societal awareness Quotes

One thing that concerns me is that today's young women don't seem to care that we have a fundamental instrument of government that makes no express statement about the equal citizenship stature of men and women. They know there are no closed doors anymore, and they may take for granted the rights that they have.

The truth can be hard to take, but we have an obligation to look and see what's going on, and, if we don't like it, a chance to stop going along with it. This important film provides precisely that insight and that opportunity.

For some reason, I have always been interested in the stories of people who are exiled and who are deprived of rights. My main motive to make a film is to keep the society in mind and the hospitality adhered.

I don't know if a country (America) where the people are so ignorant of reality and of history, if you can call that a free world.

Have you ever held a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day? Because my feeling is, if you can't answer yes to that question, you are in big trouble in trying to understand the country you live in.

Yeah, anytime anybody has a kid, you know how you feel when you have a kid, you look at the world differently because your kid's in the world now. When it's just you, whatever happens happens but now you pay more attention to political things. You pay more attention to things because your daughter or your son has to deal with these circumstances.

I am an aware citizen, so I want my characters to be aware, too. They should be aware of what's happening in the society and make a commentary. They're not in a la la land.

In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see. In the face of injustice, one may not look the other way. When someone suffers, and it is not you, that person comes first. One's very suffering gives one priority. . . . To watch over one who grieves is a more urgent duty than to think of God.

I moved to Philadelphia to go to school at Eastern partly because I wanted to study the Bible and I also went to study sociology. I like how Karl Barth said we have to read the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other so that our faith doesn't just become a ticket into heaven and a license to ignore the world around us.

Intimacy seems to be one of the major highs of life, whether it's getting to know yourself in a deeper way, or your partner, or the world and the society that you live in.

There is a chalk outline slowly being drawn around common sense and most people can't identify the victim.

I knew that my newfound activism and feminism was going to improve my acting, because I was seeing things not just in very narrow, individual, kind of Freudian terms, but seeing them in a much broader, societal way that was going to deepen and enrich my talent.

Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask whether your country has been inhaling paint-thinner fumes.

There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.

Who has the skill to make a narrow, obstinate human being aware of others' far-off grief and joy, to make him understand dimensions and delusions he himself has never lived through? Propaganda, coercion, and scientific proofs are powerless. But happily, in our world there is a way. It is art, and it is literature.

Germany was a parliamentary democracy with many, many humane and decent people who kept writing in their journals - I've read these journals, these memoirs - "Surely our leaders will stop this nonsense. Surely someone will take on these thugs. Surely the pendulum will swing back." Everyone was sitting at home going, "Well, they haven't come for me. This is crazy, but surely someone's going to take care of it." We all have to take care of it.

We wanted to bring attention to the fact that we had so many deals taking place that we could have made change for the better for all people, and we felt that we would be a catalyst to bring this to attention to society.

Look closely at those who patronize you. Half are unfeeling, half untaught.

If you say to people that there's less violence today than in the past, they would be stunned to hear that. But it's the truth, even though we have awful things happening in Syria or Sudan.

Dickens didn't have access to any other epistemologies other than those prevailing in Britain. But a novelist today cannot plausibly claim ignorance of his society's manifold connections with the wider world, the fact that prosperity and security at home, for instance, often depend on extensive violence and exploitation abroad.

A society that does not correctly interpret and appreciate its past cannot understand its present fortunes and adversities and can be caught unawares in a fast changing world.

An artist, if he is truly an artist, is only interested in one thing and that is to wake up the minds of men, to have mankind and womankind realize that there is something greater than what we see on the surface.

There are many people writing songs. That is absolutely wonderful. Who knows, there may be some kid in diapers and he or she might succeed in capturing in a few dozen words what great writers have spent years trying to say. Just the right word in the right place with the right melody behind it and the right rhythm. It might get around the world inch by inch, and people realize that this world is in danger, that we're in danger. That's the way "This Land Is Your Land" got to be so well known.

Truth is a new word in Europe (and elsewhere).

That's a very hard thing to help the establishment know. We're still an establishment that thinks the average mentality is something like 13 years of age, that never forgot H.L. Mencken's notion that nobody lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people. That's the horseshit the establishment has always lived with.