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Society Quotes
"For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying 'lepers' we would understand 'outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities.' But we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign."
34
"I expect nothing of man, and disown the race. The only folly is expecting what is never attained; man is most contemptible when compared with his own pretensions. It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within."
34
"The truth is that circumstances had done much to cultivate in Mrs. Tristram a marked tendency to irony. Her taste on many points differed from that of her husband, and though she made frequent concessions it must be confessed that her concessions were not always graceful. They were founded upon a vague project she had of some day doing something very positive, something a trifle passionate. What she meant to do she could by no means have told you; but meanwhile, nevertheless, she was buying a good conscience, by installments."
34
"Government regulation is an imperfect substitute for the accountability, and trust, built into a market in which food producers meet the gaze of eaters and vice versa."
34
"Why should man's first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction and expenditure?"
34
"He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life."
34
"You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You are not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity."
34
"Pop culture shapes our ideas of what is normal and what our dreams can be and what our roles are. Politics, of course, decides how the power and the money in the country is distributed. Both are equally important, and each affects the other."
34
"I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved."
34
"While other girls were blurry, displaying cracks or, at the very least, seams - ripped jeans, coffee-stained T-shirts, hair that poufed up in the rain - Sophia always looked sharp, clear, as if the resolution had been turned up on a microscope and angled straight at her, as if the money had formed a kind of shrink wrap that kept her protected from the normal destruction of the everyday."
34
"Bore: a person who talks when you wish him to listen."
34
"Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all."
34
"Richard exhaled. It was like somebody sprinkling pepper on his wound: Thousands of Biafrans were dead, and this man wanted to know if there was anything new about one dead white man. Richard would write about this, the rule of Western journalism: One hundred dead black people equal to one dead white person."
34
"Then, I realized that there is an indigenous presence in the Solar System. It's us. So, then, I got to wondering what would happen if a more technologically advanced society moved next door to us, the way we moved next door to the American Indians."
34
"Saying something is 'politically correct' is often a way of dismissing the voices of the oppressed."
34
"As we embrace the American dream and the freedoms it represents, we must also ensure that those who wish to enjoy those freedoms become a part of our society and learn to speak our language."
34
"Women in America read 'lifestyle' pages which are really glorifications of shopping. They teach us we must veil ourselves in make-up to be loved. And we willingly take the veil, thinking ourselves freed by it. Make-up is no more optional for us than the veil is for Arab women: it is our Western version of the chador."
34
"The Princess of Parma was a Courvoisier in that she was incapable of innovation in social matters, but unlike the Courvoisiers in that the surprises the Duchesse de Guermantes perpetually held in store for her engendered in her not, as in them, antipathy but a sense of wonder."
34
"We judge others instantly by their clothes, their cars, their appearance, their race, their education, their social status. The list is endless. What gets me is that most people decide who another person is before they have even spoken to them. What's even worse is that these same people decide who someone else is, and don't even know who they are themselves."
34
"It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences."
34
"The brains of members of the Press departments of motion-picture studios resemble soup at a cheap restaurant. It is wiser not to stir them."
34
"There is a growing wave in this country of fear, and of intolerance which springs from fear. Sometimes it is a religious intolerance, sometimes it is a racial intolerance, but all intolerance grows from the same roots."
34
"If you wish to appear agreeable in society, you must consent to be taught many things which you know already."
34
"If you think of movie studio executives, say, as society, then I root for the independent producers."
34
"If society will not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodeled."
34
"A social problem is one that concerns the way in which people live together in one society. A racial problem is a problem which confronts two different races who live in two separate societies, even if those societies are side by side."
34
"They know they dare not have their stuff stripped down to plain words. These Bishops and parsons with their beloved Christianity are like a man who has poisoned his wife and says her body's too sacred for a post-mortem. Nowadays, by the light we have, any ecclesiastic must be born blind or an intellectual rascal. Don't tell me. The world's had this apostolic succession of oily old humbugs from early Egypt onwards, trying to come it over people. Antiquity's no excuse. A sham is no better for being six thousand years stale. Christianity's no more use to us now thanthe Pyramids."
34
"We moderns are great compartmentalizers, perhaps never more so than when hungry."
34
"Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence. It is our constant anxiety about that violence, our memory of its past labours and our dread of its future manifestations, that lays down the rules for how a people as complex and as diverse as we continue to coexist " continue to live together, tolerate each other and, from time to time, murder one another. As long as the centre holds, as long as the yolk doesn't run, we'll be fine. In moments of crisis it helps to take the long view."
34
"If they had had a different neighbour, one less sel-absorbed and more concerned for others, a man of normal, charitable instincts, their desperate state would not have gone unnoticed, their distress-signals would have been heard, and perhaps they would have been rescued by now. Certainly they appeared utterly depraved, corrupt, vile and odious; but it is rare for those who have sunk so low not to be degraded in the process, and there comes a point, moreover, where the unfortunate and the infamous are grouped together, merged in a single, fateful world. They are les misA©rables - the outcasts, the underdogs. And who is to blame? Is it not the most fallen who have most need for charity?"
34
"In case nobody has told you," she said, "this is the United States of America, where nobody has a right to rely on anybody else--where everybody learns to make his or her own way."
34
"You know when 1 in 2 marriages ends in divorce, 1 in 42 boys have Autism, and safety complaints from the majority of whistle-blower's are not being upheld, that you are living in a seriously dysfunctional society."
34
"The best gift that we could give to our great nation is to prepare our younger generations to be fit enough to positively take our country to greater heights."
34
"The sociological organization is alive, holistic, vibrant, energetic, responsive, fluid, creative and innovation."
34
"There is not a man of us who does not at times need a helping hand to be stretched out to him, and then shame upon him who will not stretch out the helping hand to his brother."
34
"The voice of protest is the voice of another and an ancient civilization which seems to have bred in us the instinct to enjoy and fight rather than to suffer and understand."
34
"Individual heterosexual women came to the movement from relationships where men were cruel, unkind, violent, unfaithful. Many of these men were radical thinkers who participated in movements for social justice, speaking out on behalf of the workers, the poor, speaking out on behalf of racial justice. However when it came to the issue of gender they were as sexist as their conservative cohorts."
34
"The First Amendment rejects red tape, cover-up and double-speak."
34
"This is how we came by our factions: Candor, Erudite, Amity, Abnegation and Dauntless." Max smiles. "In them we find administrators and teachers and counselors and leaders and protectors. In them we find our sense of belonging, our sense of community, our very lives."
34
"From warm meals, to daily exercise, to healthcare; one can't help but wonder how our society would be different if tended to the elderly as we do to our imprisoned."
34
"This kind of overall way of thinking is not only a fertile source of new theoretical ideas: it is needed for the human mind to function in a generally harmonious way, which could in turn help to make possible an orderly and stable society."
33
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