Social Paradox Quotes

When you're a plebeian you want success, and when you're successful you want to be a plebeian again.

It has always seemed strange to me. The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success.

We're warriors, this culture, and we're very puritanical about sex and very embracing about violence and I don't know why that is.

Women in the postfeminist era, while supposedly strong and commanding and equal to men in every sense, looked weaker and smaller than ever before.

I was anti social, but at the same time, people gravitated to that because they wanted to figure out who I was and why I was how I was.

If slaves will make good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors.

I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.

You spend your whole life trying to get known and then you spend the rest of it hiding in the toilet.

Why is it that the same people who have the least confidence in the police and the military are the most willing to allow only the police and the military to have guns?

To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal.

Why is playing football in Europe considered the pinnacle of our game, yet in other spheres of life, that same phrase - 'being in Europe' - is dismissed with suspicion?

The power of affinity lies in its mystery: the way it stands outside everything logical; you step into a crowded room and see a stranger, and somehow you feel you know her better than you know the friends you came with.

Everyone's connected but no one is connecting.

Friends are a weird thing. It seems like they know all about you, but then they don’t understand you at all.

The disconnect I was experiencing was that people hated Wall Street, but they loved tech.

There is not enough religion in the world even to destroy religion.

Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.

Americans want individual freedom and yet they want strong communities. There is some contradiction there.

I was a weird kid because I liked to be alone, but I craved attention. It was important for me to be cool, but I couldn't keep my mouth shut. So I was either talking for the sake of talking, or I was curled up with a book somewhere hiding from everyone.

But, irreverently consorting with these grave, reputable, and pious people, these elders of the church, these chaste dames and dewy virgins, there were men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches given over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes. It was strange to see that the good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints.

For a gun-toting nation, Americans are surprisingly passive.

Paradoxically, those who call for family values also tout the wonders of an unregulated market without observing the subtle cultural links between the family they seek to regulate and the market they hold free.

I've said this before: a homeless guy in Detroit has more mojo than a millionaire in Jacksonville.

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.