Quotations about Society and Modern Living

by 3loomi Tue Oct 26, 2010 4:13 am

Most people are awaiting Virtual Reality; I'm awaiting virtuous reality. ~Eli Khamarov, "Lives of the Cognoscenti"

I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance. ~Reuben Blades

When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat? ~Chuck Palahniuk

One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of falseshame, we have killed off so much real shame as well. ~LouisKronenberger, Company Manners, 1954

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. ~Krishnamurti

Our modern society is engaged in polishing and decorating the cage in which man is kept imprisoned. ~Swami Nirmalananda, Enlightened Anarchism

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter withthe poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness. ~George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists

Our democratic capitalist society has converted Eros into an employee of Mammon. ~Octavio Paz

The first gold star a child gets in school for the mere performance ofa needful task is its first lesson in graft. ~Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers, 1942

I think God's going to come down and pull civilization over for speeding. ~Steven Wright

There comes a time when a woman needs to stop thinking about her looksand focus her energies on raising her children. This time comes at themoment of conception. A child needs a role model, not a supermodel. ~Astrid Alauda, on the "hot mom" trend

What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? ~Henry David Thoreau

It's a sad and stupid thing to have to proclaim yourself a revolutionary just to be a decent man. ~David Harris

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planetis the mental institution of the universe. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It'll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and theAir Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers. ~Unknown author,quoted in You Said a Mouthful edited by Ronald D. Fuchs

If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention. ~Author Unknown

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat. ~Lily Tomlin

Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scornto smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams. ~MaryEllen Kelly

Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion? ~William Lloyd Garrison

Society is composed of two great classes - those who have more dinnersthan appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners. ~Sébastien-Roch Nicholas de Chamfort

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon losesboth. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower, first inaugural address, 20 January 1953

It is the safest of times, it is the riskiest of times.... What theDickens is going on here? ~Denton Morrison, on chemicals, technology,and risk, quoted in National Academy of Sciences, Improving RiskCommunication, 1989

Few great men could pass Personnel. ~Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society, 1956

t's getting harder and harder to worry needlessly. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you thinkabsurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and socialconventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It isthat permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all thedead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makesyou sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict youlose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at everymoment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of yourpowers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world. ~Octave Mirbeau, [i]Torture Garden, "The Mission," Chapter 8

It would be a service to mankind if the pill were available in slotmachines and the cigarette were placed on prescription. ~MalcolmPotts, MD

There is no hope for a civilization which starts each day to the sound of an alarm clock. ~Author Unknown

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them. ~Bill Vaughn

The time is ripe, and rotten-ripe, for change. ~Lowell

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own. ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots. ~Erich Fromm

We create an environment where it is alright to hate, to steal, tocheat, and to lie if we dress it up with symbols of respectability,dignity and love. ~Whitney Moore, Jr.

When people go to work, they shouldn't have to leave their hearts at home. ~Betty Bender

Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century. ~Greg Egan, "Distress"

People have become as processed as food. ~Astrid Alauda

In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning. ~Carl Sandburg, New York Post, 9 September 1960

Oh, for the good old days when people would stop Christmas shopping when they ran out of money. ~Author Unknown

Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favor.
~Robert Frost, "The Black Cottage," North of Boston, 1914

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
~T.S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock

Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave notjust of youth but of the world we were young in. ~Peter Medawar

Mammalia, n.pl. A family of vertebrate animals whose females in astate of nature suckle their young, but when civilized and enlightenedput them out to nurse, or use the bottle. ~Ambrose Bierce

Choice has always been a privilege of those who could afford to pay for it. ~Ellen Frankfort

You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it. ~Art Buchwald

Those persons who are burning to display heroism may rest assured thatthe course of social evolution will offer them every opportunity. ~Havelock Ellis

The trouble with our age is that it is all signposts and no destination. ~The War Cry

It isn't so much that hard times are coming; the change observed is mostly soft times going. ~Groucho Marx

We have produced a world of contented bodies and discontented minds. ~Adam Clayton Powell, Keep the Faith, Baby!, 1967

Think what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world - hadcookies and milk about three o’clock every afternoon and then lay downwith our blankies for a nap. ~Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, commonly misattributed to Barbara Jordan because she quoted Fulghum in a commencement address

The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. ~Omar Bradley

Being human in our modern civilization is being forced into a boxingring with Nature. And we're bloodied every time. ~M. Robin D'Antan

Speed kills colour... the gyroscope, when turning at full speed, shows up gray. ~Paul Morand

We are living in a world today where lemonade is made from artificialflavors and furniture polish is made from real lemons. ~Alfred E.Newman

Is it my imagination, or does shipping and handling settle a box of crackers more than it used to? ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The thoughts of Plato and Machiavelli... don't seem quite enough armorfor a world beset with splitting the atoms, urban guerrillas, nineteenvarieties of psychotherapists, amplified guitars, napalm, computers,astronauts, and an atmosphere polluted simultaneously with auto exhaustand TV commercials. ~John Fischer

Nothing can be more readily disproved than the old saw, "You can't keepa good man down." Most human societies have been beautifully organizedto keep good men down. ~John W. Gardner

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be. ~Paul Valery

What's wrong with this world is, it's not finished yet. It is notcompeted to the point where man can put his final signature to the joband say, "It is finished. We made it and it works." ~WilliamFaulkner, address, Wellesley, Massachusetts, 8 June 1952

Most people are willing to pay more to be amused than to be educated. ~Robert C. Savage, Life Lessons

Life has been reduced to getting food out of cans. ~Martin H. Fischer

Food. Water. Shelter. Air. Sleep. Societal inflation has expandedneed into greed. Suddenly the basic survival needs also include a cellphone, cable TV, and French manicured fingernails.... We've become theabsolute biggest whiners of all human history with the absolutesmallest justification for whining. ~Charlie Diekatze

When we think of the past, we forget the fools and remember the sage. We reverse the process for our own time. ~George Boas

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. ~Gertrude Stein

Yes, I am positive that one of the great curatives of our evils, ourmaladies, social, moral, and intellectual, would be a return to thesoil, a rehabilitation of the work of the fields. ~Charles Wagner

You taught me to be nice, so nice that now I am so full of niceness, Ihave no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion. ~GarrisonKeillor

Commuter - one who spends his life
In riding to and from his wife;
A man who shaves and takes a train,
And then rides back to shave again.
~E.B. White, "The Commuter," Poems and Sketches, 1982

Unhappy is a people that has run out of words to describe what is going on. ~Thurman Arnold

Nowadays you envy a manic-depressive. Half the time he's happy, the other half he's right. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Fame is proof that the people are gullible. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I believe that one of the great problems for us as individuals is thedepression and the tension resulting from existence in a world which isincreasingly less pleasing to the eye. ~Lady Bird Johnson

So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goesbut to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper thecontrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress isnot real and cannot be permanent. ~Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879

One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition. ~Alvin Toffler

The world is so dreadfully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain. ~Ronald Firbank

Depressed? Of course we're all depressed. We've been so quickly,violently, and irreconcilably plucked from nature, from physical labor,from kinship and village mentality, from every natural and primordialanti-depressant. The further society "progresses," the grander thescale of imbalance. Just as fluoride is put in water to prevent dentalcaries, we'll soon find government mandating Prozac in our water toprevent mental caries. ~M. Robin D'Antan

We get lost in a fog of abstractions and easily forget that man is a bloodhound sniffing out the real. ~Robert C. Pollock

Failure seems to be regarded as the one unpardonable crime, success asthe all-redeeming virtue, the acquisition of wealth as the singleworthy aim of life. The hair-raising revelations of skullduggery andgrand-scale thievery merely incite others to surpass by yet bolderoutrages and more corrupt combinations. ~Charles Francis Adams

The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it isfully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it. ~DanielWebster

The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on myface. Thousands and thousands of us, and we're passing one anotherwithout a look of recognition. ~Henry Miller

Most people know more about their congressmen via smear campaigns thanthey know about their own neighbor via conversations, and a lot ofpeople know more about Britney Spears via tabloids than they know abouttheir own congressmen via voting booklets. Does anyone else see theproblem here? ~Brock Fiant

Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. ~Aldous Huxley, Island

Wall Street criminality is growing by leaps. There are no bounds. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Flowers don't open to the clock
but to the sunshine spontaneous;
for modern humans that manner
of instinct is now extraneous.
~Astrid Alauda, "If I Cry Will I Rust"

People haven't time to learn anything. They buy things ready-made instores. But since there are no stores where you can buy friends,people no longer have friends. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943, translated from French by Richard Howard

The human race has had long experience and a fine tradition insurviving adversity. But we now face a task for which we have littleexperience, the task of surviving prosperity. ~Alan Gregg

I never expected to see the day when girls would get sunburned in the places they do now. ~Will Rogers

I don't believe medical discoveries are doing much to advance humanlife. As fast as we create ways to extend it we are inventing ways toshorten it. ~Christiaan Barnard

Society is always engaged in a vast conspiracy to preserve itself - atthe expense of the new demands of each new generation. ~John HaynesHolmes

The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded. ~Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

Junk mail, junk food, our society is full of junk living, period. ~Carrie Latet

Information and communications technology unlocks the value of time,allowing and enabling multi-tasking, multi-channels, multi-this andmulti-that. ~Li Ka Shing

[The] men of the technostructure are the new and universal priesthood. Their religion is business success; their test of virtue is growth andprofit. Their bible is the computer printout; their communion bench isthe committee room. ~J.K. Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 1977

If living conditions don't stop improving in this country, we're goingto run out of humble beginnings for our great men. ~Russell P. Askue

With each passing year, one has less to say, and knows better how to say it. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price,peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love ofsoft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life. ~Theodore Roosevelt

It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegianceto truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face herwhere graver issues are at stake. ~Norman Douglas

There's a standard formula for success in the entertainment medium, andthat is: "Beat it to death if it succeeds." ~Ernie Kovacs

[H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely. ~Will and Ariel Durant, Lessons of History

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progressrequires them are not really progress at all, but just terriblethings. ~Russell Baker

Society is now one polish'd horde,
Formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.
~Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto XIII, stanza 95

I've been reading a lot lately about Indian captives. One woman whohad been captured by the Indians and made a squaw was resentful whenshe was rescued because she'd found that there was a lot more work todo as the wife of a white man. ~Stephen Vincent Benét

Information should be used as food for thought, not poison to the soul. ~Shellie R. Warren

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies. ~Cesare Pavese

The things that are wrong with the country today are the sum total ofall the things that are wrong with us as individuals. ~Charles W. Tobey

The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic... power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmentaldisease of the age. ~Russell Baker, New York Times, 1 May 1969

Cell phones are the latest invention in rudeness. ~Terri Guillemets

Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moraldistinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. Weprefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individualresponsibility. ~Thomas Szasz

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowlingthrough the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, butthe earth is still going round the sun. ~George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant, 1950

It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Over the Teacups, 1891

The three horrors of modern life - talk without meaning, desire without love, work without satisfaction. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Most of our diversions do not so much delay death as accustom us to it. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

There is no appeal from the ways of the world, which must continue onits own terms or take us all down with it into chaos and confusion. ~Mark van Doren

Once the Xerox copier was invented, private diplomacy died. There's nosuch thing as secrecy. It's just a question of whether it's leaked orrevealed openly. ~Andrew Young

It is madness beyond compare
To try to reform the world.
~Molière, The Misanthrope, 1666

In nature, there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences. ~Robert Greene Ingersoll, "The New Testament," Some Reasons Why, 1881

The number of substitutes for fine and clean thinking the world provides positively gnaws at one's vitals. ~Harold J. Laski

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but toescape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. ~Marcus Aurelius

I think societal instinct much deeper than sex instinct - and societal repression much more devastating. ~D.H. Lawrence

In spite of all our speeding it's still the style to be late. ~Kin Hubbard

Noise, crowding, pollution, and the sheer rush of our complex, modernsociety are rapidly becoming as oppressive to many individuals as theworst kind of political dictatorship. ~Thomas F. Eagleton

The public is hedged about by so many goddam bookkeepers that no timeis left in which to produce. More time is spent in carrying outgarbage than in carrying in food. ~Martin H. Fischer

The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence onthe wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet how can anyonespeak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heartfettered, wounded, and maimed?... With human nature caged in a narrowspace, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of itspotentialities? ~Emma Goldman, Anarchism

I am not quite sure what the advantage is in having a few more dollarsto spend if the air is too dirty to breathe, the water too polluted todrink, the commuters are losing out in the struggle to get in and outof the city, the streets are filthy, and the schools so bad that theyoung perhaps wisely stay away, and the hoodlums roll citizens for someof the dollars they saved in the tax cut. ~John Kenneth Galbraith

Beggars should be abolished. It annoys one to give to them, and itannoys one not to give to them. ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, "On thePitying," Thus Spake Zarathustra

We have smothered ourselves, buried ourselves, in the vast heap ofinformation which all of us have and none of us has. ~Gamaliel Bradford

The secret to living contently and sanely in this modern world is to...find the beautiful in the ugly - but don't get confused which iswhich. ~Terri Guillemets

I believe... that security declines as security machinery expands. ~E.B. White

If some people got their rights they would complain of being deprived of their wrongs. ~Oliver Herford

How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cakemixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to itsyoung? ~Paul Sweeney

Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers. ~Mignon McLaughlin

Final Ruin fiercely drives
Her ploughshare o'er creation.
~Edward Young

Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers. ~Erik Pepke

There are more doctors in a single North Shore medical building than in one entire West Side ghetto. ~Jack Starr

The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when wewere defenceless against tigers than they are today when we have becomedefenceless against ourselves. ~Arnold Toynbee

Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of 'progress,' but only by viewing history as a neurosis. ~Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death

You make me sick! You are offered meat and you choose a banana-split-with-nuts. ~Martin H. Fischer

We're the middle children of history.... no purpose or place. We haveno Great War, no Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. ~From the movie Fight Club, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's-license age than at voting age. ~Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964

You can say this for ready-mixes - the next generation isn't going tohave any trouble making pies exactly like mother used to make. ~EarlWilson

You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars. ~Charles Kuralt

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on the human face - forever. ~George Orwell

No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously. ~Dave Barry, Dave Barry Turns 50

[A] science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuatethe existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or moredirectly promotes the destruction of human life. ~Harold HardyGodfrey, A Mathematician's Apology, 1941

It's difficult to view the world outside our human context. Stayingalive and paying the bills both require our attention squarely fixed onour own business. Our sprawling cities and suburbs are wonderful andfrightening tributes to creative self-absorption. In them, we spendour microscheduled days bustling between work and the endless detailsof our private lives, turning in our moments of rest to the buzzingdistractions of television and computers - all accelerating toward someultimate, unseen fulfillment of convenience and hyperreality. Littleencourages us to pause and look around, much less question the end goalof all our busyness. Anything slower than the quick cuts of TVcommercials is overwhelmed by our impatience and short attention. Unfortunately, we might be missing something important - to ourhappiness and to our survival. The purpose of this book is to help remind us. ~From the introduction to The Sacred Earth: Writers on Nature & Spirit, edited by Jason Gardner, 1998, New World Library

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which welive. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We haveguided missiles and misguided men. ~Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

My meaningless office job: they pay me for my body and mind, but myheart gets no paycheck and my soul pays the taxes. ~Carrie Latet

Everything is for the eye these days - TV, Life, Look,the movies. Nothing is just for the mind. The next generation willhave eyeballs as big as cantaloupes and no brain at all. ~Fred Allen

Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magicfor medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, menmistake medicine for magic. ~Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin, 1973

The trouble with the laws these days is that criminals know their rights better than their wrongs. ~Author Unknown

Somebody recently figured out that we have 35 million laws to enforcethe ten commandments. ~Attributed to both Bert Masterson and EarlWilson

In the lifetime of one person, we went from figuring out where we camefrom to figuring out how to get rid of ourselves. ~Jack Horner, on theeighty years between Darwin's On the Origin of Species and the nuclear bomb, in Time, 26 April 1993

Living in this modern toxic world, we are all slowly being poisoned to death. ~Carrie Latet

Death is losing its terror. It is the emergency exit for a world thatis becoming more frightening death ever was. ~Julian Green, Diary, 28 December 1958

A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States thanhe could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for menfavored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitterfacts of life in bandages of self-illusion. ~H.L. Mencken

Somehow among all our use of antibiotic medicine and antibacterial soapour souls are becoming sanitized as well - don't let it happen to you! ~Brock Fiant

Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our ownconvenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye toour convenience at all. ~Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 1950

Science is now the craft of the manipulation, substitution anddeflection of the forces of nature. What I see coming is a giganticslaughterhouse, an Auschwitz, in which valuable enzymes, hormones, andso on will be extracted instead of gold teeth. ~Erwin Chargaff, Columbia Forum, Summer 1969

I always turn to the sports section first. The sports section recordspeople's accomplishments; the front page nothing but man's failures. ~Earl Warren, quoted in Sports Illustrated, 22 July 1968

When Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he said, "It would be nice." ~Author Unknown

It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence. ~Jacques Barzun, God's Country and Mine, 1954

On an average day 7 minutes of news happens. Yet there are currently three full-time, 24-hour news networks. ~Jon Stewart

Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continuedstriving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believein an afterlife. ~Arianna Stassinopoulos

Social reform aims to improve the condition of the poor by worsening the condition of the rich. ~Martin H. Fischer

Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions. ~Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 1950

Jefferson thought schools would produce free men: we prove him right by putting dropouts in jail. ~Benjamin R. Barber

Man is the animal that intends to shoot himself out into interplanetaryspace, after having given up on the problem of an efficient way to gethimself five miles to work and back each day. ~Bill Vaughan

The world is changing so fast I've got societal vertigo. ~Terri Guillemets

If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all. ~Pearl S. Buck

This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims. ~Matthew Arnold

In this prostituting society, we all have to hustle, and I'd rather suck cock than kiss ass! ~Margo St. James, attributed

The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of anintellectual conviction of the need for change in those mentalattitudes and values which shape the course of a nation's development. A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies andinstitutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions haslittle chance of genuine success. Without a revolution in spirit, theforces which had produced inequities of the old order would continue tobe operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform andregeneration. It is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracyand human rights. There has to be a united determination to perseverein the struggle, to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths, toresist the corrupting influences of desire, ill will, ignorance, andfear. ~Aung San Suu Kyi

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork. ~Milton Friedman

There is more to life than increasing its speed. ~Mohandas K. Gandhi