Quotes About Society

The World, she said, is chock full of bitchy girls.

Most girls I know would consider that wish fullfillment, not torture." I sat back, shaking my head. "Why does everyone keep saying that? Who says just because I'm a girl I'm hardwired to want to spent a hundred and eighty bucks on jeans?

Most people think a girl and a guy can't just be friends, there has to be something else going on.

How do ugly men make their way through life?

In the U.S.A., we want to sing along with the chorus and ignore the verses, ignore the blues. . . No one is going to hold up a cigarette lighter in a stadium to the tune of mourn together, suffer together. City on a hill, though -- that has a backbeat we can dance to. And that's why the citizens of the United States not only elected and reelected Ronald Reagan; that's why we ARE Ronald Reagan.

She is either male property (Mrs.), wannabe male property (Miss), or man-hating harpy (Ms.).

Freedom of expression truly exists only when a society's most repugnant nitwits are allowed to spew their nonsense in public.

Parliament would abolish slavery in the British Empire in 1833, thirty years before President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. A return to the British fold in 1778 might have freed American slaves three decades sooner, which is what, an entire generation and a half? Was independence for some of us more valuable than freedom for all of us? As the former slave Frederick Douglass put it in an Independence Day speech in 1852, 'This is your Fourth of July, not mine'.

In the United States, there was no simpler, more agreeable time.

First, from this side of the twentieth century, après strip malls, fast-food franchises, glass boxes, housing projects, and other architectural gaffes, it's fun to look back on this dilemma of to-column-or-not-to-column, because honestly, the only question most Americans ask about a new building at this point is basically: Is it a soul-sucking eyesore of cheap-ass despair? It's not? Whew.

Hell is other people

The idea of Plato that philosophers must be the rulers and directors of society is practiced in India.

Someone, somewhere, needs to take courage to break the cycle of violence. Forgiveness is superior to justice. Being kind and compassionate to those who are good to you is easy. True forgiveness and compassion come only when one is able to forgive even those who have committed barbaric acts. If Angulimala is capable of renouncing violence, then tell me, your Majesty: is your civilized society also capable of being truly civilized and renouncing violence?

Again, behavior is the criterion, and since the devotee is the standard for the most important part of life – spiritual advancement – his misbehavior is the greatest disservice to society.

Of course, in an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too.

between human beings there are only two alternatives, either brotherhood or crime.

Society is what beats me. Alone I can be pretty good, but let me go among people and there's the devil to pay.

But the best-treated, most favored and intelligent part of any society is often the most ungrateful. Ingratitude, however, is its social function.

There haven't been civilizations without cities. But what about cities without civilizations? An inhuman thing, if possible, to have so many people together who beget nothing on one another. No, but it is not possible, and the dreary begets its own fire, and so this never happens.

Look here, because they were born you think they have to turn out to be men? That's just an old-fashioned idea. And who tells them that? A big organization. One more big organization. A big organization makes dough or it doesn't last. If it makes dough it's for dough.

La gente non fa le cose per cui ha un vero talento, ma quelle a cui la spinge la preoccupazione. Se sono bravi a riparare le automobili, devono cantare il Don Giovanni; se sanno cantare, devono fare l'architetto; e se hanno il bernoccolo dell'architettura, vogliono diventare ispettori scolastici o pittori astrattisti o qualunque altra cosa. QUALUNQUE COSA!

Humankind is still fooling around with hypocrisy, I thought. They don't realize that it's too late even for that.

What did Danton lose his head for, or why was there a Napoleon, if it wasn't to make a nobility of us all?

History is the history of cruelty, not love, as soft men think.