societal tension Quotes

If someone doesn't have a reason to not like you in America, they talk politics or religion. Then they get to hate you and we get to be enemies.

This is what it always comes down to, I realized. There are the ones who believe, and the ones who don't, and caught in the space between them are guns.

I am at peace with God. My conflict is with Man.

The scum that rises upmost, when the nation boils.

A society which is clamoring for choice, which is filled with many articulate groups, each urging its own brand of salvation, its own variety of economic philosophy, will give each new generation no peace until all have chosen or gone under, unable to bear the conditions of choice. The stress is in our civilization.

Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

The problem is that we live in an uptight country. Why don't we just laugh at ourselves? We are funny. Gays are funny. Straights are funny. Women are funny. Men are funny. We are all funny, and we all do funny things. Let's laugh about it.

You do have this circumstance in Karachi that because people know things are changing, the stakes are higher. Everyone is thinking, "My home is threatened, my job is threatened, my identity is threatened, my world is threatened." And that creates a very particular sort of climate, that is linked.

As for the Folsom Prison show, ... would anybody have the guts to do that show now 50 Cent, maybe I think the whole idea of even playing to a crowd of people like that is so politically unfavorable now - it's like, 'What are you doing, singing for these people Do they deserve it' There's such anger in our culture right now, that kind of grace and forgiveness, we don't see that very often.

In America, as elsewhere, the general irritability level keeps rising.

It is not our sexual preferences, the color of our skin, the language we speak, nor the religion we practice that creates friction, hatred and wars amongst in society. It is our words and the words of our leaders that can create that disparity.

What we are witnessing now is a clash of civilisations, not just between states but within them.

Everything I love about America is fragile.

What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.

This is the age of the new tolerance and it is producing a bumper crop of anti-Christian and anti-American sentiment.

Society is at odds with itself.

If you try to discuss multiculturalism in the U.K., you're labeled a racist.

Riots and comedy are but symptoms of the times, profoundly revealing. They betray the psychological tone, the deep uncertainties....and the striving for something better, plus the fear that nothing would come of it all.

As Shakespeare himself knew, the peace, the reconciliation that he created on the stage would not last an hour on the street.

The great majority of Americans are suspended between these opposing attitudes. They are uneasy with injustice but unwilling yet to pay a significant price to eradicate it.

To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.

Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies; that a city knows not whom it entertains.

We live in a very tense society. We are pulled apart... and we all need to learn how to pull ourselves together.... I think that at least part of the answer lies in solitude.

Multicultural societies are multi-conflict societies.