All Quotes By Tag: Society
“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.”…”There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality.”…”But they used to take morphia and cocaine.”…”Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178.”…”Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug.”…”Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant.”…”All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”…”Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology.”…”Stability was practically assured.”
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“The novel should tell the truth, as I see the truth, or as the novelist persuades me to see it. And one more demand: I expect the novelist to aspire to improve the world. … As a novelist, I want to be more than one more dog barking at the other dogs barking at me. Not out of any foolish hope that one novelist, or all virtuous novelists in chorus, can make much of a difference for good, except in the long run, but out of the need to prevent the human world from relaxing into something worse. To maintain the tension between truth and falsity, beauty and ugliness, good and evil. … I believe the highest duty of the serious novelist is, whatever the means or technique, to be a critic of his society, to hold society to its own ideals, or if these ideals are unworthy, to suggest better ideals.”
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“All of them are the same type; girls with overprocessed hair and too much makeup and way too much access to Daddy’s credit cards. Girls who, if you took away the designer labels, hair dye and cover-up, wouldn’t be more than average-looking, but with all that stuff look too plastic to be pretty.”
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“But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound.”
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“A system is corrupt when it is strictly profit-driven, not driven to serve the best interests of its people.”
“It wasn’t science and technology that cause a slow progress, but collective knowledge of the society and market demands.”
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“God invented smiles so that love could go anywhere.”
“It’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are – and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world … It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.”
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“Look, no matter where you live, the biggest defect we human beings have is our shortsightedness. We don’t see what we could be. We should be looking at our potential, stretching ourselves into everything we can become. But if you’re surrounded by people who say ‘I want mine now,’ you end up with a few people with everything and a military to keep the poor ones from rising up and stealing it.”
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“To say nothing is saying something. You must denounce things you are against or one might believe that you support things you really do not.”
“The church must suffer for speaking the truth, for pointing out sin, for uprooting sin. No one wants to have a sore spot touched, and therefore a society with so many sores twitches when someone has the courage to touch it and say: “You have to treat that. You have to get rid of that. Believe in Christ. Be converted.”
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“He told us that nations of men fell into disorder, so nations of law were set up instead. He told us that nations of law then forgot justice and let the law become a Game, a Game in which the moves and the winning were more important than truth. He told us to seek justice rather than the Game.”
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“Despite how entertaining certain stories were, at the bottom of every item of gossip there was someone getting hurt.”
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“Each time a person passes by you and you say ‘hello’, imagine that person turning into a candle. The more positivity, love and light you reflect, the more light is mirrored your way. Sharing beautiful hellos is the quickest way to earn spiritual brownie points. You should start seeing hellos as small declarations of faith. Every time you say hello to a stranger, your heart acknowledges over and over again that we are all family.”
“Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.”
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