Social Illusion Quotes

People are dreaming if they think they have rights. They've never had rights. There's no such thing.

Public opinion is no more than this. What people think that other people think.

A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.

I always liked the idea that America is a big facade. We are all insects crawling across on the shiny hood of a Cadillac. We're all looking at the wrapping. But we won't tear the wrapping to see what lies beneath.

One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fiber of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardily.

The sprinkling of people of color through elite institutions in the United States, due to affirmative action policies and the limited progress of middle-class and upper-middle-class African Americans, creates the illusion of great progress.

If society is a ship, it appears to many to be firmly at anchor in moral waters. Perhaps this isn't so.

Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshrouds others.

Male mastery in marriage is a social illusion, nurtured by women exhorting their creations to play and walk. At the emotional heart of every marriage is a pietà of mother and son.

I don't think you fully appreciate the importance of Illusion in life, the Essential Nature of Lies and Deception of the body politic.

You need more people to perpetuate a myth because if the people stop the myth is known to all.

Friendship is such an elastic word. There never was an age when it stood for so many things in private, and was yet so absolutely non-existent in fact.

Morality is similar to religion - it is a somniferous drug which blinds people from seeing the squalor of their lives.

The reality which is pretending be reality right now, impersonating reality, is just a pretty flimsy structure. There is not a lot of substance to it. You can't find people who are actively involved of affected by it. What you see is a completely different world, what you see is the world of the homeless, and so forth.

The modern superstition is that we're free of superstition.

The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist (our friends being friends only in the light of an agreeable folly which travels with us through life and to which we readily accommodate ourselves, but which at the bottom of our hearts we know to be no more reasonable than the delusion of the man who talks to the furniture because he believes that it is alive.).

I don't care if you're gay, black, Chinese, straight. That means nothing to me. It's all an illusion.

The 'public' is a phantom, the phantom of an opinion supposed to exist in a vast number of persons who have no effective interrelation and though the opinion is not effectively present in the units. Such an opinion is spoken of as 'public opinion,' a fiction which is appealed to by individuals and by groups as supporting their special views. It is impalpable, illusory, transient; "'tis here, 'tis there, 'tis gone"; a nullity which can nevertheless for a moment endow the multitude with power to uplift or destroy.

Most of us live in a world that has ceased to exist.

The public pleasures of far the greater part of mankind are counterfeit.

Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.

Democracy is still a radical idea in a world where we often confuse images with realities, words with actions.

I used to have a recurring dream where I was at a party in a country house, surrounded by the same people each evening. Everyone would be singing and dancing and after a while I came to know the people; though, of course, they never really existed.

Whether or not the working class came to Chicago in 1969 in the Days of Rage is not a measure of their commitment to stopping the war or to seeing life in certain way. There were very few of us who were there, and those of us that were had an illusion about ourselves.

This country wants to live in the illusion that it is tolerant but also wants to be able to practice intolerance.