societal paradox Quotes

Like lots of baby boomers, I was brought up on archaic anthropomorphism. Upstanding Christian dogs. Rabbits with family values. Because the ancient texts and pictures were sacred - Potter, Milne and the rest. Even concerned parents who knew Freud and Jung never saw the contradictions in feeding us on them.

Should an anthropologist or a sociologist be looking for a bizarre society to study, I would suggest he come to Ulster. It is one of Europe's oddest countries. Here, in the middle of the twentieth century, with modern technology transforming everybody's lives, you find a medieval mentality that is being dragged painfully into the eighteenth century by some forward-looking people.

This is America; our icons are complicated.

I verily believe that a man's way with women is in inverse ratio to his prowess among men. The weakling and the saphead have often great ability to charm the fair sex, while the fighting man who can face a thousand real dangers unafraid, sits hiding in the shadows like some frightened child.

This is the even-handed dealing of the world!" he said. "There is noth-ing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes tocondemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.

It is an odd paradox that a society, which can now speak openly and unabashedly about topics that were once unspeakable, still remains largely silent when it comes to mental illness.

The world has been made by fools that wise men may live in it.

Paradoxical as it may seem, men and women who are free to pursue individualism and material wealth turn out to be the most compassionate of all.

We've always idealized youth and then destroyed youth. That has happened since the beginning of time, and I'm fascinated by why we do that.

If you throw the baby away, that's garbage. But no, the heart's precious. You could get something, you could save a life. Well, you just threw away a baby but the heart's valuable. That's the horror and the terror and the hypocrisy that nobody can understand. We base communities on the idea of protecting children based on the sacrifice of adults. Adults work and die so that their next generation would grow and prosper.

One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology.