Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.
There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.
I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me, and I learned to hate.
If decade after decade the truth cannot be told, each person's mind begins to roam irretrievably. One's fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians.
Prime-time network television has become an island without religion in an ever-more-religious America.
I think a lot of people in my circle are thinking that way or see the movie [Into the Forest] and then really think that way. I think it's hopefully tapping into sort of a consciousness right now in regards to our society's relationship with the environment and our own and our disconnect from it, myself included.
If lyrics make people do things, how come we don't love each other?
We're all human beings and we all have feelings. And we all live in this industrial meat grinder where we don't really understand love anymore.
It is tragic-comic to see that all this knowledge and understanding exercises no power at all over men's lives, that their lives do not express in the remotest way what they have understood, but rather the opposite.
a time has come in our history when what is known has little connection with what is done.
The gap between the young people and the rest of society is that... young people don't have hope.
Americans threw away their communities in order to save a few dollars on hair dryers and plastic food storage tubs, never stopping to reflect on what they were destroying.
The Iraq war was fought by one-half of one percent of us. And unless we were part of that small group or had a relative who was, we went about our lives as usual most of the time: no draft, no new taxes, no changes. Not so for the small group who fought the war and their families.
With the all-volunteer military, we, as a society, have become disconnected from our armed forces. And our military, like almost everything else in our country, has been outsourced.
I've met people who are baffled by children, as though they were never children themselves.
Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.
I think part of our problem right now in the country is that people feel that nobody listens to them. And that means that they just don't trust anybody in government, anybody in politics, and anybody in the economy.
There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us and that's too many. Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood. Good God, who were those men? I never saw them before in my life!
You always feel like you are the only one in the world, like everyone else is crazy for each other, but it's not true. Generally, people don't like each other very much. And that goes for friends, too.
