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Society Quotes
"It's a good thing that columnists don't make homosexuality their last taboo anymore. But I wish the columnists themselves would come out too."
21
"Infectious diseases introduced with Europeans, like smallpox and measles, spread from one Indian tribe to another, far in advance of Europeans themselves, and killed an estimated 95% of the New World's Indian population."
21
"The most important thing to a lot of people, is to belong to something that's hip or whatever. To be a part of something that's not society, just a clique."
21
"It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans, in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World."
21
"A remarkable feature of the humanitarian movement, on both its sentimental and utilitarian sides, has been its preoccupation with the lot of the masses."
21
"It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company."
21
"These are not dark days: these are great days - the greatest days our country has ever lived."
21
"In the beginning there was only a small amount of injustice abroad in the world, but everyone who came afterwards added their portion, always thinking it was very small and unimportant, and look where we have ended up today."
21
"The Parthenon without the marbles is like a smile with a tooth missing."
21
"The underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us..."
21
"Rotten travesty. Yeah. Send me to jail for contempt. Try that. Go ahead."
20
"Because Social Security is specifically designed to boost the retirement income of low earners with a progressive benefit formula, the program has played an enormous and necessary role in keeping Latinas out of poverty."
20
"What is the damnation of hell? To go with that society who have not obeyed His commands."
20
"War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society."
20
"We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society."
20
"He who negates present society, and seeks social conditions based on the sharing of property, is a revolutionary whether he calls himself an anarchist or a communist."
20
"AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq."
20
"Champions keep playing until they get it right."
20
"Persian social manners are well known, and there is no other society that can compete with them."
20
"According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for."
20
"Society as a whole is better off when information is available to the public. Whether you are talking about how to prevent disease, or about who does the best job of treating disease, it is useful to provide as much information to the public as possible."
20
"It is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever produced."
20
"Just about every year, Congress passes another crime bill - spending billions of dollars to build more prisons, to place more band-aids on society's scars."
20
"Cities produce in me melancholy or a tension I don't need."
20
"I, for one, would think both about how far we have come as a country and how much further we need to go to erase racism and discrimination from our society."
20
"I can't say that I've changed anybody's life, ever, and that's the real work of the world, if you want a better society."
20
"Fixing a broken immigration system. Protecting our kids from gun violence. Equal pay for equal work, paid leave, raising the minimum wage. All these things still matter to hardworking families; they are still the right thing to do; and I will not let up until they get done."
20
"America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."
20
"The world is a show and the show is a performance of the wealthy, the beautiful and the fortunate. The invulnerable, the matchless and the exclusive live a life like dazzling fish in a scintillating seascape behind glass. Everybody may admire them, but nobody can touch them. ['Keeping up with the Joneses']"
20
"I am sorry to have to introduce the subject of Christmas into these articles. It is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly subject; a wasteful, disastrous, subject; a wicked, cadging, lying, filthy, blashphemous, and demoralizing subject. Christmas is forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press: on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred; and any one who looked back to it would be turned into a pillar of greasy sausages."
20
"Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized."
20
"Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all."
20
"A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation."
20
"Also " for there had been more than a few migrants aboard, yes, quite a quantity of wives who had been grilled by reasonable, doing-their-job officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands' genitalia, a sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy the British Government had cast its ever-reasonable doubts " mingling with the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home."
20
"Society mends its wounds. And that's invariably true in all the tragedies, in the comedies as well. And certainly in the histories."
19
"If you want to know who is being hurt in this society, go see what is being done and to whom in pornography and then go look for them other places in the world."
19
"The only yardstick for success our society has is being a champion. No one remembers anything else."
19
"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."
19
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