Social Extremes Quotes

One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.

Over-civilization and barbarism are within an inch of each other. And a mark of both is the power of medicine-men.

I think New York City most represents what it is that America in general aspires to. It's big; it's dense. I've known this city from all of its social arcs. The best that's in America is yet to come. The worst that's in America is yet to come.

I would go through these cycles of being really, really focused on work, and not being around anyone, to being around everyone. And that could be distracting. It was nothing or everything.

I feel... an ardent desire to see knowledge so disseminated through the mass of mankind that it may, at length, reach even the extremes of society: beggars and kings.

I like people too much or not at all.

...religion either produces the very best people or the very worst.

I love playing women at the far ends of the social scale. I've done it all my life; that's where my ability lies.

The lunatic fringe is more like a Spanish shawl, where the fringe makes up the entire garment.

I really swung between the extremes. From the danger of being ostracised by the society, I almost overnight found myself as virtually the darling of the millions.

[On sociability in Italy:] You may be a hermit or an innkeeper.

There is a lot of extreme emotion in Korean film. It's because there are a lot of extremes in Korean society.

Destitution and excessive luxury develop apparently the same ideals, the same marauding attitude towards mankind, the intensity of struggle for material goods, -- surely showing how perfect is the meeting of extremes.

Whenever anything 'gay' comes along, everybody wants that thing to somehow be everything to everybody. And usually, it is too gay or not gay enough. There's never the right amount. I think that happens a little bit in the media.

It is the tendency of the social burdens to crush out the middle class, and to force society into an organization of only two classes, one at each social extreme.

The distractions, the exhaustions, the savage noises, the demands of town life, are, for me, mortal enemies to thought, to sleep,and to study; its extremes of squalor and of splendor do not stimulate, but sadden me; certain phases of its society I profoundly value, but would sacrifice them to the heaven of country quiet, if I had to choose between.

[Emigrants] will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty.