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Society Quotes
"Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk - real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious."
15
"In this country we have no place for hyphenated Americans."
15
"The American people do not want people thumbing their nose at the law. It undercuts the very fabric of our society and the system of civil justice and of criminal justice as well."
15
"War never leaves where it found a nation."
15
"The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account."
15
"Police are inevitably corrupted. ... Police always observe that criminals prosper. It takes a pretty dull policeman to miss the fact that the position of authority is the most prosperous criminal position available."
15
"But the development of human society does not go straight forward; and the epic process will therefore be a recurring process, the series a recurring series - though not in exact repetition."
15
"The first duty of society is to give each of its members the possibility of fulfilling his destiny. When it becomes incapable of performing this duty it must be transformed."
15
"Some changes we can control, but we find that many things are inseparably wired into the life we share in local, national, and global communities. For example, the healthy lifestyle you are determined to live and take to be a personal choice of which you have control, is heavily influenced and limited by the culture and industries of the communities you belong to."
15
"When everyone hates a person, you should investigate thoroughly, and when everyone loves a person, you should also investigate thoroughly."
15
"You have young men of color in many communities who are more likely to end up in jail or in the criminal justice system than they are in a good job or in college. And, you know, part of my job, that I can do, I think, without any potential conflicts, is to get at those root causes."
15
"When I was in high school I asked myself at one point: "Why do I care if my high school's team wins the football game? I don't know anybody on the team, they have nothing to do with me... why am I here and applaud? It does not make any sense." But the point is, it does make sense: It's a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority and group cohesion behind leadership elements. In fact it's training in irrational jingoism. That's also a feature of competitive sports."
15
"Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken."
15
"Women have always moaned about men...but it turns out that their deepest complaints are reserved for one another, because while they expect men to be fickle, treacherous, and weak, they judge their own sex by higher standards, they expect more from their own sex--loyalty, understanding, trustworthiness, love...."
15
"In our excessive involvement in the affairs of other countries, we are not only living off our assets and denying our own people the proper enjoyment of their resources; we are also denying the world the example of a free society enjoying its freedom to the fullest."
15
"On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects."
15
"I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief."
15
"The planet is fine. The people are fucked."
15
"Until that moment I'd thought I could have it both ways; to be one of them, and also my husband's wife. What conceit! I was his instrument, his animal. Nothing more. How we wives and mothers do perish at the hands of our own righteousness. I was just one more of those women who clamp their mouths shut and wave the flag as their nation rolls off to conquer another in war. Guilty or innocent, they have everything to lose. They are what there is to lose. A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars."
15
"American culture enforces such rigid gender roles for male friendships that they are gay unless they materially resemble a beer commercial."
15
"What holds true for the individual holds true for a society. It is never static; if it does not grow, it decays; if it does not transcend the status quo for the better, it changes for the worse. Often we, the individual or the people who make up a society, have the illusion we could stand still and not alter the given situation in the one or the other direction. This is one of the most dangerous illusions. The moment we stand still, we begin to decay."
15
"It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy."
15
"My main point in this regard was to compete for my country and my people and to receive the support of the entire Cuban society, to carry my flag in whatever competition I was in, the Olympic Games, Pan-American Games."
15
"Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun."
15
"A great deal of the global stimuli that we view comes to us without major effort. Daily a person scans and screens a wide barrage of solicited and unsolicited material. What information a society pays attention to creates the standards and principles governing citizens' life. A nation's discourse translates its economic, social, and cultural values to impressionable children."
15
"If there is technological advance without social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery."
15
"There's too much coldness in the world," I told her. "If people would only talk things out together it would help."
15
"The way Americans understand and treat other peoples almost guarantees that the world will suffer more trouble."
15
"We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show."
15
"The upper management team had informed me that an employee that worked for me was a poor performer and would be terminated soon. This employee was clearly displaying mental health issues that were causing problems in the workplace. When I followed the company procedures and reported this to human resources, their response was to inform me that my contract would not be renewed and I would be immediately fired if anyone complained about me. This was my introduction to how mental health issues are handled in the USA."
15
"Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense."
15
"Over the years we seem to have become habituated, even addicted, to the notion of radical threat, threat of the kind that can make virtually anything seem expendable if it does not serve an immediate, desperate purpose of self-defense -- as defined by people often in too high a state of alarm to make sound judgments about what real safety would be or how it might be achieved, and who feel that their duty to the rest of us is to be very certain we share their alarm. Putting to one side the opportunities offered by the coercive power of fear, charity obliges me to assume that their alarm is genuine, though i grant that in doing so I again raise questions about the soundness of their judgment."
15
"There are two groups of people: Herds and individual clever people. Because herds have numerical superiority, individual clever people remain weak in determining the right fate for the country! The solution: Disperse the herds, augment the individuals!"
15
"Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success."
15
"When everyone believes they are the life coaches, who are the players?"
15
"When I see the cultural diversity that exists today, I feel that we must defend it, and we need Europe, because otherwise we are going to live in a society with a single model, the Anglo-American model."
15
"Narcissism is as profitable to a model as scruffiness is to a homeless person."
15
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