Raymond Queneau Quotes

You have to look at history as an evolution of society.

I'm not interested in current events per se, but I am interested in how certain aspects of social or public life that might seem ultra-contemporary actually take their place in a long American continuum.

We now know how things were in the '60s and how things have changed, but I don't think we appreciate how much things have changed.

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.

If the ideas of any particular man are determined by his environment, then the ideas of humanity, in their historical development, are determined by the development of the social environment, by the history of social relationships.

There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.

Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

Things aren't much wilder now, I don't think, than they were back then. Of course I just read about all the goings-on now. Ha.

The study of social progress is today not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.

Civilization and religion do not necessarily move with equal pace.

Historical truth is that, and that alone, which reveals the forces that go to mold the social life of mankind.

History, we now know, is not merely, of even primarily, past politics, it is also past economics, past society, past religion, past civilization, in short—past everything.

Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past

People who want to wage cultural wars ought to keep in mind that cultural views often don't move at all for a very long time, but when they move they can move very fast.

Such manifestations I account as representing the creative leadership of the new forces of thought and appreciation which attend changes in technological pattern and therefore of the pattern of human relationships in society.

But the history of the changes produced by a universal idea is not a history of changes in the individual, but of changes brought about by the successive efforts of millions of individuals in the course of many generations.

Things change in different countries as people grow, and as generations change.

I'm fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion.

In one aspect, my works record the history of the development of Chinese society. Concern about the situation of Chinese reality is one important theme of my works. I am trying to ask, 'How does our society develop? What are the problems in our society? Where is our direction leading?'

A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.

Pop culture is a reflection of social change, not a cause of social change.

The history of the world shows that peoples and societies do not have to pass through a fixed series of stages in the course of development.

There certainly have been a lot of changes, although they come in such gradations that most people have either forgotten, or, if they're too young, they never knew about them in the first place.

The stream of civilisation flows on like a river: it is rapid in mid- current, slow at the sides, and has its backwaters. At best, civilisation advances by spirals.

Human society can only adapt to social change at a certain rate.