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Society Quotes
"It only too often yields to the temptation to become sycophantic, opportunist and lying, like a politician who sees the truth but wants to keep his place in popular favour."
2
"On moonlight nights the long, straight street and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog's bark, glimmered in the pale recession. The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice."
2
"Somewhere on the Earth tonight, my Tylla, there is a Man with a Lever, which, when he pulls it, Will Save The World. The man is now unemployed. His switch gathers dust. He himself plays pinochle."
2
"No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it he must serve it too."
2
"It's such a shame that we know so little about our own country, that we can't find it in our hearts to love our own kind. Instead we admire those who show our country disrespect and betray its people."
2
"Mags seemed to attract trouble wherever she went. The Raploch Estate in Stirling was a nice backdrop, a middleclass place to live and bring up your kids until the scourge of drugs took a grip of its sons and daughters, like any other quiet township. The more the people needed drugs, the rougher and more violent the place became."
2
"It is a mistake, he said, "to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort."
2
"Spurious fame spreads from tongue to tongue like the fog of the early dawn before the sun rises."
2
"That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better."
2
"You label somebody 'New Age,' and that's automatic mockery: 'She cannot possibly be a serious thinker.'"
2
"Prejudice is a vagrant opinion without visible means of support."
2
"Where solitude endeth, there beginneth the market-place; and where the market-place beginneth, there beginneth also the noise of the great actors, and the buzzing of the poison-flies."
2
"It is man's social nature which distinguishes him from the brute creation. If it is his privilege to be independent, it is equally his duty to be inter-dependent. Only an arrogant man will claim to be independent of everybody else and be self-contained."
2
"When you know how to handle people, handle people well, for you may need people one day! Don't just shun them; don't kill them! Don't curse them; don't harm them! Pray for them, for they are a good part of the story, both for the good and for the bad; get understanding, and disarm the armed who seems to be a threat with wit and wisdom! Life is not a one day journey, so be careful!"
2
"The issues Miss Quested had raised were so much more important than she was herself that people inevitably forgot her."
2
"At least the more modern princesses had the guts to do something aside from clean and wait to be rescued. They armed themselves and tried to provide good role models to impressionable girl tykes. It riled some innate feminist... that the princesses were strongest when they were acting like the men..."
2
"Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this."
2
"She was not an unkind woman, despite a lifetime of being gently dried out on the stove of education, but she was conscientious and a stickler for propriety and thought she knew how this sort of thing should go and was vaguely annoyed that it wasn't going."
2
"Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If our civilization goes on like this, only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest."
2
"Improving the human condition takes little effort, destroying it takes maximum force."
2
"Humans live in a pit of cheating, exploiting, hurting, incarcerating. Every time, the species wastes some part of what it could be. This waste is poisonous."
2
"All around, grown men were getting out of cars and shoving at each other like fifteen-year-olds, the bunch of juiced-up, armchair quarterbacks ready to peanut-gallery it up: The closest they were going to get to the octagon was standing on the outside of the chicken wire looking in."
2
"And I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government."
2
"The idea that you have to avoid teaching evolution or pretend you're not teaching it is unique in the industrial world. And the statistics are mind-boggling. Roughly half the population think the world was created a couple thousand years ago."
2
"School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?"
2
"She'd been a good nurse, and now she'd never be a nurse again. She was bitter about it and had turned herself into the slut bride from Planet X, as if even in human form, she wanted people to know what she was now: different, other. Trouble was, she looked like a thousand other teens and early twenties who also wanted to be different and stand out."
2
"What a joke, coming from a woman who worked for the fashion industry. Really. Starving yourself to fit into a size zero - why did that size even exist? Zero referred to the absence of something, but what did it mean in terms of a model's measurements? Her fat? Or her presence? How much could you cut away before the person herself vanished? It was hypocritical, that's what it was. I said as much, adding, "If you're so keen on me being healthy then you should have no problem accepting me for the way I am. That's what's healthy, Mom. Not being focused on all this freaky weight-loss stuff."
2
"And so by the fifteenth century, on October 8, the Europeans were looking for a new place to try to get to, and they came up with a new concept: the West."
2
"Are you calling us pigs?' Froi asked, watching as Rafuel winced for the tenth time at the formality of Froi's Charyn.Rafuel thought for a moment and then nodded.'Actually yes, I am. Pig-like.'Froi turned back to Trevanion and Perri, who were discussing the need for longbow training in the rock village.'What is it?' Perri asked Froi.'He said we eat like pigs.'Trevanion and Perri thought about it for a moment and then went back to their conversation."
2
"My girlfriends and I talk a lot about feminism and the inequality between the way men and women are talked about, the kind of things we say are, 'Why is it mischievous, fun and sexy if a guy has a string of lovers that he's cast aside; loved and left? Yet if a woman dates three or four people in an eight-year period she is a serial dater and it gives some 12-year-old the idea to call her a 'slut' on the internet?' It's not the same for boys, it just isn't and that's a fact."
2
"That is one thing that in all my years among your folk I have never become accustomed to. The great importance that you attach to what gender one is."
2
"Last time I talked to her she didn't sound like herself. She's depressed. It's awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they're no good."
2
"A man is likely as a woman to be intelligent, innovative and creative. We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much."
2
"Institutionalized:Ghetto stars pimped so hard for so long -- they'll starve to pimp themselves behind psychic bars."
2
"All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news."
2
"I was ready to leave with every load, with every worthy individual of respectable appearance hiring a cab; but absolutely nobody invited me, not one; it was as if they had forgotten me, as if I was actually something alien to them!"
2
"The target of the masses is that which stands out of the masses."
2
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