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Society Quotes
"The one thing ... that is truly ugly is the climate of hate and intimidation, created by a noisy few, which makes the decent majority reluctant to air in public their views on anything controversial. ... Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all."
13
"Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation from government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment."
13
"The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care & reproductive health services, we could LOWER that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent."
13
"Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty."
13
"A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repressive and murderous society."
13
"In this world one must have a name; it prevents confusion, even when it does not establish identity. Some, though, are known by numbers, which also seem inadequate distinctions."
13
"Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We've seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse."
13
"One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody."
13
"It's going to happen soon, a nuclear war. Someday, somewhere, some jackass politician will get in over his head and push the button, and us? Society? We haven't really grasped the full reality of the situation. If a nuclear bomb were detonated, we'd all just be collateral damage. That's why it has to be prevented, because trust me when I say that nobody will be standing up for our rights or life when there's no one left to do so."
13
"I have been the patient one. I have waited for the world to stop being silly. I have waited for it to stop wars. I have waited for politicians to be honest. I have waited for real estate men to be good citizens. But while I wait, I dance!"
13
"Again, as I had often met it in my own church, I was confronted with the Impurity of Women doctrine that seemed to preoccupy all clergymen."
13
"Since its appearance the view that prostitution is a product of capitalism has gained ground enormously. And as, in addition, preachers still complain that the good old morals have decayed, and accuse modern culture of having led to loose living, everyone is convinced that all sexual wrongs represent a symptom of decadence peculiar to our age."
13
"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."
13
"Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out."
13
"While religious tolerance is surely better than religious war, tolerance is not without its liabilities. Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us incapable of criticizing ideas that are now patently absurd and increasingly maladaptive."
13
"It's a strange thing, to be talked about instead of talked to."
13
"As Elizabeth Blackmar and Ray Rosenzweig wrote in their magisterial history of [Central Park in NYC]: 'The issue of demoncratic access to the park has also been raised by the increasing number of homeless New Yorkers. Poor people--from the 'squatters' of the 1850s to the 'tramps' of the 1870s and 1890s to the Hooverville residents of the 1930s--have always turned to the park land for shelter...The growing visibility of homeless people in Central Park osed in the starkest terms the contradiction between Americans' commitment to democratic space and their acquiescence in vast disparities of wealth and power."
13
"Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty?"
13
"Many words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were considered so distastefully explicit that, were they merely to be breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from polite society, and in some extreme cases shot through the lungs, are now thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday speech and writing is seen as evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed and totally un****ed-up personality."
13
"Some want more than they need, and others think they need more than they want. That's why we have so many greedy people who can't share with the poor."
13
"Love as a concrete foundation for an authentically functional civilization requires the around-the-clock labors of forgiveness. Without it, Love fails, Friendship fails, Intelligence fails, Humanity: fails."
13
"If I'm walking down an American street and anyone darker than a peanut shell approaches, I'll say, 'Hello.' This because, if I don't say it, he or she might think that I'm anxious. Which, of course, I must be, otherwise I'd walk by in silence, just as I do with my fellow Caucasians.Does this make me racist, or simply race conscious? Either way, I'm more afraid of conservatives than I am of black people."
13
"More than anyone else in the society, these men had apparently dreamed the dream and made it work. And what they did then was to build a place which seems to illustrate, as in a child's primer, that the production ethic led step by step to unhappiness, to restrictiveness, to entrapment in the mechanics of living."
13
"Never before have the tools of value creation been so great and the potential artisans so busy watching the Kardashians."
13
"He was looking for programs on which he might be allowed to appear. But it was too early in the evening for programs that allowed people with peculiar opinions to speak out. It was only a little after eight o'clock, so all the shows were about silliness or murder."
13
"If we stopped calling it profiling and started calling it 'proactive intelligence screening' or 'high alert detecting', people would be saying 'Well, it's about time'."
13
"Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity, and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom."
13
"People are often frightened of Parisians, but an American in Paris will find no harsher critic than another American."
13
"People live in different worlds. There's a rich world, there's a poor world, and there's an extremely poor. The one you dwell is determined by the outcome of your sacrifice."
13
"The alienation, the downright visceral frustration, of the new American ideologues, the bone in their craw, is the unacknowledged fact that America has never been an especially capitalist country. The postal system, the land grant provision for public education, the national park system, the Homestead Act, the graduated income tax, the Social Security system, the G.I. Bill -- all of these were and are massive distributions or redistributions of wealth meant to benefit the population at large."
13
"I was pure, before you defiled me, and don't you forget it. As though the concept of purity is anything more than the construct of selfish, competitive men stampeding toward the women to call dibs. I'll be damned if I'm not worth stampeding toward, but the prize had better be me, hymen or no hymen."
13
"I think that to acknowledge a new generation is to acknowledge some degree of obsolescence in yourself, and that is very hard to do and often comes with undeniable anger."
13
"Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are not as they ought to be."
13
"Selfish, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others."
13
"TO ALL MANKIND. Speak kind words to man, kind and the unkind will attack you. Speak common sense using any of your senses, and you will be attacked by the senseless. Speak truth, and you will be attacked by the untruthful. Speak about absolutely nothing, and absolutely nothing will speak back, but then nothing at all will ever change."
13
"Agent Jones switched to the big screen and a grainy video of MoMo sitting at his enormous desk, a swivel-hipped Elvis clock ticking behind his bewigged head. 'Death to the capitalist pigs! Death to your cinnamon bun-smelling malls! Death to your power walking and automatic car windows and I'm With Stupid T-shirts! The Republic of ChaCha will never bend to your side-of-fries -drive -through-please-oh-would-you-like-ketchup-with-that corruption! MoMo B. ChaCha defies you and all you stand for, and one day, you will crumble into the sea and we will pick up the pieces and make them into sand art."
13
"What's really sad is that so many young women between the ages of 16 and 25 are ignorant and they already believe that women get the same pay as men. They don't even really understand that equality hasn't happened with the pay force."
13
"Because it's no longer enough to be a decent person. It's no longer enough to shake our heads and make concerned grimaces at the news. True enlightened activism is the only thing that can save humanity from itself."
13
"Even the Us's are Them's."
13
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