Societal Trends Quotes

Everything in culture moves in a cyclical way.

Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.

The spirit of the times can haunt even the atheists.

You've got to remember that films don't lead the way. People think that films are trying to lead society. Mostly, they're reflecting the moods and thoughts that are going on in the country or around the world.

Simply that we are mirroring the trends in society, at any given time smuggling was an issue in the seventies, corruption is an issue today, and we faithfully reflect those issues.

Whether it's a popcorn movie or some really intellectual sociopolitical movie, I think to some degree they're all influenced by the social climate that we're living in.

I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything.

According to the latest poll, a record 73 percent of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. But the good news: Gas is so expensive that we'll never get there.

Everything that is popular, it has been said, deserves the attention of philosophers: and this is for the obvious reason, that although it may not be of any worth in itself, yet it characterizes the people.

He who doesn't have the spirit of his time, has all its misery.

The world of rumor and gossip is like a privileged world with which a social scientist or an anthropologist can take the temperature of popular aspirations.

As designers, we are the interface. Trying to make things understandable. That requires involving oneself with what's going on in the world. One must understand what people are, what they're up to, what they care about, how they feel.

I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation's history, among them the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity.

You know, it's fashionable right now for people to be cynical. We go in cycles like this and right now a lot of people are saying, 'Oh, America is doing terribly' and 'What are we going to do?'

If you really want to know about the future, don't ask a technologist, a scientist, a physicist. No! Don't ask somebody who's writing code. No, if you want to know what society's going to be like in 20 years, ask a kindergarten teacher.

You might argue that I make the rounds no matter what year it is, but sometimes the human race likes to crank things up a little. They increase the production of bodies and their escaping souls.

If you wish to obtain a great name or to found an establishment, be completely mad; but be sure that your madness corresponds with the turn and temper of your age.

To portray America over the past twenty years or so, I would think immediately of football, probably the Super Bowl in its sumptuous suggestion of a national death wish.

That tendency of social thought to generalize, to describe a leading tendency in a society in such a way that it seems that everything falls within its iron laws, is very common. Of course our own experience tells us that life is not as monochrome as these thinkers depict it. On the other hand they are very valuable because they alert us to transformations we are likely to take for granted.

In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

Social science virtually abhors the event. Not without reason; the short-term is the most capricious and deceptive form of time.

To some degree, we're all thinking about the same things. It's the zeitgeist. The trick, in a way, as a writer, is to hope that your interests in some sense link up with the culture around you.

As a filmmaker, you've got to have a nose for what's going on culturally. You have to feel it. It doesn't have to be manga or music, but you need some kind of antenna. That's very important.

The kosher community tends to follow often several years behind the general societal trends.