Quotes About Society

Flush likes civilised life, and the society of little dogs with turned-up tails, such as Florence abounds with. Unhappily it abounds also with fleas, which afflict poor Flush to the verge sometimes of despair. Fancy Robert and me down on our knees combing him, with a basin of water on one side! He suffers to such a degree from fleas that I cannot bear to witness it. He tears off his pretty curls through the irritation. Do you know of a remedy?

I would have the government educate the people absolutely, and then give room for the individual to develop himself into life freely. Nothing can be more hateful to me than this communist idea of quenching individualities in the mass.

Also, in every advancement of the world hitherto, the individual has led the masses. Thus, to elicit individuality has been the object of the best political institutions and governments. Now, in these new theories, the individual is ground down into the multitude, and society must be 'moving all together if it moves at all' — restricting the very possibility of progress by the use of the lights of genius. Genius is always individual.

But wasn't that part of a whore's job? Being the sort of ear that lonely men could turn to? I wondered who lonely women paid to listen. As with so much, it seemed as if the world had a solution for the one but not the other.

The way I saw it, nobody thought the worse of a man who followed his pecker anywhere it sniffed, like a droopy-faced hound dog led on by his nose. So why a woman did the same should be judged different… well, women always is.

Women have more of that patience, as a class. That ain't because we're born with it, though. It's because we're schooled to it and taught early that if we don't have it we won't never win.

Being a growed woman, it turned out, was harder work than it looked. But that's a thing, too, ain't it? Them as work hardest get no respect for it—women, ranch hands, sharecroppers, factory help, domestics—and them as spend all their time talking about how hard they work have no idea what an honest day's labor for nary enough pay to put beans in your family's bellies is all about.

It's funny, ain't it, that nobody holds giving men the illusion they want about themselves against wives, though they hold it against the sisters. And nobody holds it against the illusionists, though they do against spiritualists. I'm not quite sure how to explain what I'm driving at, except it seems to me that these things is all linked.

Without women in a position to protect them, gentle males would find it rough going in a society dominated by stud males and hormonally driven aggression.

Because a girl would never have made it here without knowing somebody, right?

She had long since stopped finding it ironic or eerie that the city at large paid no attention to a murder, whether the victim was a prominent citizen or a guttersnipe.

My people have a saying that every civilization is founded in a terrible crime.

The clades like to point out that their choices were just a more extreme version of being and remaining a productive member of the Synarche-or good.

Enjoy belonging to the machine, babes.

Strike two for Utopia. The problem with the damned things always comes when you try to introduce actual people into your philosophical constructs.

It's kind of horrifying to think of an era when people were so constrained to and by gender, in which the externals you were born with were something you would be stuck with your whole life, could never alter, and it would determine your entire social role and your potential for emotional fulfilment and intellectual achievement.

Marlowe patted Matthew on the shoulder, and Matthew found himself grinning in naked relief; notorious rakehell, sodomite, and playboy he might be remembered as, but lately Christopher Marlowe was the only person who seemed willing to touch Matthew without some implication lying predatory behind it.

Society was self-interest given a pretty gloss.

Men make this great pretense of not wanting to be caught, but in the end they usually beg for a lady's hand.

That did it. With his masculine pride completely trampled beneath her sturdy and practical heel, Jack made a vow. The moment this ends, I am going straight up to London to cut a swath through Society that will ensure my place in history alongside Casanova and every other great rake. There won't be a woman's heart safe from my charms.

Woman has relied heretofore too entirely for her support on the needle - that one-eyed demon of destruction that slays thousands annually; that evil genius of our sex, which, in spite of all our devotion, will never make us healthy, wealthy, or wise.

The woman is uniformly sacrificed to the wife and mother.

Men think that self-sacrifice is the most charming of all the cardinal virtues for women, and in order to keep it in healthy working order, they make opportunities for its illustration as often as possible.

It was just so in the American Revolution, in 1776, the first delicacy the men threw overboard in Boston harbor was the tea, woman's favorite beverage. The tobacco and whiskey, though heavily taxed, they clung to with the tenacity of the devil-fish.