Quotes About Society

Emasculation does seem to be a theme in the roles that I choose.

In one aspect, my works record the history of the development of Chinese society. Concern about the situation of Chinese reality is one important theme of my works. I am trying to ask, 'How does our society develop? What are the problems in our society? Where is our direction leading?'

A theme I'm obsessed with is the tension between human nature and the frameworks designed to curb the worst and promote the best of it.

Boys will be boys, people said, as if being a cruel, destructive monster was a rite of passage.

People's intelligence tends to be in inverse proportion to their number. People don't tend to get smarter as they get into bigger groups.

And so she ghosted on, in relentless pursuit of escape, not from society, but from herself.

One thing I've noticed is that the only places people insist you relax are the least relaxing places on the planet.

To Cassidy, the panopticon wasn't a metaphor. It was the greatest failing of everything she was, a prison she had built for herself out of an inability to appear anything less than perfect. And so she ghosted on, in relentless pursuit of escape, not from society, but from herself. She would always be confined by what everyone expected of her, because she was too afraid and too unwilling to correct our imperfect imaginings.

There was this philosopher-slash-historian called Foucault, who wrote about how society is like this legendary prison called panopticon. In the panopticon, you might be underconstant observation, except you can never be sure whether someone is watching or not, so you wind up following the rules anyway." "But how do you know who's a watcher and who's a prisoner?"... "That's the point. Even the watchers are prisoners.

To Cassidy, the panopticon wasn't a metaphor. It was the greatest failing of everything she was, a prison she had built for herself out of an inability to appear anything less than perfect. And so she ghosted on, in relentless pursuit of escape, not from society, but from herself. She would always be confined by what everyone expected of her, because she was too afraid and too unwilling to correct our imperfect imaginings.

There was this philosopher-slash-historian called Foucault, who wrote about how society is like this legendary prison called the panopticon. In the panopticon, you might be under constant observation, except you can never be sure whether someone is watching or not, so you wind up following the rules anyway.

I shook my head. "No, I mean Animal Farm. You know: 'Some animals are more equal than other animals.

Sois tan Orgullo y prejuicio… —¿Te refieres a que me despreciará a causa de mi familia mientras intenta convencer al alma gemela de mi hermana de que, en realidad, no la ama?

Christians ended up compromising even more than they had already; learning to "play ball," as it were, to live and let live, to keep silent when they ought to have spoken, to render unto Caesar the things that were God's. Yes, the third-century Church had found a way to make peace with paganism—and it was proving deadly.

It is up to us today to take up this challenge, to live not by lies and to speak the truth that defeats evil. How do we do this in a society built on lies? By accepting a life outside the mainstream, courageously defending the truth, and being willing to endure the consequences.

Relatively few contemporary Christians are prepared to suffer for the faith, because the therapeutic society that has formed them denies the purpose of suffering in the first place, and the idea of bearing pain for the sake of truth seems ridiculous.

I began to wonder what, exactly, mainstream conservatism was conserving. It dawned on me that some of the causes championed by my fellow conservatives—chiefly an uncritical enthusiasm for the market—can in some circumstances undermine the thing that I, as a traditionalist, considered the most important institution to conserve: the family. I

But American Christians are going to have to come to terms with the brute fact that we live in a culture, one in which our beliefs make increasingly little sense. We speak a language that the world more and more either cannot hear or finds offensive to its ears.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the novel that previews what's coming; it's rather Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The contemporary social critic James Poulos calls this the "Pink Police State": an informal arrangement in which people will surrender political rights in exchange for guarantees of personal pleasure.

No culture, and no person, can remember everything. A culture's memory is the result of its collective sifting of facts to produce a story—a story that society tells itself to remember who it is. Without collective memory, you have no culture, and without a culture, you have no identity.

According to Hannah Arendt, the foremost scholar of totalitarianism, a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rulers decide it is.

In a letter to soldiers in 1798, John Adams, a Founding Father and practicing Unitarian, remarked: We had no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

It's amazing to me to see parents who have money, and who think they're conservative, abandon their children to the culture, and then turn around and express shock at what the culture does to their children,

He is concerned by polls showing that Americans' support for the First Amendment—which guarantees the constitutional right to free expression—is waning, especially among younger Americans, who are increasingly intolerant of dissenting opinion. Grygorenko sees this as a sign that society prefers the false peace of conformity to the tensions of liberty. To grow indifferent, even hostile, to free speech is suicidal for a free people.