Quotes about Society

Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health—and create profitable diseases and dependences—by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving.

If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself. As the master, or as a member of the dominant race, he has felt little compulsion to acknowledge or speak of it; the more painful it has grown the more deeply he has hidden it within himself. But the wound is there, and is a profound disorder, as great a damage in his mind as it is in his society.

An education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries.

the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity; it is moral ignorance and weakness of character.

And so there is the Territory of self-righteousness. It is easy to assume that we do not participate in what we are not in the presence of. But if we are members of a society, we participate, willy-nilly, in its evils.

Tell um de good Lawd dont keer whether he bright er not. Dont nobody but white trash keer dat.

Ah, Mr Compson said, Years ago we in the South made our women into ladies. Then the War came and made the ladies into ghosts. So what else can we do, being gentlemen, but listen to them being ghosts?

Government was founded on the working premiss of being primarily an asylum for ineptitude and indigence.

If you are going to write, write about human nature. That is the only thing that doesn't date.

If I blow the conch and they don't come back; then we've had it. We shan't keep the fire going. We'll be like animals. We'll never be rescued. If you don't blow, we'll soon be animals anyway.

I'm frightened. Of us.

Maybe, he said hesitantly, maybe there is a beast. The assembly cried out savagely and Ralph stood up in amazement. You, Simon? You believe in this? I don't know, said Simon. His heartbeats were choking him. [...] Ralph shouted. Hear him! He's got the conch! What I mean is . . . maybe it's only us. Nuts! That was from Piggy, shocked out of decorum.