Wendell Berry Quotes

Whether the issue was black political power or nuclear power, Scott-Heron didn't mince words. His comeback record, 'I'm New Here,' doesn't mince words either, but instead of political battles, these songs suggest he's fighting personal ones.

You know, you can be really quite subversive in popular fiction, which is capable of taking on big issues of politics, war, the rise and fall of commercial dynasties.

All comedy is really talking about social issues and things that are affecting our lives.

Expressing criticism of society is not being a grouch.

In movies that tackle these political issues, there are far more interesting themes to be explored than partisan politics, which is what we get on cable news every second of every day.

There are times when every act, no matter how private and unconscious, becomes political.

The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink.

The first period of getting famous was incredibly strange to me and really fun at the beginning because you didn't realise the consequences of anything. You could say or do whatever you wanted and it just didn't matter.

To tell about a drunken muzhik's beating his wife is incomparably harder than to compose a whole tract about the 'woman question.'

All the world's a stage. P.T. Barnum: It becomes a circus. But circuses or street pageants or parades have always been useful in a society.They've always been useful as a way of critiquing power. The carnivalesque has always been useful as a way of the powerful being mocked in a public space.

To understand any plea for further consideration of a group you don't know anything about to be some form of, quote, political correctness. These things are bubbling right under us.

The market is the only critic that matters.

I think that critiquing the myths of our society and helping people find their way through them is a very important thing. It's a theme that goes through all of my work.

A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.

I won't deny the polemical elements in my work, but they are less in the service of attempting to reform human behavior than the delighted exercise of my rather malicious sense of humor - especially vis-a-vis the horrifying everyday environment we have produced for ourselves. These mall-scapes, burb-scapes, urban wildernesses, starchitect stunts, and other toxic contexts for our daily lives express about every human vice, stupidity, and blunder that it is possible for a society to make. It all leads, really, to a psychological place where only comedy or despair make sense.

A lot of political people, especially people on the left, have forgotten the importance of humor as an incredible weapon, and a vehicle through which to affect change.

To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

The best example of all, to me, that our problems are both personal and cultural and political and social is the whole condition of the middle class economically.

Where else could one find such a perfect combination of American values -- racism, militarism, capitalism -- all packaged in one 'ideal' symbol, a woman.

The shuffle only demonstrated people's fatuous belief in a political cure for a human condition.

American political culture quickly and always outpaces any attempt to satirize it.

No matter what federal program one selects - Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the drug war, the income tax and the IRS, education, foreign interventions and wars - they are all a giant mess.

The Carpetbaggers was the first big money I made. Money gave me a lot of freedom, but no matter how much you make there's always somebody chasing your ass for more.

People are so sensitive about race that they can't hear someone speaking about their life in a very true way, or doing satire or political parody.

Among the many factors that make a return to halcyon days of the first decades of the postwar era virtually impossible is the decline of clearly defined political leadership.