societal context Quotes

The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. This is its task and its promise.

I've read crime fiction all my life. A thing that's bothered me about crime fiction is that it's generally about one or two people, but there's not much about society. I want to get away from that particular pattern: a lead, a supporting role and backdrop characters.

Food is interesting to me because it's a way of understanding culture and societies and history. I would never write about food just as food. Just like I would never write about baseball just as baseball.

There was never an age in which useless knowledge was more important than in our own.

The best educated human being is the one who understands most about the life in which he is placed.

I knew that my newfound activism and feminism was going to improve my acting, because I was seeing things not just in very narrow, individual, kind of Freudian terms, but seeing them in a much broader, societal way that was going to deepen and enrich my talent.

Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence. Myth looked back to the origins of life, to the foundations of culture, and to the deepest levels of the human mind. Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal.

It's not so easy to apply to today's society things that were written thousands of years ago. But that's exactly the job of a minister - to make the teaching of the Bible relevant.

You're molded by the period you were brought up in.

Eternal truths will be neither true nor eternal unless they have fresh meaning for every new social situation.

I feel that what I do is always contemporary with the society I'm living in... If I wanted to explain myself, that's how I'd explain myself: that I'm a diarist.

My advice to the 10 year old daughter is: fashion happens in a context. It's societal, it's cultural, it's historic, it's economic, and it's political. So all of her studies, everything that is happening in the world, all needs to be channeled through her in order to be a good designer.

As a writer, I've always believed that while my work and I myself are embedded in whatever period I am writing about, clearly I am sensitive to the winds that are blowing in the culture. At the same time, I have always felt that the issue was not to deal with the problem in the abstract, but to deal with the people who are in that problem. The emphasis is on the people. The general problem begins to resolve itself even before the play is finished.

I understand the Rooney Rule and I understand why it is critical in America. I certainly think there are differences between the American system and in American football, there is such a large percentage of players who are of ethnic backgrounds. I think there is a difference here... I don't think its appropriate here.

The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.

To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.