William Golding Quotes

I do think there is this danger that our society has made its peace with decline. I'd like to jolt them out of their complacency a little bit.

I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.

...I have no resentment towards the man. If society were so constituted as to allow every man, woman and child to lead a normal life there would be no violence in this world. It fills me with horror to think the brutal acts done in the name of government. Every act of violence finds its echo in another act of violence. The policeman's club breeds criminals.

You can't find your way to social reform through the forces that made social reform necessary.

There's a great feeling of powerlessness in America. When I express ideas to people, they say, 'That's terrific, but do you think it really counts?'

There was a time when I believed in the persuadability of man, and had the mania of man-mending. Experience has taught me better. The ablest physician can do little in the great lazar-house of society. He acts the wisest part who retires from the contagion.

Western society has many flaws, and it is good for an educated person to have thought some of these through, even at the expense of losing a lecture or two to tear gas.

The Great War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment.

The peace and justice movement has to expand and not run away from the plight of gang members.

When Americans are faced with the prospect that they can never earn their way to wealth, they have two choices: to rebel against the system, or to settle into depressed complacency.

I think all of us thought that by the '70s, at the latest the '80s, all the world's problems would be solved and everyone would be getting along fine. And instead we saw that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated that year, Robert F. Kennedy died. We saw that it was going to be a lot more difficult than I think we had thought.

The idealists will always be in society, and we will survive.

One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.

A severe though not unfriendly critic of our institutions said that the cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

I've completely lost faith in the Democratic Party to truly serve the disadvantaged.

Social paralysis is strong and stands firmly in the way of change on the ground level. As allies, we have to prepare ourselves to step into the fire when necessary, even - and especially - when said fire is merely a still-lit cigarette tossed carelessly onto the street.

The role model approach to social change is no substitute for challenging unjust employment practices, educational policies and housing.

Remember, social progress only happens when those in society's privileged classes choose to give up their status.

I think society is both something that's very real and very powerful, but on the whole quite problematic.

The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not suffice.

Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?

Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.

But someone like Claude Chabrol tries to make a connection between the society in which we live and the social reasons which make monsters out of some people.

To my utter despair I have discovered, and discover every day anew, that there is in the masses no revolutionary idea or hope or passion.