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Society Quotes
"The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them."
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"The surest way of ruining a youth is to teach him to respect those who think as he does more highly than those who think differently from him."
12
"If I could remove one thing from the world and replace it with something else, I would erase politics and put art in its place. That way, art teachers would rule the world. And since art is the most supreme form of love, beautiful colors and imagery would weave bridges for peace wherever there are walls. Artists, who are naturally heart-driven, would decorate the world with their love, and in that love - poverty, hunger, lines of division, and wars would vanish from the earth forever. Children of the earth would then be free to play, imagine, create, build and grow without bloodshed, terror and fear."
12
"Though when at home their countenances varied with the seasons, their market faces all the year round were glowing little fires."
12
"No one HAS to do something he doesn't want to do for the rest of his life. But then again, if that's what you wind up doing, by all means convince yourself that you HAD to do it. You'll have lots of company."
12
"When modern sociologists talk of the necessity of accommodating one's self to the trend of the time, they forget that the trend of the time at its best consists entirely of people who will not accommodate themselves to anything. At its worst it consists of many millions of frightened creatures all accommodating themselves to a trend that is not there. And that is becoming more and more the situation...Every man speaks of public opinion, and means by public opinion, public opinion minus his opinion."
12
"That will do extremely well, child. You have delighted us long enough. Let the other young ladies have time to exhibit."
12
"Romantic love as most people understand it in patriarchal culture makes one unaware, renders one powerless and out of control. Feminist thinkers called attention to the way this notion of love served the interests of patriarchal men and women. It supported the notion that one could do anything in the name of love: beat people, restrict their movements, even kill them and call it a "crime of passion," plead, "I love her so much i had to kill her."
12
"The world has become a much smaller place, there is no longer room for hatred."
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"London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilization which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task!"
12
"There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this -- which will not be tomorrow and will not be today and may very well be never -- the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed."
12
"You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute."
12
"With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were the words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets."
12
"Home was never a dream for homeless people as they used to have their homes. Living in a home was their reality. Now we need to help them to find the lost-reality again."
12
"I feel despised there, for having so little money; also for once having had so much. I never actually had it, of course. Father had it, and then Richard. But money was imputed to me, the same way crimes are imputed to those who've simply been present at them."
12
"Why, because an author has more rights than ordinary people, as everybody knows. People will stand much more from him."
12
"In America the vast spaces accentuate the vast spaces between people, deserts which stretch between human beings. It is a void which has to be spanned by the automobile. It takes an hour to reach a movie, two hours to reach a friend. So the coyotes howl and wail at the awful emptiness of mountains, deserts, hills."
12
"The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society formed upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution."
12
"They ignored her because of their headphones, a thousand people marching to fifteen hundred different drummers, effectively secluded but for a very basic instinct not to bump into one another. Those that were unplugged rushed from place to place and were never actually anywhere other than "somewhere else."
12
"Love sharpens intelligence, fear dulls it. Who wants you to be intelligent? Not those who are in power. How can they want you to be intelligent?-because if you are intelligent you will start seeing the whole strategy, their games. They want you to be stupid and mediocre. They certainly want you to be efficient as far as work is concerned, but not intelligent; hence humanity lives at the lowest, at the minimum of its potential."
12
"There are two sides to the life of every man: there is his individual existence which is free in proportion as his interests are abstract; and his elemental life as a unit in the human swarm, in which he must inevitably obey the laws laid down for him."
12
"Avery doesn't know what these people are talking about, and since he's driving, he can't go online to check. The sensation he has is a strange, difficult one. He knows these people aren't talking about him. But at the same time they are talking about him, in their blanket dismissal. And they're also talking about us. Because so many of them are our age or older, stuck in previous decades of thought. The gays of today, the gays of yesterday-we're all the same bother, all the same wrong. Not people, really. Just something to yell about."
12
"I know why there is no glass, in front of the watercolor picture of blue irises, and why the window opens only partly and why the glass in it is shatter-proof. It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge."
12
"Why is it that a convict never saves his money? Well, not only is it difficult for him to keep it, but prison life is so miserable that a man, of his very nature, thirsts for freedom of action. His position in society makes him so irregular a being that the idea of swallowing up his capital in orgies, of intoxicating himself with revelry, seems to him quite natural if only he can procure himself one moment's forgetfulness."
12
"Most police cars are the equivalent of an electrical room on wheels and it does not surprise me that police officers that spend time in such a biologically toxic environment are displaying aggression."
12
"Newspapers are the Bibles of worldlings.How diligently they read them!Here they find their law and profits,their judges and chronicles,their epistles and revelations."
12
"The great appeal of drugs in the West is only because the West has succeeded in destroying the right hemisphere completely because of compulsory education."
12
"Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself."
12
"One of the most distinct features of this whole human history is god flattery! People never get tired of buttering every kind of gods in the hope of getting earthly benefit or obtaining heavenly plunder! Man is no doubt a tireless flunkey!"
12
"In my opinion, the state of mind of a community is always directly due to the influence of the man at the top."
12
"He said to people: you're free. And they said hooray, and then he showed them what freedom costs and they called him a tyrant and, as soon as he'd been betrayed, they milled around a bit like barn-bred chickens who've seen the big world outside for the first time, and then they went back into the warm and shut the door..."
12
"In a materialistic society, an employed boy is older than an unemployed man."
12
"Do not let us speak of darker days let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days: these are great days - the greatest days our country has ever lived."
12
"Let us admit, without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct interests and can, without felony, stipulate for those interests and defend them. The present has its pardonable amount of egotism; momentary life has its claims, and cannot be expected to sacrifice itself incessantly to the future. The generation which is in its turn passing over the earth is not forced to abridge its life for the sake of the generations, its equals after all, whose turn shall come later on."
12
"Most of the people are nice to live with, but not to do business with!"
12
"Academic sociologists have been trained to conceive of their discipline - sociology - as the scientific study of society, and to remit to the sister discipline of psychology the study of individuals."
12
"There were many women in the Soviet scientific community, proportionately more so than in the United States. But they tended to occupy menial middle-level positions, and male Soviet scientists, like their American counterparts, were puzzled about a pretty woman with evident scientific competence who forcefully expressed her views."
12
"The problem of society today: An absolute lifestyle of entitlement. People gauge everything by "feeling", meaning whatever they feel like doing or whatever they don't feel like doing. Passion is valued over dedication. Instant gratification is prized over true fulfillment. They don't know that more than feeling; intuition is the better key. They don't know that more than passion; fulfillment and dedication are the better keys. True passion will produce dedication and ultimately- fulfillment. If not, then it should not be called passion; it should just be called a lack of self control/ immaturity."
12
"Man cannot be reduced to slavery if he is not distorted first. The politician and the priest have been in a deep conspiracy down the ages. They have been reducing humanity to a crowd of slaves. They are destroying every possibility of rebellion in man-and love is rebellion, because love listens only to the heart and does not care a bit about anything else."
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