|
98c4b32
|
Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?
|
|
humor
towel
thumb
social-commentary
science-fiction
|
Douglas Adams |
|
26246c4
|
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
|
|
philosophy
inspirational
lecture
transcendentalism
essay
self-reliance
social-commentary
nonfiction
|
Ralph Waldo Emerson |
|
b5ab4c0
|
I can't give you the white picket fence, and if I did, you'd set it on fire.
|
|
humor
picket-fence
social-commentary
|
Ilona Andrews |
|
5ae749f
|
Sometimes I think I must have a Guardian Idiot. A little invisible spirit just behind my shoulder, looking out for me...only he's an imbecile.
|
|
social-commentary
science-fiction
|
Spider Robinson |
|
c0123ce
|
Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.
|
|
social-commentary
human-nature
psychology
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
c76efb6
|
Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.
|
|
social-commentary
|
Margaret Atwood |
|
4c45e24
|
There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.
|
|
labels
social-commentary
trends
society
|
William Gibson |
|
3a1ff61
|
We're living in a funny world kid, a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty. The politicians are preachers, and the preachers are politicians. The tax collectors collect for themselves. The Bad People want us to have more dough, and the good people are fighting to keep it from us. It's not good for us, know what I mean? If we had all we wanted to eat, we'd eat too much. We'd have inflation in the toilet paper industry. That's the way I understand it. That's about the size of some of the arguments I've heard.
|
|
social-commentary
|
Jim Thompson |
|
938ac04
|
It's not Americans I find annoying; it's Americanism: a social disease of the postindustrial world that must inevitably infect each of the mercantile nations in turn, and is called 'American' only because your nation is the most advanced case of the malady, much as one speaks of Spanish flu, or Japanese Type-B encephalitis. It's symptoms are a loss of work ethic, a shrinking of inner resources, and a constant need for external stimulation, followed by spiritual decay and moral narcosis. You can recognize the victim by his constant efforts to get in touch with himself, to believe his spiritual feebleness is an interesting psychological warp, to construe his fleeing from responsibility as evidence that he and his life are uniquely open to new experiences. In the later stages, the sufferer is reduced to seeking that most trivial of human activities: fun.
|
|
social-commentary
satire
|
Trevanian |
|
942c38d
|
It's basically the same in all periods of societies. If you belong to the majority, you can avoid thinking about lots of troubling things.' 'And those troubling things are all you /can/ think about when you're one of the few.' 'That's about the size of it,' she said mournfully. 'But maybe, if you're in a situation like that, you learn to think for yourself.' 'Yes, but maybe what you end up thinking for yourself /about/ is all those troubling things.
|
|
social-commentary
conversation
|
Haruki Murakami |
|
fbe0ab4
|
"Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is; the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived..." (Bk2:3)"
|
|
philosophy-of-people
social-commentary
|
Jean-Jacques Rousseau |
|
042aa45
|
A public outcry usually masks a private obsession.
|
|
social-commentary
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
4b65e8d
|
People turned out to be alive. Hitherto he had supposed that they were what he pretended to be - flat pieces of cardboard stamped with a conventional design... there came by no process of reason a conviction that they were human beings with feelings akin to his own.
|
|
social-commentary
society
self
sociology
|
E.M. Forster |
|
5efb61b
|
All those happy, pretty, successful people- he hated them because he knew they didn't really exist, and he hated even more the magazine that glorified them and in a way that made them exist, actors, rock musicians, famous writers, politicians. Those aren't he fumed, they're
|
|
continental-drift
social-commentary
|
Russell Banks |
|
9b15804
|
There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe.
|
|
social-commentary
society
|
Edith Wharton |
|
3cb5f8e
|
"On the raptors kept for falconry: "They talk every night, deep into the darkness. They say about how they were taken, about what they can remember about their homes, about their lineage and the great deeds of their ancestors, about their training and what they've learned and will learn. It is military conversation, really, like what you might have in the mess of a crack cavalry regiment: tactics, small arms, maintenance, betting, famous hunts, wine, women, and song. Another subject they have is food. It is a depressing thought," he continued, "but of course they are mainly trained by hunger. They are a hungry lot, poor chaps, thinking of the best restaurants where they used to go, and how they had champagne and caviar and gypsy music. Of course, they all come from noble blood." "What a shame that they should be kept prisoners and hungry." "Well, they do not really understand that they are prisoners any more than the cavalry officers do. They look on themselves as being 'dedicated to their profession,' like an order of knighthood or something of that sort. You see, the member of the Muse [where Raptors are kept for falconry] is restricted to the Raptors, and that does help a lot. They know that none of the lower classes can get in. Their screened perches do not carry Blackbirds or such trash as that. And then, as for the hungry part, they're far from starving or that kind of hunger: they're in training, you know! And like everybody in strict training, they think about food."
|
|
social-commentary
self-deception
|
T.H. White |
|
8b42519
|
"Waste of time," said the leper. "There's a dozen or more beggars who come here every day, pretending to be cripples, hiring themselves out to the holy men. A couple of drachmas and they'll swear they've been crippled or blind for years then stage a bloody miraculous recovery. Holy men? Healers? Don't make me laugh." "But this man is different," said Christ. "I remember him," said the blind man. "Jesus. He come here on the sabbath, like a fool. The priests wouldn't let him heal anyone on sabbath. He should've known that." "But he did heal someone," said the lame man. "Old Hiram. You remember that. He told him to take up his bed and walk." "Bloody rubbish," said the blind man. "Hiram went as far as the temple gate, then he lay down and went on begging. Old Sarah told me. He said what was the use of taking his living away? Begging was the only thing he knew how to do. You and your blether about goodness," he said, turning to Christ, "where's the goodness in throwing an old man out into the street without a trade, without a home, without a penny? Eh? That Jesus is asking too much of people." "But he was good," said the lame man. "I don't care what you say. You could feel it, you could see it in his eyes." "I never saw it," said the blind man."
|
|
miracle
religion
social-commentary
|
Philip Pullman |
|
38b3451
|
I simply refuse to deal with idiots...It has cut my social obligations in half.
|
|
idiots
social-commentary
|
Julia Quinn |
|
0864bea
|
Considering our backgrounds, I found it a strange irony that Ian and I should meet in central Borneo. Both of us were set in motion by the war in Southeast Asia. Ian enlisted. I left the country several weeks before an FBI agent arrived at my parents' front door.
|
|
war
social-commentary
|
Eric Hansen |
|
c9e8d60
|
"Tyrena did not laugh again but her smile slashed upward in a twist of green lips. "Martin, Martin, Martin," she said, "the population of literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenberg's day. By the twentieth century, less than two percent of the people in the so-called industrialized democracies read even one book a year. And that was before the smart machines, dataspheres, and user-friendly environments."
|
|
reading
humor
social-commentary
satire
|
Dan Simmons |
|
183563a
|
One problem with the division of labor in our complex economy is how it obscures the lines of connection, and therefore of responsibility, between our everyday acts and their real-world consequences. Specialization makes it easy to forget about the filth of the coal-fired power plant that is lighting this pristine computer screen, or the back-breaking labor it took to pick the strawberries for my cereal, or the misery of the hog that lived and died so I could enjoy my bacon. Specialization neatly hides our implication in all that is done on our behalf by unknown other specialists half a world away.
|
|
social-commentary
society
food
|
Michael Pollan |