Society Quotes - Page 35

• The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Political, Events, Aberration

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• Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.

  James A. Baldwin

  America, Battle, Heroism

  "Notes of a Native Son". Book by James Baldwin, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 21, 1955.

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• Who is not attracted by bright and pleasant children, to prattle, to creep, and to play with them?

  Epictetus

  Children, Play, Creeps

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• To be omnipotent but friendless is to reign.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Leadership, Reign, Friendless

  'Prometheus Unbound' (1820) act 2, scene 4, l. 47

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• A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Men, Thinking, Function

  Alfred North Whitehead (1967). “Adventures of Ideas”, p.98, Simon and Schuster

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• The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.

  George Steiner

  Broken, Silence, Graffiti

  George Steiner (1987). “George Steiner: A Reader”, p.432, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• Adults who still derive childlike pleasure from hanging gifts of a ready-made education on the Christmas tree of a child waiting outside the door to life do not realize how unreceptive they are making the children to everything that constitutes the true surprise of life.

  Karl Kraus

  Education, Children, Doors

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• Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.

  Karl Kraus

  Marriage, Literature, Unions

  Thomas Stephen Szasz, Karl Kraus (1990). “Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry”, p.152, Syracuse University Press

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• When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest.

  Karl Kraus

  Religion, Atheism, Culture

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• I feel sure that coups d'état would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what was happening and not miss anything.

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Funny, War, Missing

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• He knows very little of mankind who expects, by any facts or reasoning, to convince a determined party man.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  Party, Men, Politics

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• The public seldom forgive twice.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  Forgiving

  "Aphorisms on Man" by Johann Kaspar Lavater, (c. 1788).

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• There is one fact that can be established. The only phenomenon which, always and in all parts of the world, seems to be linked with the appearance of writing

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Writing, World, Facts

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• The conviction of tragedy that rises out of his [John Dos Passos's] work is the steady protest of a sensitive democratic conscience against the tyranny and the ugliness of society, against the failure of a complete human development under industrial capitalism.

  Alfred Kazin

  Tragedy, Development, Sensitive

  ALFRED kAZIN (1956). “ON NATIVE GROUNDS An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature”

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• The worst of revolutions is a restoration.

  Charles James Fox

  Restoration, Revolution, Rebellious

  Speech to the House of Commons, December 10, 1785.

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• Sociology and anthropology are not disciplines which take easily to situations where people are able to live out their fantasies, not just in the symbolic action of ritual, but in the concrete theater of society at large.

  Jonathan Raban

  Discipline, People, Able

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Soft City: Picador Classic”, p.53, Pan Macmillan

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• People become less inhibited from wanting to change social and economic conditions in a radical fashion according to their own interests, and from being prepared to think of state intervention in ever wider spheres as possible and useful for this purpose.

  Gunnar Myrdal

  Fashion, Thinking, People

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• Society is a kind of parent to its members. If it, and they, are to thrive, its values must be clear, coherent and generally acceptable.

  Milton Sapirstein

  Parent, Kind, Members

  Milton R. Sapirstein (1955). “Paradoxes of Everyday Life: A Psychoanalyst's Interpretations”

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• What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything he tries to get and succeeds in getting; what he gains is civil liberty and the proprietorship of all he possesses.

  Jean-Baptiste Rousseau

  Men, Trying, Liberty

  "Du Contrat Social" by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, translated by G. D. H. Cole, 1913.

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• Time and time again I have been persuaded that a huge potential of goodwill is slumbering within our society. It's just that it's incoherent, suppressed, confused, crippled and perplexed.

  Vaclav Havel

  Confused, Goodwill, Perplexed

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• We praise like frogs, Swear like frogs, Turn midgets into heroes, and heroes into scum: We never stop and think.

  Nizar Qabbani

  Hero, Thinking, Scum

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• Class war is not the cause of social progress; it is a disease developed in the course of social progress. The cause of the disease is the inability to subsist, and the result of the disease is war.

  Sun Yat-sen

  War, Class, Progress

  Dr. Sun Yat-Sen (1928). “San Min Chu I”

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• We will be able to achieve a just and prosperous society only when our schools ensure that everyone commands enough shared background knowledge to be able to communicate effectively with everyone else.

  Edward Hirsch

  School, Able, Enough

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• The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called ''significant literature'' will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles.

  Raymond Chandler

  Reading, Literature, Significant

  Raymond Chandler, Tom Hiney, Frank MacShane (2002). “The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959”, p.65, Grove Press

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• Every ruler is harsh whose laws is new.

  Aeschylus

  Leadership, Law, Harsh

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