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Society Quotes
"Young men are sadly degenerate nowadays."
2
"Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists."
2
"'Crazy' is a term of art; 'Insane' is a term of law. Remember that, and you will save yourself a lot of trouble."
2
"I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality [in Europe] producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property,...[One] means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise."
2
"Supporting a dictator is no different than eating a poisonous mushroom!"
2
"Modern society is modern because of its mental cocktail of reasoning and compassion. Turn the compassion network in the brain off, and it will be a society of heartless robots. On the other hand, turn the reasoning network off, and it will be a society of dumb sentimental apes."
2
"It's not about Al, I snap. "It's about everyone watching! Everyone who now seeshurling themselves into the chasm as a viable option. I mean, why not do it if everyonecalls you a hero afterward? Why not do it if everyone will remember your name? It's Ican't."
2
"Civilization has made life a humanized jungle, a sugar coated jungle, but still a jungle."
2
"One guy yelled at me, 'You stupid bitch, how do you live like that with nothing in your brain?' Well, that did it. I wasn't going to put up with that. Ok, I'm not so smart. I'm working class. But it's the working class that keeps the world running, and it's the working classes that get exploited. What kind of revolution is it that just throws out big words that working-class people can't understand? What kind of crap social revolution is that? I mean, I'd like to make the world a better place, too. If somebody's really being exploited, we've got to put a stop to it. That's what I believe, and that's why I ask questions. Am I right, or what?"
2
"They forget that love is not a science but an inherent state of mind; they forget that sex is practiced by animals without textbooks and that it is not such a secret that requires a complete science, courses and special training. And so impotent, with artificial stars on the ceilings of their rooms, they become the main teachers on the way to the stars."
2
"A society is an organic system that develops spontaneously, governed by myriad interactions and adjustments that no human mind can pretend to understand. Just because we cannot capture its workings in verbal propositions does not mean it should be scrapped and reinvented according to the fashionable theories of the day. Such ham-fisted tinkering will only lead to unintended consequences, culminating in violent chaos."
2
"Black people are either threats or entertainment."
2
"Leaders should never alienate themselves from the poor, if their main aim is to alleviate poverty."
2
"Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf."
2
"All of us - who might have probed space, or cured cancer, or built industries - were, instead, black victims of the white man's American social system."
2
"As a general rule the one who is not easily accessible is more valuable."
2
"Why, you may ask, didn't we have a cow tonight? No one would sell Bayard one. He had the brilliant idea of telling the farmers why he wanted the cow. The God-fearing folk would sell their cows to be eaten, but not for raising zombies. Prejudiced bastards."
2
"What a peculiar civilisation this was: inordinately rich, yet inclined to accrue its wealth through the sale of some astonishingly small and only distantly meaningful things, a civilisation torn and unable sensibly to adjudicate between the worthwhile ends to which money might be put and the often morally trivial and destructive mechanisms of its generation."
2
"They always believe that 'things are in a bad way now,' but they 'haven't any faith in these idealists.' One minute they call Wilson 'just a dreamer, not practical'- a year later they rail at him for making his dreams realities. They haven't clear logical ideas on one single subject except a sturdy, stolid opposition to all change. They don't think uneducated people should be highly paid, but they won't see that if they don't pay the uneducated people their children are going to be uneducated too, and we're going round and round in a circle. That- is the great middle class."
2
"In the twentieth century, nowhere on Earth was sex so vigorously suppressed as in America---and nowhere else was there such a deep interest in it."
2
"Many of the boys and men who are regarded as immature by some females are so deemed merely because they do not want to get married someday - or soon."
2
"Another good thing about being poor is that when you are seventy your children will not have you declared legally insane in order to gain control of your estate."
2
"For alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga- a belief that we're all connected as one people. If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me- even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription drugs and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer- even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that that threatens my civil liberties. It is that fundamental belief- I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper- that makes this country work."
2
"It's obsequious little nicety-nice girls like me who allow assholes to run the world: Miss Harlot O'Harlots, billionaire phony tree huggers, hypocrite drug-snorting, weed-puffing peace activists who fund the mass-murdering drug cartels and perpetuate crushing poverty in dirt-poor banana republics. It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities."
2
"I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy."
2
"Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn't be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple failure of imagination? One doesn't like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring about the end, yet..."
2
"So you've been gone a couple days,' Alison said. 'Hmm, what'd you miss...A celebrity did drugs. Politicians disagreed. A different celebrity wore a bikini that revealed a bodily imperfection. A team won a sporting event, but another team lost.' I smiled. 'You can't go disappearing on everybody like this, Hazel. You miss too much."
2
"ABNORMAL, adj. Not conforming to standards in matters of thought and conduct. To be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be detested.A striving toward the straiter [sic] resemblance of the Average Man than he hath to himself, whoso attaineth thereto shall have peace, the prospect of death and the hope of Hell."
2
"The world needs someone they can admire from a distance, from a very far distance."
2
"In short, not only was it surprising to be greeted in person with such enthusiastic words, but it was doubly surprising when the person reciting these words displayed the same kind of disengagement as, say, the checkout clerk who utters the words 'Have a nice day' while her expression indicates that it's really a matter of total indifference to her whether you drop dead in the parking lot outside ten seconds from now."
2
"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."
2
"Life is difficult for an ant, for a cat, for an elephant, for us, for birds! Everyone needs a helping hand, if not today, tomorrow for sure! Keep your hands ready for helping! Keep yourself ready to be helped!"
2
"Eh, brother, but nature has to be corrected and guided, otherwise we'd all drown in prejudices. Without that there wouldn't be even a single great man."
2
"It was so screwed up, because the thing that made us the most powerless also gave us such power. We could make them turn away. We could bother them and challenge them and mess them up. You think people are afraid of two boys in love? To hell with that. What people are really afraid of is two boys screwing."
2
"When gorillas smell danger, they run around and call out to the rest of the primates in the jungle to warn them something evil is coming. And when one of their own dies, they mourn for days while beating themselves up in sadness for failing to save that gorilla, even if the cause of death was natural. And when one colony is mourning, their chilling echoes migrate to other colonies - and those neighbors, even if they are territorial rivals, will also grieve with them. When faced with a common danger, rivals turn into allies. And when faced with death, the loss of just one gorilla becomes the loss of the entire jungle."
2
"We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language."
2
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