Virginia Woolf Quotes

Society is our extended mind and body.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

Public opinion is the atmosphere of society, without which the forces of the individual would collapse, and all the institutions of society fly into atoms.

Popular culture is most powerful when it offers us a vision of how our society should look - or at least reproduces our reality.

The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or creative consciousness.

Despite all the boosterish talk of globalization breaking down barriers, most writers in Anglo-America are still working within the nationalist assumptions of their traditionally powerful societies.

Culture does not make people. People make culture.

We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.

The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.

America is a construction of mind, not of race or inherited class or ancestral territory.

Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups.

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

Too much society makes a man frivolous; too little, a savage.

Humor, a good sense of it, is to Americans what manhood is to Spaniards, and we will go to great lengths to prove it. Experiments with laboratory rats have shown that, if one psychologist in the room laughs at something a rat does, all of the other psychologists will laugh equally. Nobody wants to be left holding the joke.

Our relationship to money reflects how we feel about our power to affect the world. Since money is a mirror of our consciousness, the more comfortable we are with being powerful, the more money we are likely to create in our lives.

The supremacy of public opinion determines not only the singular role that economics occupies in the complex of thought and knowledge. It determines the whole process of human history.

Maybe this is all a bit of a myth, a willful desire to give each place its own unique aura. But doesn't any collective belief eventually become a kind of truth? If enough people act as if something is true, isn't it indeed "true," not objectively, but in the sense that it will determine how they will behave? The myth of unique urban character and unique sensibilities in different cities exists because we want it to exist.

I do not want to be controlled by any superpower. I myself consider myself the most powerful figure in the world, and that is why I do not let any superpower control me.

The world sympathizes only with strong and powerful.

I'm interested in politics, what's going on in the world, how people behave and how your life is often in the hands of other people.

Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world.

The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed

Social Science … led us to the fallacy that, since all men have their being in culture and as a result of culture, they owe a debt to that culture which even a lifetime of altruism could not repay.

I do not call the sod under my feet my country; but language-religion-government-blood-identity in these makes men of one country.