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Society Quotes


"Our society has led us to believe that everybody is on the internet these days. Contrary to popular belief everyone is not on social media."


"In society, one doesn't tell the truth, one tells the exact opposite."


"He is really not so ugly after all, provided, of course, that one shuts one's eyes, and does not look at him."


"Culture has little to do with how refined a man's intellect is, it rather depends on the refinement of his emotions."


"Civilizations have always been pyramidal in structure. As one climbs toward the apex of the social edifice, there is increased leisure and increasing opportunity to pursue hapiness. As one climbs, one finds also fewer and fewer people to enjoy this more and more. Invariably, there is a preponderance of the dispossessed. And remember this, no matter how well off the bottom layers of the pyramid might be on an absolute scale, they are always dispossessed in comparison with the apex."


"One would never defeat one's circumstances by working and saving one's pennies; one would never, by working, acquire that many pennies, and, besides, the social treatment accorded even the most successful Negroes proved that one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear. It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else-housewives, taxi-drivers, elevator boys, dishwashers, bartenders, lawyers, judges, doctors, and grocers-would never, by the operation of any generous human feeling, cease to use you as an outlet for his frustrations and hostilities."


"All people are enslaved by something."


"But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run "amok" against society; but I preferred that society should run "amok" against me, it being the desperate party."


"She didn't care that people called her a bitch. 'It's just another word for feminist,' she told me with pride."


"I hate women who complain about being fat when they're like a size 5. Anything under size 5 isn't a woman. It's a boy with breasts."


"Upon my word, you five your opinion very decidedly for so young a person."


"Gender is not an easy conversation to have. It makes people uncomfortable, sometimes even irritable. Both men and women are resistant to talk about gender, or are quick to dismiss the problems of gender. Because thinking of changing the status quo is always uncomfortable."


"To live in a city, one must be larger than one's environment or enjoy belonging to the crowd."


"I must show the blacksmith and the shopkeeper once more--two years after marriage--time long enough to have made common people as common to each other as the weed by the roadside; but these are not common to each other yet, and never will be. They will never complain of being _desillusionnes_, for they have never been illuded. They look up each to the other still, because they were right in looking up each to the other from the first. Each was, and therefore each is and will be, real."


"You became the sum total of where you lived, where you shopped, which church you went to, how many kids you had and which taxi company you used, and you only associated with people who had the same responses on their list."


"The secular world often finds its constituents disenfranchised and solitary as it has spent a great deal of time debating the religious community while failing to build a true community of its own."


"We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt. We say we believe in equal opportunity but then stand idle while millions of American children languish in poverty. We insist that we value family, but then structure our economy and organize our lives so as to ensure that our families get less and less of our time."


"Peace is significant for any country that seeks prosperity, because it is easier to uplift the economy in a peaceful environment."


"America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.... It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters."


"The fact the enemies of God must face is that modern civilization has conquered the world, but in doing so has lost its soul. And in losing its soul it will lose the very world it gained. Even our own so-called Liberal culture in these United States which has tried to avoid complete secularization by leaving little zones of individual freedom is in danger of forgetting that these zones were preserved only because religion was in their soul. And as religion fades so will freedom, for only where the spirit of God is, is there liberty."


"In today's world hunger for sanity seems to be more intense than our hunger for food."


"In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people."


"The brutal truth is, we're scarcely 'educating' children at all. Even if you overlook the guilt, fear, bigotry, and dangerous anti-intellectual flapdoodle being funneled into young brains by schools on the religious right, what we're doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce."


"Proverty and wealth are comparative sins."


"A celebrity's body is an advertiser's canvas."


"Ironically, the worship of of death as a strategy for coping with our underlying fear of death's power does not truly give us solace. It is deeply anxiety producing. The more we watch spectacles of death, of random violence and cruelty, the more afraid we become in our daily lives."


"Generally speaking, our prisoners were capable of loving animals, and if they had been allowed they would have delighted to rear large numbers of domestic animals and birds in the prison. And I wonder what other activity could better have softened and refined their harsh and brutal natures than this. But it was not allowed. Neither the regulations nor the nature of the prison made it possible."


"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?"


"We are living the American Dream, which is, of course, to benefit from someone else's misfortune."



"Born into thisInto hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to dieInto lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guiltyInto a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closedInto a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes..."


"People who are not on Facebook are face to face."


"Respectability is the dickey on the bosom of civilization."


"During the depression, people fought each other for boxes of groceries and if you were lucky you might get a few shillings for fighting six rounds. When Jack Johnson was World Heavyweight Champ, back in the early 1900s, Hartlepool had a brilliant boxer called Jasper Carter. People today will never have heard of him, but almost 100 years ago he put Hartlepool on the fistic map."


"Gods, religions and national boundaries are absolutely imaginary. They don't tend to exist. As soon as you pull back half a mile and look down at the Earth there are no national boundaries. There aren't even national boundaries when you get down and walk around. They're just imaginary lines we draw on maps. I just get fascinated by people who assume that things that are imaginary have no relevance to their lives."


"O woman, father says natural is beautifulso why do you redden your cheeks and blacken your eyes?Why do you remove the hair on your legsand draw them into your brows?Why do you hold your breathlest your stomach showand hold your fartlest they knowthat you're a human? O woman, father says natural is beautifulso why do you straighten your hairto curl it nextand pretend to orgasm so they think you enjoyed the sex?Why do you dumb yourself downand push your breasts up?Why do you smile when you're told toand love when you don't want to?When? When will you stop, woman? Father says natural is beautifulbut that is doubtfulfor what does father knowhe's only a fellow."


"Although there are certain needs, such as hunger, thirst, sex, which are common to man, those drives which make for the differences in men's characters, like love and hatred, the lust for power and the yearning for submission, the enjoyment of sensuous pleasure and the fear of it, are all products of the social process. The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed and biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man. In other words, society has not only a suppressing function - although it has that too - but it has also a creative function."


"No hero is a hero if he ever killed someone! Only the man who has not any blood in his hand can be a real hero! The honour of being a hero belongs exclusively to the peaceful people!"


"When we replace a sense of service and gratitude with a sense of entitlement and expectation, we quickly see the demise of our relationships, society, and economy."


"If the bringing of children into the world is today an economic burden, it is because the social system is inadequate; and not because God's law is wrong. Therefore the State should remove the causes of that burden. The human must not be limited and controlled to fit the economic, but the economic must be expanded to fit the human."


"But today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change. The large house in which we live demands that we transform this world-wide neighborhood into a world - wide brotherhood. Together we must learn to live as brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools.We must work passionately and indefatigably to bridge the gulf between our scientific progress and our moral progress. One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually."


"The wise person often shuns society for fear of being bored."


"Since we aim for a healthy life for all, we should teach young girls that their worth can't be validated by dating older rich men, because that is risky for their health. Until we change certain perceptions in society, we will keep fighting the same battles."


"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
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