Quotes About Society

The discovery is, of course, that "man" and "woman" are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models they are reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for male and female both. The conclusion is inescapable: we are, clearly, a multisexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete.

The questions now really are: why is pornography credible in our society? how can anyone believe it? And then: how subhuman would women have to be for the pornography to be true? To the men who use the pornography, how subhuman are women?

In her heart she is a mourner for those who have not survived. In her soul she is a warrior for those who are now as she was then. In her life she is both celebrant and proof of women's capacity and will to survive, to become, to act, to change self and society. And each year she is stronger and there are more of her.

You damn well better believe that you're involved in this tragedy and that it's your tragedy too. Because you're turned into little soldier boys from the day that you are born and everything that you learn about how to avoid the humanity of women becomes part of the militarism of the country in which you live and the world in which you live.

Most Amerikans do not read books--they prefer television. Academics lock books in a tangled web of mindfuck and abstraction. The notion is that there are ideas, then art, then somewhere else, unrelated, life.

standard forms are sometimes called conventions, conventions are mightier than armies, police, and prisons. each citizen becomes the enforcer, the doorkeeper, an instrument of the Law, an unfeeling guard punching his fellow man hard in the belly.

Und ich hasse die Mittelschichts-Blödmänner, die so viel zu sagen haben, aber nie einen einzigen verdammten Tag mit dem Versuch verbracht haben, am Leben zu bleiben.

she studies to be equal in a world that is no longer surprised at anything

Our fraught way of life gives each of us a narrowly defined role, creating conditions conducive to developing only those elements in our psyche which allow us to grow within the confines of that role. The other areas of our psyche waste away. Hence lack of contact. Here psychological and social factors combine, and produce fear, distrust, moral baseness and the death of hope.

Gianni (Antonioni's friend) was telling us horrifying things today about England, which he found hardly recognizable after an interval of two years. Spiritual degeneration. Money and make-believe replacing the life of the spirit.

The artist has no right to an idea to which he is not socially committed, or the realisation of which could involve a dichotomy between his professional activity and the rest of his life.

The ideal has collapsed. It's not possible to live without an ideal, no one is able to invent a new one, and the old one has collapsed: the church.

Even the poorest can be made to see this, and to agree that great sums gathered by some of their fellow-citizens and spent for public purposes, from which the masses reap the principal benefit, are more valuable to them than if scattered among them through the course of many years in trifling amounts.

Alan Turing, however, cared nothing for the opinion of society, and therefore was ahead of his time in laying bare the role of the state.

Even as U.S. policy in recent decades has become progressively militarized, so too has the Vietnam-induced gap separating the U.S. military from American society persisted and perhaps even widened.47

Americans entrust their security to a class of military professionals who see themselves in many respects as culturally and politically set apart from the rest of society.53

Without a home there can be no good citizen. With a home there can be no bad one.

For all their privileges, their legions of servants, their chauffeur-driven cars, private yachts and planes, they are prisoners of society's expectations and puppets of the system.

One of the worst things that happened to her was that she was put on a pedestal which didn't allow her to develop in the direction that she wanted but one which has forced her to be concerned about image and perfection.

La tentazione della barbarie passa immutata da generazione a generazione, e riaffiorerà sempre ogni volta che ce ne sarà l'occasione adatta.

What type of authority held together such an evidently organized, uniform and widespread society, if it truly did manage to prosper without palaces, royal graves, temples, powerful rulers and even priests? Why does the Indus civilization offer no definitive evidence for warfare, in the form of defensive fortifications, metal weapons and warriors – a situation without parallel in war-addicted ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and China, not to mention all subsequent civilizations? Was

Just as a gay couple cannot walk hand in hand down the streets of Marrakech, he thinks, two men, best friends, cannot walk hand in hand down the streets of Chicago.

Hard to feel bad for a middle-aged white man.

Why do today's young men insist on marrying? Was this why we all threw stones at the police, for weddings