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Society Quotes
"It's been easier to convince people to hand over half their income, their children to war, and their freedoms in perpetuity, than to engage them in seriously considering how roads might function in the absence of taxation."
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"I find the earth to be a place of misery in which I am surrounded by the conformity that kills society."
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"It is impossible, in our condition of Society, not to be sometimes a Snob."
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"Instead of warning pregnant women not to drink,I think female alcoholics ought to be told not to fuck."
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"The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes- I am not speaking now of its racial value, another matter altogether- is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened. One wishes they would say so more often."
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"If you want to understand what's most important to a society, don't examine its art or literature, simply look at its biggest buildings."
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"In most of history, societies have not been free. It's a very rare society that is free. The default condition of human societies is tyranny."
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"All too often, those of us who choose to remain childless are accused of being somehow unwomanly or unnatural or selfish, but history teaches us that there have always been women who went through life without having babies."
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"The U.S. military has done a phenomenal job of creating these facilities almost over-night and dealing with these sworn enemies of America with more respect and dignity than they ever would have considered according our officers had they captured any."
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"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."
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"The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more."
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"Suddenly I was tired of Lotterman; he was a phony and he didn't even know it. He was forever yapping about freedom of the press and keeping the paper going, but if he'd had a million dollars and all the freedom in the world he'd still put out a worthless newspaper because he wasn't smart enough to put out a good one. He was just another noisy little punk in the great legion of punks who marched between the banners of bigger and better men. Freedom, Truth, Honour - you could rattle off a hundred such words and behind every one of them would gather a thousand punks, pompous little farts, waving the banner with one hand and reaching under the table with the other.I stood up. "Ed," I said using his name for the first time, "I believe I'll quit."
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"Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything."
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"Other men might respond by saying: Okay, this is interesting, but I don't think like that. I don't even think about gender. Maybe not. And that is part of the problem. That many men do not actively think about gender or notice gender."
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"Hawaii once had a rat problem. Then, somebody hit upon a brilliant solution. import mongooses from India. Mongooses would kill the rats. It worked. Mongooses did kill the rats. Mongooses also killed chickens, young pigs, birds, cats, dogs, and small children. There have been reports of mongooses attacking motorbikes, power lawn mowers, golf carts, and James Michener. in Hawaii now, there are as many mongooses as there once were rats. Hawaii had traded its rat problem for a mongoose problem. Hawaii was determined nothing like that would ever happen again.How could Leigh-Cheri draw for Gulietta the appropriate analogy between Hawaii's rodents and society at large? Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem."
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"Bullshit is the glue that binds us as a nation."
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"When I wake up in the morning, I feel like a billionaire without paying taxes."
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"No one in the world -- in the entire world -- know more -- knows Americans better or, odd as this may sound, loves them more than the American Negro. This is because he has had to watch you, outwit you, deal with you, and bear you, and sometimes even bleed and die with you, ever since we got here, that is, since both of us, black and white, got here -- and this is a wedding. Whether I like it or not, or whether you like it or not, we are bound together forever. We are part of each other."
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"Women writers make for rewarding (and efficient) lovers. They are clever liars to fathers and husbands; yet they never hold their tongues too long, nor keep ardent typing fingers still."
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"As long as one egg looks pretty much like another, all the chickens like chicken, and beef beef, the substitution of quantity for quality will go unnoticed by most consumers, but it is becoming increasingly apparent to anyone with an electron microscope or a mass spectrometer that, truly, this is not the same food."
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"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."
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"Religious extremism is fatal to those who don't conform to its values, or remold or submit themselves to its 'principles'. It craves control and power - and power is the one tool that enables it to wreak its characteristic havoc, destruction and cruelty upon those it chooses to label as scapegoats. Giving in to extremists enables them and empowers them - and worse, it encourages them."
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"In theory at any rate each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy . It was understood that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were officers and NCOs, but there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; not titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society."
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"No one should suffer from the great delusion that any form of communism or socialism which promotes the dictatorship of the few instead of the initiative of the millions can produce a happier or more prosperous society."
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"Previously, when I began to write this tale, I set out by saying that Mlle. Claude was a whore. She is a whore, of course, and I'm not trying to deny it, but what I say now is--if Mlle. Claude is a whore then what name shall I find for the other women I know?"
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"People who are distracted by door money, neglect the production and the audience. Money becomes their god. They sacrifice their reputation in favor of building revenue. Believe me; the former is more difficult to recover if lost."
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"We are trying to remake Vietnamese society, a task which certainly cannot be accomplished by force and which probably cannot be accomplished by any means available to outsiders."
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"If you think of movie studio executives, say, as society, then I root for the independent producers."
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"Sir, I did not count your glasses of wine, why should you number up my cups of tea?"
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"He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors."
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"I am strongly convinced that the people or society is the best and the most unerring critic."
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"As an Auyana man living in New Guinea under the Pax Australiana put it, "Life was better since the government came because "a man could now eat without looking over his shoulder and could leave his house in the morning to urinate without fear of being shot."
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"There are so many things I can't believe. That people deserve what they get, both bad and good. That one day I'll live in a world where people are judged by what they do instead of who they are. That happy endings don't have contingencies and conditions."
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"The world admires wealth and velocity-these are the things for which everyone strives. Railroads, the post, steamboats, and all possible modes of communication are the means by which the world overeducates itself and freezes itself in mediocrity."
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"She's on the stairs, ma'am, getting her breath,' said the young servant, who had not been long up from the country, where my mother had the excellent habit of getting all her servants. Often she had seen them born. That's the only way to get really good ones. And they're the rarest of luxuries."
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"The larger the group, the more toxic, the more of your beauty as an individual you have to surrender for the sake of group thought. And when you suspend your individual beauty you also give up a lot of your humanity. You will do things in the name of a group that you would never do on your own. Injuring, hurting, killing, drinking are all part of it, because you've lost your identity, because you now owe your allegiance to this thing that's bigger than you are and that controls you."
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