Quotes About Society

So when time had begun to run out on Adelia with no really acceptable husband in sight, she'd married money -- crude money, button money. She was expected to refine this money, like oil.

What is believed in society, is not always the equivalent of what is true;

it is no longer possible to be both human and alive)

Watch out for art, Crake used to say. As soon as they start doing art, we're in trouble.

Female artists are biologically confused, said Crake.

Money was the only measure of worth, for everyone, they got no respect as mothers.

But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.   I

The doctors, the dentists, the lawyers, the accountants: in the new world of Gilead, as in the old, their sins are frequently forgiven them.

but love was undependable, it came and then it went; so it was good to have a money value, because then at least those who wanted to make a profit from you made sure you were fed enough and not damaged by too much. Also there were many who had neither love nor money value and having one of these things was better than having nothing.

Watch out for the leaders, Crake used to say. First the leaders and the led, then the tyrants and the slaves, then the massacres. That's how it's always gone.

whatever else women want to see, it's not themselves; not in their worst light anyway.

Sex and violence, he thinks now. A lot of the songs were about that. We didn't even notice. We thought it was art.

A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women. Not

Bearing false witness was not the exception, it was common. Beneath its outer show of virtue and purity, Gilead was rotting.

Sex has been domesticated, stripped of the promised mystery, added to the category of the merely expected. It's just what is done, mundane as hockey. It's celibacy these days that would raise eyebrows.

Considering that the whole point of Consilience is for things to run smoothly, with happy citizens, or are they inmates? Both, to be honest. Because citizens were always a bit like inmates and inmates were always a bit like citizens, so Consilience and Positron have only made it official.

The difference between a civilized man and a barbarous fiend—a madman, say - Lies, perhaps, Merely in a thin veneer of willed self-restraint.

It's psychic. It's the age. It's chemical.

I expect he did it awkwardly, but awkwardness in men was a sign of sincerity then.

Letting yourself go is an alarming notion; it is said of older women who become frowzy and fat, and of things that are sold cheap. Of course there is something to it. I am letting myself go.

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them to suit ourselves - our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies. Now that I've been one myself, I know.

When chlorophyll chewing gum came into fashion two decades later, it was that colour.)

Everything is post these days, as if we're all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.

Human society, they claimed, was a sort of monster, its main by-products being corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain.