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Society Quotes
"Saying someone is religious is heard in most of America as a compliment, a reassuring affirmation that someone will be moral, ethical, and after a few glasses of wine, a freak in the bedroom."
14
"The wise person often shuns society for fear of being bored."
14
"I take from the poor and give to the rich. They just happen to be the same individuals. Poor and stupid before they learn from me and pay with their time and money, but rich and successful after they do. The truly miserable, however, don't know how poor they are, and I want nothing from them."
14
"For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us."
14
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
14
"I can't imagine why a media company views a law preventing the commission of hate speech as a restriction on media freedom, but it is probably similar to how some religious folk view hate speech as being essential to religious freedom."
14
"Someone asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don't have as much money. That was a true and incomplete answer. In fact women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage."
14
"The most evil institution in the world is the Roman Catholic Church."
14
"Who you allow into the circle of your life will make the difference in the quality of your life."
14
"Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion, destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness! They will not march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-demand principle; they will not; nor ought they, nor can they. Ye shall reduce them to order, begin reducing them. to order, to just subordination; noble loyalty in return for noble guidance. Their souls are driven nigh mad; let yours be sane and ever saner."
14
"Modern fanaticism thrives in proportion to the quanitity of contradictions and nonsense it poures down the throats of the gaping multitude, and the jargon and mysticism it offers to their wonder and credulity."
14
"The poor are very well off, at least the agricultural poor, very well off indeed. Their incomes are certain, that is a great point, and they have no cares, no anxieties; they always have a resource, they always have the House. People without cares do not require as much food as those whose life entails anxieties. See how long they live!"
14
"The point is that newspapers are not there for spreading news but for covering it up. X happens, you have to report it, but it causes embarrassment for too many people, so in the same edition you add some shock headlines - mother kills four children, savings at risk of going up in smoke, letter from Garibaldi insulting his lieutenant Nino Bixio discovered, etc. - so news drowns in a great sea of information."
14
"Murder was in fact a fairly uncommon event in Ankh-Morpork, but there were a lot of suicides. Walking in the night-time alleyways of The Shades was suicide. Asking for a short in a dwarf bar was suicide. Saying 'Got rocks in your head?' to a troll was suicide. You could commit suicide very easily, if you weren't careful."
14
"His principles were out of date, but there was a good deal to be said for his prejudices."
14
"If it was my business, I wouldn't talk about it. It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like stockbroker's do that, and then merely at dinner parties."
14
"When you build a city near no mountains and no ocean, you get materialism and traditional religion. People have too much time and lack inspiration."
14
"The sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as "substance" and "essence of man," and what they have deified and attacked: a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as "self-consciousness" and the "Unique."
14
"If we stood close to each other, side by side, as true brothers and sisters, then evil would not know how to stand between us."
14
"With heightened focus on the construction of woman as a "victim" of gender equality deserving reparations (whether through changes in discriminatory laws or affirmative action policies) the idea that owmen need to first confront their internalized sexism as part of becoming feminist lost currency. Females of all ages acted as though concern for or rage at male domination or gneder equality was all that was needed to make one a "feminist." Without confronting internalized sexism women who picked up the feminist banner often betrayed the cause in their interactions with other women."
14
"How unlucky that you should have a reasonable answer to give, and that I should be so reasonable as to admit it!"
14
"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time."
14
"If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression."
14
"Do not fuck with gun nuts because they are nuts about their guns."
14
"The old exhortations to nationalist fervor and jingoist pride have begun to lose their appeal. Perhaps because of rising standards of living, children are being treated better worldwide. In only a few decades, sweeping global changes have begun to move in precisely the directions needed for human survival. A new consciousness is developing which recognizes that we are one species."
14
"Folks who talk about no violence are always the ones who are first to call a policeman and usually they are sure there is one handy."
14
"The only genuine hope of feminist liberation lies wth a vision of social change which challenges class elitism."
14
"Wherever there is society, there is authority and the temptation to disobedience because our individual wills refuse to submit..."
14
"Still it is true that many same-sex couples want nothing more than to join society as fully integrated socially responsible family-centered taxpaying Little League-coaching nation-serving respectably married citizens. So why not welcome them in Why not recruit them by the vanload to sweep in on heroic wings and save the flagging and battered old institution of matrimony from a bunch of apathetic ne'er-do-well heterosexual deadbeats like me."
14
"What I've learned is that unless it's an emergency, like a fire or brain surgery, hierarchy is not necessary and may be damaging. If you have a hierarchy, you're repeating the strengths and weaknesses of one person without allowing for the accumulative strength of a group."
14
"One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man."
14
"There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other."
14
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