Social Contradiction Quotes

America was based on a big promise—a great big one: the Declaration of Independence. When you have to live with that in the house, that’s quite a problem—particularly when you’ve got to make money and get ahead, open world markets, do all the things you have to, raise your children, and so forth. America is stuck with its self-definition put on paper in 1776, and that was just like putting a burr under the metaphysical saddle of America—you see, that saddle’s going to jump now and then and it pricks.

It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved.

There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.

Nowhere on Earth was sex so vigorously suppressed as in America--and nowhere else was there such a deep interest in it.

The clergy are ready and willing to marry anybody and everybody, age to youth, vice to virtue, and no questions asked, as a certain class of advertisements put it. Yet the clergy set their faces most sternly against divorce. To protest against such discordant unions as they again and again ratify would be an interference with the liberty of the subject. But to oppose anything that facilitates divorce is a most serious interference with the liberty of the subject.

On the one hand we publicly pronounce the equality of all peoples; on the other hand, in our immigration laws, we embrace in practice these very theories we abhor and verbally condemn.

An intriguing paradox of the 1990s is that it isn't called a decade of greed.

We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practice the very opposite of the democratic creed.... This strange dichotomy, this agonizing gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man's earthly pilgrimage.

How are you gonna make an 'idol' from the type of person you're trying to avoid in real life?

The virtual Saudi Arabia actually exists in its rules and in the minds of the people. For instance, in virtual Saudi Arabia there is no satellite television. In principle, and by law, you are not allowed to own a satellite dish. But in reality we are the biggest consumers of satellite television in the Middle East. Not only that, Saudi businessmen are also the biggest investors in satellites. In principle, and by law, Saudi Arabia is not supposed to have interest-based banking, but in fact ninety per cent of our banking system is interest-based. And it goes on and on. The solution for Saudi problems is to bring the virtual world and the real world together.

I think that contradictions, unless they're understood, unless they're analyzed, unless they're thoughtfully probed, unless people have a sense of what those contradictions mean - there's just as much of a chance that they'll move into embracing fascism as there is that they'll move into a more radical conception of democracy itself.

I've chronicled the experience of the mother of a transgender child who got attacked by the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee, and that of a transgender woman who was asked to deliver a sermon at her Montana church and got a standing ovation from her congregation. The idea that Christianity is a blanket term that encompasses both of those attitudes seems ludicrous to me.

People are still encouraged to marry as if they could count on marriage being for life, and at the same time they are absorbing a knowledge of the great frequency of divorce.

Although readers and viewers tell us that they do not want this filth, that is exactly what they read and tune in to.

The country and culture commonly known as "America" had had a badly split personality all through its history. Its overt laws were almost always puritanical for a people whose covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were all Apollonian in varying degrees---its religious revivals were often hysterical in a fashion almost Dionysian.

That's what I hate about the war on drugs. All day long we see those commercials: "Here's your brain, here's your brain on drugs", "Just Say No", "Why do you think they call it dope?" … And then the next commercial is [singing] "This Bud's for yooouuuu." C'mon, everybody, let's be hypocritical bastards. It's okay to drink your drug. We meant those other drugs. Those untaxed drugs. Those are the ones that are bad for you.

Why is it that no one understands me and everybody likes me

My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.

The same people that tell me what I ought to have is the same people asking for an autograph.

I hate people but I love gatherings.

I am everything Donald Trump is against.

There is a kind of desperate need for somebody to tell everyone what to do, which I find really peculiar in America. And then when you tell them, they're not interested, because it's also a country where everybody's opinion is their opinion, and they really don't give a damn what you think. So it's a very odd experience.

The gestures and the swagger and the attitude of black men is imitated everywhere in American culture, but people still find black men intolerable.

My sister lives in Oklahoma. And, you know, it is so shocking that James Inhofe, the foremost climate-denying senator, is from the state that is so deeply climate-affected.

Once it has been perceived that the division of labour is the essence of society, nothing remains of the antithesis between individual and society. The contradiction between individual principle and social principle disappears.