Societal Perception Quotes

If every nation gets the government it deserves, every generation writes the history which corresponds with its view of the world.

Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.

We know in our society, women are valued for their sexual desirability and not necessarily for what they have to say.

Our best people don't go into politics.

It's really important that we don't hang up the membership to the human community at menopause.

In Russia - Poets are considered a danger to the political system and are sent into Asylums. What a compliment to the Russian People, that poetry could move them so. In New Zealand, Poets are not considered a danger. No one reads poetry. Poets aren't sent to Asylums but they are considered mad nonetheless.

What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.

There's a thin line between genius and insanity - and I always get labelled as being the crazy one.

Somebody who had read Lila asked me, ‘Why do you write about the problem of loneliness?’ I said: ‘It’s not a problem. It’s a condition. It’s a passion of a kind. It’s not a problem. I think that people make it a problem by interpreting it that way.’

In history as it comes to be written, there is usually some Spirit of the Age which historians can define, but the shape of things is seldom so clear to those who live them. To most thoughtful men it has generally seemed that theirs was an Age of Confusion.

Why are sex and violence always linked? I'm afraid they'll blur together in people's minds - sexandviolence - until we can't tell them apart. I expect to hear a newscaster say, "The mob became unruly and the police were forced to resort to sex."

The artist is something of an outsider in America. I have always felt that America does not value its artists, certainly not in the sense that the Europeans do.

Do you know what a soldier is, young man? He's the chap who makes it possible for civilised folk to despise war.

When you're a fifty-year-old woman, no one really bothers to look at you anymore, much less value your opinion. It's hard on the old ego. But damn, it does make it easy to get away with a lot.

I frequently observe that one pretty face would be followed by five and thirty frights.

The property of manliness in a man is a great possession, but perhaps there is none that is less understood, which is more generally accorded where it does not exist, nor more frequently disallowed where it prevails.

When a mad man walks naked, it is his kinsmen who feel shame, not himself.

When my mother died, my father's early widowhood gave him social cachet he would not have had if they had divorced. He was a bigger catch for the sorrow attached.

You can reach a situation where things of intelligence and refinement and culture can be considered elite, and things that are crass and ignorant can be considered to be real and of the people. And when you begin to have the mass of populus striving for something that's not worth striving for, then tremendous amounts of energy go into...the maintenance of that which is worthless.

Man as seen as an organism or man as seen as a person discloses different aspects of the human reality to the investigator. Both are quite possible methodologically but one must be alert to the possible occasion for confusion. (...) Seen as an organism, man cannot be anything else but a complex of things, of its, and the processes that ultimately comprise an organism are it-processes.

I'm wary of the word glam because I think that became the all-inclusive term with for any bloke with lipstick on, which is fine, you know, and that's what it is when it comes down to the public level.

If Islam is so peaceful, why is everybody so damn frightened of offending them? And on the other hand, if Christianity is so violent as people like Whoopi Goldberg and others tell us, why is nobody afraid to offend Christians? People laugh at, make fun of, and mock Christians all day long with no fear whatsoever. But you so much as think anything offensive about Islam, and they descend on you and they accuse you of violating political correctness and they beg you to shut up.

It may well be that a societys greatest madness seems normal to itself.

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.

Currently, U.S. society has been encouraged by its political and subsidized mass-media intelligentsia to view U.S. life as a continual "morning in America" paradise, where the only social problems occur in the inner cities. Psychologists call this denial.