Quotes About Society

That's not a bad word... hate and war are bad words, but fuck isn't.

When women's lib hit the headlines many of these second-generation ranch women sniffed around its edges and pitched it back like a dead carp. If equality meant doing a man's work, you could have it. That brand of equality had dug their mothers an early grave and was three feet down on their own. They'd come a long way baby, and were on the road back to being real ladies -- or so it appeared.

Judith Butler, for example, has argued that men's and women's interests are not objectively given, but are collectively created.

other words, technologies only come to life and have meaning as people adopt and use them.

Since language is community, if the cognitive ecology of a language is altered, so is the community.

Some artists attain to the cosmos of the spirit only by a practice of violence. They are artists who know hell and speak of it familiarly: Dante, Dostoievsky, Blake, Rimbaud, Henry Miler and Jim Morrison. The vocabulary used by these men opens up their passage through the flames. This is the violence of the spirit (not that of passion) in which the artist becomes the accuser of a wayward society.

at times expressing his conviction that literature and music were being absorbed by television, which was turning people into voyeurs.

One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.

It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation.

I never learned to say shit before a lady. I don't believe in progress in quite the way you seem to. You believe in it more than Grandmother did. As for those purely cultural patterns of convention you think I ought to escape from, they happen to add up to civilization, and I'd rather be civilized than tribal or uncouth.

And I would not blame you if you still asked, Why bother to make contact with kindred spirits you never see and may never hear from, who perhaps do not even exist except in your hopes? Why spend ten years in an apprenticeship to fiction only to discover that this society so little values what you do that it won't pay you a living wage for it?

Chaos is the law of nature; order is the dream of man.

I don't care how they speculate, or what their answers are. We live as we can, we do what we must, and not everything goes by either Freudian or Victorian patterns. What I am sure of is that friendship—not love, friendship—is as possible between women as between men, and that in either case it is often stronger for not having to cross sexual picket lines. Sexuality and mistrust often go together, and both are incompatible with amicitia.

Civilizations grow and change and decline - they aren't remade.

Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.

Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness of heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us.

One's-Self I sing, a simple separate person,Yet utter the word Democratic, the wordEn-Masse.

Judging from the main portion of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.

America fears the unshaven legs, the unshaven men's cheeks, the aroma of perspiration, and the limp prick. Above all it fears the limp prick.

No one will ever comprehend the arrested civilizations unless he sees the strict dilemma of early society. Either men had no law at all, and lived in confused tribes, hardly hanging together, or they had to obtain a fixed law by processes of incredible difficulty. Those who surmounted that difficulty soon destroyed all those that lay in their way who did not.

Public opinion... requires us to think other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule.

The socially relevant achievement of the average person serves in the vast majority of cases to repress the original and nonderivative, inner aspirations of the human being.

There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.