Social Constructs Quotes

I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.

Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split.

Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it.

It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political, and moral beliefs that control our actions.

Among human beings, the subjection of women is much more complete at a certain level of civilization than it is among savages. And the subjection is always reinforced by morality.

If people tell an untruth long enough and loud enough, they begin to believe it themselves.

Man is the organizer of life, woman is his organ for carrying out plans.

For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashion of our garments, depend on where we were born. We are molded and fashioned by our surroundings.

Man is a child of his environment.

The public history of all countries, and all ages, is bet a sort of mask, richly colored. The interior working of the machinery must be foul.

The commonsense rules of the "real world" are a fragile collection of socially reinforced illusions.

We, as a culture, use television as at least one of the great arbiters of truth. Even though we know it's fiction, when we see it portrayed, we believe it. We recognize it as part of our culture.

The world is governed much more by opinion than by laws. It is not the judgment of courts, but the moral judgment of individuals and masses of men, which is the wall of defense around property and life.

Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups...So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

I think we have to get beyond the idea that we have to categorize people.

Women, by their nature, are not exceptional chess players: they are not great fighters.

Femininity can be a powerful thing.

You've got to be taught To hate and fear, You've got to be taught From year to year It's got to be drummed In your dear little ear You've got to be carefully taught. You've got to be taught to be afraid Of people whose eyes are oddly made, And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade, You've got to be carefully taught. You've got to be taught before it's too late, Before you are six or seven or eight, To hate all the people your relatives hate, You've got to be carefully taught!

One of the things I had to really wrap my head around is I have no control over what people call me: advocate, activist, gay, Filipino, undocumented person, gay person with an Asian face and Latino name.

So-called racial characteristics are not really racial at all but are due to the historical experiences of the communities in question.

I don't believe in the institution of marriage.

Every film is a political act; it's how you see the world.

Men are run ragged by female sexuality all their lives. From the beginning of his life to the end, no man ever fully commands any woman. It's an illusion.

I don't like labels.

The truth is whatever people will believe is the truth.