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Society Quotes


"Isn't it awkward how a lot of the people who tell others to 'stop being cheap,' are usually the same ones that end up borrowing money from them?"


"Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken..."


"Never follow the crowd....Until and unless you're crossing the road."


"Let us know our differences! Let us understand our differences! Let us know and understand that we are all different people with different differences! We all have different differences that are not all that different! Understanding is the matter! When we get to know and understand our differences well, we shall least spit on each other just because of our differences!"


"Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it...."


"The police are often as corrupt as the corporate government that employs them."


"No man can have society upon his own terms. If he seeks it he must serve it too."


"The more civilized people are, the more honorable working hard is to them. As a result, the more civilized we get, the less we live."



"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."


"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."


"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!"


"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."


"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."


"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."



"Down there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no."


"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."


"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."


"Insanity can be a heavy cross to bear; I mean look at all those people in loony bins compared to those that are free and walking the streets " a tiny percentage are classed as mad. The incidence of mental problems amongst people is said to be rising, so what do they go and do, they cut the amount of asylums by half! Whoever makes these decisions has to be a loon and a half!"


"When it comes to the crusty behavior of some people, give them the benefit of the doubt. They may be drowning right before your eyes, but you can't see it. And you would never ask someone to drown with a smile on his face."


"So it was in Botswana, almost everywhere; ties of kinship, no matter how attenuated by distance or time, linked one person to another, weaving across the country a human blanket of love and community. And in the fibres of that blanket there were threads of obligation that meant that one could not ignore the claims of others. Nobody should starve; nobody should feel that they were outsiders; nobody should be alone in their sadness."


"The surgeons' market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women's faces or bodies that social change won't cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred."


"Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new."


"They judged me like they would judge themselves and that's what they could never understand, we are all human but we are not the same."


"We have entertained ourselves with the pornography of violence and inflamed passions that might otherwise have slumbered..."


"If it could come about that each of us were to describe his innermost secrets "secrets which one would hesitate to tell not only to people at large, but even to one's closest friends, nay, to fear to admit even to one's own self - the world would be filled with such a stench that each one of us would choke to death. That's why, speaking in parenthesis, all our social conventions and niceties are so beneficial."


"William Cowper said that God made the country, and man made the town. If it was the opposite, there would be no country; because town can be created from the country but the country cannot be created from the town!"


"The function of the well-intentioned individual, acting in isolation, is to formulate or disseminate theoretical truths. The function of the well-intentioned individuals in association is to live in accordance with those truths, to demonstrate what happens when theory is translated into practice, to create small-scale working models of the better form of society to which the speculative idealist looks forward."


"Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking."


"Why does it seem that the church is more interested in people involvement rather than people engagement."


"Deep in my heart politeness impresses me more than competence."


"He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us. "Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes."


"In a conservative old town, say something new and be prepared for the stones!"


"The world doesn't need a good woman who is meekly obedient to the uncivilized social norms that advocate female inferiority. The world needs those bad women who can think for themselves, to break the primeval norms of the society that consistently drag the human civilization back to the stone-age."
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