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Society Quotes


"The target of the masses is that which stands out of the masses."


"I was waiting for you," said Gregory. "Might I have a moment's conversation?""Certainly. About what?" asked Syme in a sort of weak wonder.Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the tree. "About this and this," he cried; "about order and anarchy. There is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself--there is anarchy, splendid in green and gold.""All the same," replied Syme patiently, "just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree."


"In that pallid and sullen shadow in which he crawled, whenever he turned his head and endeavoured to raise his eyes, he saw, with mingled rage and terror, forming, massing, and mounting up out of sight above him with horrid escarpments, a kind of frightful accumulation of things, of laws, of prejudices, of men, and of acts, the outlines of which escaped him, the weight of which appalled him, and which was no other than that prodigious pyramid that we call civilization."


"Either a species learns to control its own population, or something like disease, famine, war, will take care of the issue."


"Millions of deaths would not have happened if it weren't for the consumption of alcohol. The same can be said about millions of births."


"Violence is avoided, when we sit down with others, and discuss issues, and work together for solutions."


"But these few are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist, it is they who keep the life in those which already existed."


"Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls. Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being."


"In a country where people are afraid of criticizing the government, many things must be going horrible! In such countries people must know that a society of cowards will always be remembered as a society of honourless people!"



"Respect, I think, always implies imagination - the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls."


"Will any of those men under you ever really understand all this? They're professional cynics, and it's too late for them. Why do you want to go back with them? So you can keep up with the Joneses? To buy a gyro just like the Smith has? To listen to music with your pocketbook instead of your glands?"


"Our fight is a fundamental fight against both of the old corrupt party machines, for both are under the dominion of the plunder league of the professional politicians who are controlled and sustained by the great beneficiaries of privilege and reaction."


"Everyone just wasting time because they have so much of it to waste, minutes slipping by on who's with who and did you hear."


"A pickpocket is obviously a champion of private enterprise. But it would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that a pickpocket is a champion of private property. The point about Capitalism and Commercialism, as conducted of late, is that they have really preached the extension of business rather than the preservation of belongings; and have at best tried to disguise the pickpocket with some of the virtues of the pirate."


"The government is ethics rape in perpetuity."


"Journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarist."


"A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless."


"For some reason I was reluctant to ask anybody what had happened. I hate being the person who always doesn't know what's going on and has to ask somebody; it always seems like everybody else knows what's going on. This is a clear low-status marker, and I resisted it."


"For the wealthy, money is a tool. For the impoverished, it is the rule."


"That's just how white folks will do you. It wasn't merely the cruelty involved; I was learning that black people could be mean and then some. It was a particular brand of arrogance, an obtuseness in otherwise sane people that brought forth our bitter laughter. It was as if whites didn't know they were being cruel in the first place. Or at least thought you deserved of their scorn."


"And, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves as one, but every child was conducting itself like forty."


"A society must create lots of sunshine for its miners as they need the sun most! And 'to be remembered, to be respected' is a good sunshine; 'safety in the mine' is a good sunshine!"


"When people are broken on the outside, society is taught to never be rude to them. When people are broken on the inside, society is taught to rub happiness in their faces and show them how perfect life should be. When someone has half of an arm, you are not supposed to go up to them and show them how great of an arm wrestler you are. But when someone has a broken mind or a broken soul, you're taught to go up to them and tell them to look for joy in everything. Society has a very long way to go in terms of what it means to heal this world's broken people."


"A manual for how to build a mentally ill child."


"Trying to erase, hide, discredit, degrade, and suppress a writer's work, merit, voice, and influence-is unconstitutional. Censorship only exists to protect corruption."


"Over the last 25 years, the major popular movements that have had significant impact on the general society and have changed it, that have had a major civilizing effect " the feminist movement, the environmental movement, and so on " these are mostly developments of the '70s and '80s. Their roots might be in the activism of the '60s, but the movements themselves developed and extended later. The same is true of the changes in respect for other cultures, rights of oppressed people, and so on. These are quite significant changes. If you compare the United States now to what it was, say, 35 years ago, the changes are quite dramatic. These are changes in popular consciousness that are quite deeply embedded."


"I wanted us to have an adventure. Because I love that crap. Because I'm not whatever-her-name-is. I don't think it's oh so hard to walk four miles in the snow. I want that. I love that."


"When bad news sells, money politics buys."


"More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don't have to think, eh? Organize and organize and superorganize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee."


"Religious toleration, to a certain extent, has been won, because people have ceased to consider religion so important as it was once thought to be. But in politics and economics, which have taken the place formerly occupied by religion, there is a growing tendency to persecution, which is not by any means confined to one party."


"Instead of asking, "Why is there war? we might ask, "Why is there peace? We can obsess not just over what we have been doing wrong but also over what we have been doing right. Because we have been doing something right, and it would be good to know what, exactly, it is."


"In seeking to severely penalize criminals society by putting the criminals away behind safe walls actually provide them with the means of greater strength for future atrocities glorious and otherwise."



"To say that the emperor has no clothes is a nice anti-authoritarian gesture, but to say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision but only an inverted version of the mainstream's 'everything's fine."


"Imagine a problem in psychology: to find a way of getting people in our day and age - Christians, humanitarians, nice, kind people - to commit the most heinous crimes without feeling any guilt. There is only one solution - doing just what we do now: you make them governors, superintendents, officers or policemen, a process which, first of all, presupposes acceptance of something that goes by the name of government service and allows people to be treated like inanimate objects, precluding any humane or brotherly relationships, and, secondly, ensures that people working for this government service must be so interdependent that responsibility for any consequences of the way they treat people never devolves on any one of them individually."


"The only true disability is the inability to accept and respect differences."


"A society, on occasion, can be the worst possible describer of mental health."


"If we are to be truly free, that freedom will come through cooperation and tolerance with one another."
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