Social Critique Quotes

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Power is only too happy to make football bear a diabolical responsibility for stupefying the masses.

The white race is the cancer of human history.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture - and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.

Today we hear a great deal about Organizational Men, Mass Culture, Conformity, the Lonely Crowd, the Power Elite and its Conspiracy of Mediocrity. We forget that the very volume of this criticism is an indication that our society is still radically pluralistic. Not only are there plenty of exceptionalists who take exception to the stereotyping of the mass culture but that very string of epithets comes from a series of books that have been recent best-sellers, symptoms of a popular, living tradition of dissent from things as they are.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.

I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.

I didn't have a manifesto. I had some discontent. It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism.

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we've ever been in - and which we lost - every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.

It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

When someone goes, 'Oh, this group is really pissed off at what you said,' there's not a piece of my body that goes, 'Sweet!' That means I did it wrong. I'm just trying to make people laugh.

I've spent my entire career being a satirist.

Mr. Clooney has directed six movies; five are set in the middle of the previous century. And 'Suburbicon' clarifies why. Race is a blind spot.

The reason to do any barking - well, the reason for me - is that 'Three Billboards' feels so off about so many things. It's one of those movies that really do think they're saying something profound about human nature and injustice.

The value of making young people stupid, subject to an educational deficit has enormous currency in a society in which existing relations of power are normalized. Under such conditions, those who hold power accountable are reviewed as treasonous while critically engaged young people are denounced as un-American.

I hate America. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. I live in America, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s got to love something.

I think it's very interesting, people who can't stand people who whinge and whine. It seems almost like a class issue. Because you think about who is the most positive, who's the most redemptive songwriter that's ever existed in your lifetime?

The best art is either political or revolutionary....Those things that are powerfully revolutionary are not always successful in the market place.

I believe all Southern liberals come from the same starting point--race. Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you start to question everything.

'The Truth About Lorin Jones' will undoubtedly shock and offend as many readers as it will amuse, since it dares to make fun of feminism - of its manners, if not its politics.

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