest of siddity sisters.

Ruth did not believe in makeup. She thought it demeaned women.

What will people say, you running off to Memphis like you don't have a house to look after? Shug say, Albert. Try to think like you got some sense. Why any woman give a shit what people think is a mystery to me. Well, say Grady, trying to bring light. A woman can't git a man if peoples talk. Shug look at me and us giggle. Then us sure nuff. Then Squeak start to laugh. Then Sofia. All us laugh and laugh.

Aside from the fact that they say it's unhealthy, my fat ain't never been no trouble. Mens always have loved me. My kids ain't never complained. Plus they's fat.

When Toni Morrison said she writes the kind of books she wants to read, she was acknowledging the fact that in a society in which "accepted literature" is so often sexist and racist and otherwise irrelevant or offensive to so many lives, she must do the work of two. She must be her own model as well as the artist attending, creating, learning from, realizing the model, which is to say, herself.

Without money of one's own in a capitalist society, there is no such thing as independence.

What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one's glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world. And yet, in our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrowing view of life that often wins

Young womens no good these days, he say. Got they legs open to every Tom, Dick and Harry.

The Olinka do not believe girls should be educated. When I asked a mother why she thought this, she said: A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something.

In an oppressive society it may well be that *all* fantasies indulged in by the oppressor are destructive to the oppressed. To become involved in them in any way at all is, at the very least, to lose time defining yourself. To isolate the fantasy we must cleave to reality, to what *we* know, *we* feel, *we* think of life. Trusting our own experience and our own lives; embracing both the dark self and the light.

none of her innate curiosity about and interest in life had ebbed. She also in no way subscribed to the rules and regulations of a society that suppressed almost all spontaneous signs of joy, and whose insistence on conformity, she had noticed, made life so lacking in vibrancy for all concerned. At the moment she realized any human being might die for almost any reason at any given instant, she also understood that, accepting this fact, she could be free.

there because of her brilliance but only tolerated because it was clear she was one, too, on whom true Ladyhood would never be conferred.

Why are women so easily tramps and traitors when men are heroes for engaging in the same activity? Why do women stand for this?

The news always sound crazy. People fussing and fighting and pointing fingers at other people, and never even looking for no peace. People insane, say Shug. Crazy as betsy bugs. Nothing built this crazy can last.

Folks crying and fanning and trying to keep a stray eye on the children, but they don't stare at Sofia and her sisters. They act like this the way it always done. I love folks.

Because I know. Grown-up white men don't want to pretend to be anything else. Not even for a minute.

Shug say, Albert. Try to think like you got some sense. Why any woman give a shit what people think is a mystery to me.

Men, however, were encouraged to sow their wild oats, but a woman who did so became a social outcast and ruined her chances of making a good marriage.

Peace and order could only be achieved when all classes of society were in harmony with each other. Disorder – such as heresy, rebellion, or trying to get above one's station in life – was regarded as the work of the Devil and therefore as mortal sin.

It's the rich what gets the pleasure, it's the poor what gets the blame.' I

Pay a fortune for an LCD TV, all very well, but it doesen't improve the quality of the shite they make you watch.

Sex is the price women pay for marriage. Marriage is the price men pay for sex.

This means that if boys and girls grew up on a deserted island with no organised society or parents to guide them, girls would still cuddle, touch, make friends and play with dolls, while boys would compete mentally and physically with each other and form groups with a clear hierarchy.

Alcohol doesn't benefit anybody except the industry that peddles it. There is no demarcation line between "normal" drinking and problem drinking; it is all part of the same disease. The problem drinker is just at a more advanced stage.