Social Commentary Quotes

It was mid-November 2008. There were pirates taking ships with impunity in African waters, terrorists punching holes in Indian security, China sinking towards depression because Americans were afraid to buy cheap goods for Christmas, and the richest nation in the history of the world was talking about how to keep a budget. ~ Walter Mosley

What the hell is this stuff?" he muttered, frowning at the oily spot on the linen cloth. "Pearlman slathered it on me this morning."
"It's macassar oil. Gentlemen use it to keep their hair neat. Nicholas used it," she added pointedly.
"Well, tomorrow he's giving it up. I smell like a rotten apple."
"You do not. And I think it looks rather nice."
He sent her an incredulous look. "I look like an otter. And everything I put my head against gets greasy."
"That's why someone invented the antimacassar," she told him, almost smiling.
"The-aha!" He laughed as he made the connection. "Of course. First they invent something stupid, then something ugly to make up for it. We live in a wondrous age, Annie. ~ Patricia Gaffney

I had made all these rules for myself: I'm not writing social commentary, I'm not writing love songs. ~ Joni Mitchell

When I think about writers who use fiction as social commentary and to raise social awareness but who are also very popular, I think of Dickens. ~ Jodi Picoult

Events cast their shadows ahead; before a harsh winter, wild animals grow thicker fur, and the beaver puts on a thicker layer of fat. What kind of times and what sort of tasks can lie ahead for a generation that must think so harshly, even at such a young age, in order to survive? ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

You were doing a TV show - you don't realise that you're also making social commentary at the same time. ~ Amber Benson

And if she spent rather more time with her nose in a book than was considered ideal at that time (or any other), well, at least that meant she always had a story to tell. ~ Kristen Roupenian

I saw America's economy last night, people raiding dumpsters at a higher rate than normal in my home town. Digging through garbage shouldn't be a career. Thanks Democrats. Thanks Republicans. ~ Carroll Bryant

Poverty . . . is a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilisation," the Scottish merchant and statistician Patrick Colquhoun, turned London magistrate, said in 1806, ironically in an argument for raising people from destitution and misery to mere poverty. "It is the lot of man - it is the source of wealth, since without poverty there would be no labour, and without labour there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth."113 And weren't the poor resentful that they could not eat rich meats, sauces, and sweets and dubious about the rule that each rank in society needed a distinct diet? ~ Rachel Laudan

But I had no idea who this person might be, or who any of the people might be who sat at that table and watched me at the door and claimed to have feelings not exactly for me, but at me. ~ Alexandra Kleeman

I believe myself to be a worthwhile and inventive performer in my own right. [And] I want to be known for what I do best. ~ George Carlin

Sometimes I think I must have a Guardian Idiot. A little invisible spirit just behind my shoulder, looking out for me ... only he's an imbecile. ~ Spider Robinson

There is more friendship ahead after we tell each other the truth. ~ Zain Abdul Nassir

Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is; the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived ... (Bk2:3) ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe. ~ Edith Wharton

Before civilization, artists painted for the living. Today, most paint for a living. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

They are talking about how we can't trust the faded women, women who can't be touched but can stand on the earth, which means they must be lying about something, they must be deceiving us somehow. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

Doctor MacKenzie says Sometimes I think the Victorians had the right idea. When you lost a family member back then you were suppose to be in full mourning, dress in nothing but black, for a whole year. Then you went into something they called 'half mourning' for another full year, adn during those two years, you were pretty much expected to have emotional breakdowns, you could do it whenever you felt you needed to, and everybody would support you. Now?, A month after a tragedy, maybe two, and you're expected to be all better-or down pills so you can pretend you are. ~ Mercedes Lackey

Because the great beauty of embryo development, the bit that human beings find so hard to grasp, is that it is a totally decentralised process ... no cell need wait for instructions from authority; every cell can act on its own information and the signals it receives from its neighbours. We do not organise societies that way ... Perhaps we should try. ~ Matt Ridley

Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. ~ George Macaulay Trevelyan

Binkie, the one and only. He can hear her rings clacking on the plastic phone, and he chuckles, envisioning with amusement the bejeweled and suntanned manicured grip his grandmother thinks she has on his balls. And she does. ~ Jardine Libaire

If you read the first page of one of my novels, I can guarantee that you will read the last one. This isn't just social commentary. This is also about writing good page-turners. I want people to keep reading. ~ Jodi Picoult

People only need the right amount of bullshit for things to start exploding. Sad, but it's human nature. ~ Gabbo De La Parra

I try to tell the best story, and the story that has some heart and some genuine terror and some social commentary and some comedy and some romance and some sex and some violence. ~ Alan Ball

It's basically the same in all periods of societies. If you belong to the majority, you can avoid thinking about lots of troubling things.'
'And those troubling things are all you /can/ think about when you're one of the few.'
'That's about the size of it,' she said mournfully. 'But maybe, if you're in a situation like that, you learn to think for yourself.'
'Yes, but maybe what you end up thinking for yourself /about/ is all those troubling things. ~ Haruki Murakami

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream. ~ Iris Murdoch

On the raptors kept for falconry:
"They talk every night, deep into the darkness. They say about how they were taken, about what they can remember about their homes, about their lineage and the great deeds of their ancestors, about their training and what they've learned and will learn. It is military conversation, really, like what you might have in the mess of a crack cavalry regiment: tactics, small arms, maintenance, betting, famous hunts, wine, women, and song. Another subject they have is food. It is a depressing thought," he continued, "but of course they are mainly trained by hunger. They are a hungry lot, poor chaps, thinking of the best restaurants where they used to go, and how they had champagne and caviar and gypsy music. Of course, they all come from noble blood."
"What a shame that they should be kept prisoners and hungry."
"Well, they do not really understand that they are prisoners any more than the cavalry officers do. They look on themselves as being 'dedicated to their profession,' like an order of knighthood or something of that sort. You see, the member of the Muse [where Raptors are kept for falconry] is restricted to the Raptors, and that does help a lot. They know that none of the lower classes can get in. Their screened perches do not carry Blackbirds or such trash as that. And then, as for the hungry part, they're far from starving or that kind of hunger: they're in training, you know! And like everybody in strict training, they think ~ T.H. White

From school desks with inkwells and scratchy nibs on paper to sweaty finger prints on a tablet... technology progression yes... style? ~ David H. Millar

'Twisted' is similar to 'Pretty Little Liars' in that it's about trying to find out who did it, but it's more about the human relationships between characters and the strain that things can put on them. It's also a little bit of a social commentary piece, because it covers very timely issues. ~ Avan Jogia

One good thing about being an immigrant in the US, no one cares about my sociopolitical opinion. I exist like a bland wallpaper to all races. ~ Fidelis O. Mkparu

Here they were grocery shopping in Fairway on a Saturday morning, a normal married thing to do together - although, Graham could not help noticing, they were not doing it together. His wife, Audra, spent almost the whole time talking to people she knew - it was like accompanying a visiting dignitary of some sort, or maybe a presidential hopeful - while he did the normal shopping. ~ Katherine Heiny

There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul. ~ William Gibson

Hollywood, where the rich don't have to pay for anything. ~ Caroline Kepnes

Tyrena did not laugh again but her smile slashed upward in a twist of green lips. "Martin, Martin, Martin," she said, "the population of literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenberg's day. By the twentieth century, less than two percent of the people in the so-called industrialized democracies read even one book a year. And that was before the smart machines, dataspheres, and user-friendly environments. ~ Dan Simmons

Everyone in life has a purpose, even if it's to serve as a bad example ~ Carroll Bryant

'Dating Game' wasn't social commentary, political analysis, Shakespearean-level drama or even blunt-force comedy. It was just the televised equivalent of meeting someone at a bar. But it appealed to our most basic Darwinian instinct: selecting a good mate. You can't go wrong when a show's premise is hard-wired into human DNA. ~ Seth Shostak

I bet he got picked on but what they don't tell you about bullying is that sometimes, the kid deserves it. ~ Caroline Kepnes

I don't want to offend people and I don't want to be mean, but social commentary and comedy for me are part and parcel. I think the greatest social activists are comedians. ~ Alanis Morissette

It was the age of confidence. Arrogance was epidemic. ~ David Laskin

We will not be dictated to by men with less intelligence, energy, initiative and ambition than we ourselves possess. ~ Elbert Hubbard

His nature was not a suspicious one, and he did not take pleasure, as some men did, in believing himself to have been betrayed. ~ Eleanor Catton

Last summer, in London at least, the hoodie was transformed from a benign piece of leisurewear into a uniform for the disaffected, the angry, the malevolent. So much so that 'hoodie' was no longer a piece of clothing. It was a whole person. A hoodie was somebody likely to steal, plunder and do you unimaginable harm.

People were crossing the street when a hoodie crossed their path - even if it was a 70-year-old gentleman walking his dog. That's how quickly the fear had permeated the collective consciousness. And lifting the hood was tantamount to cocking a gun. ~ Mark Capell

All those happy, pretty, successful people- he hated them because he knew they didn't really exist, and he hated even more the magazine that glorified them and in a way that made them exist, actors, rock musicians, famous writers, politicians. Those aren't people, he fumed, they're photographs. ~ Russell Banks

As a writer, it is my job to tell a story. I don't want to get involved in social commentary; I just want to show issues from a different point of view. I want to show issues from a perspective that may not be highlighted. ~ Nicola Monaghan

Goodreads sports some of the social awkwardness of middle school. If you are looking for a friend, I promise no matter your background or book preferences I will be your friend. ~ Red Phoenix

You see man we are just fucking extras!! Extras in a capitalist blockbuster!~page 75 ~ Winshluss

The idea that the millionaire finds nothing but a sad, empty place at the top of this society; the idea that the rich do not know what to do with their
money; the idea that the successful become filled up with futility, and that
those born successful are poor and little as well as rich - the idea, in short,
of the disconsolateness of the rich - is, in the main, merely a way by which
those who are not rich reconcile themselves to the fact. Wealth in America is
directly gratifying and directly leads to many further gratifications. To be
truly rich is to possess the means of realizing in big ways one's little whims
and fantasies and sicknesses ... ~ C. Wright Mills

She was all slump and sag her spirit withering like a tuckering weed shambling for a way out ~ Saira Viola

Dickens writes such brilliant characters and stories, and his themes and social commentary are still so relevant. I think that's why he's still so loved today. ~ Douglas Booth

Half of life is lost in charming others.
The other half is lost in going through anxieties caused by others.
Leave this play. You have played enough. ~ Rumi

I know all those words, but that sentence makes no sense to me. ~ Matt Groening

That's how you keep someone tied to you, not set them free. You say no to a man and don't give him the peace of repayment. ~ Erri De Luca

Reality Tv had become the preferred drug of choice for the George Clooney obsessed housewives strung out on empty promises and splintered dreams ~ Saira Viola

Society in the English countryside is still strangely, quaintly divided. If black comedy and a certain type of social commentary are what you want, I think English rural communities offer quite a lot of material. ~ Rachel Cusk

Human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism ... inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon) ... And through it all there has always been some truly awful food. ~ Matt Haig

The kind of self-righteous intolerance once associated with the more puritanical forms of religion and the more extreme forms of Socialism now reappeared to promote the 'rights' of women, homosexuals, racial minorities, the disabled and any group of people who could be portrayed as being 'below the line' and therefore discriminated against...Unconsciously they were using the belief that they were acting in the name of selfless moral principle simply as a cloak for asserting their ego, and as a means to enjoy feelings of moral superiority. In the cause of 'toleration' and promoting collective 'rights,' they had become possessed by a fanatical and humorless intolerance. ~ Christopher Booker

Immature citizens in several sizes were massed before a large factorylike structure where advanced techniques transformed them into true-thinking right-acting members of the three social classes, lower, middle, and upper middle. ~ Donald Barthelme

Subterfuge as a woman was always more complicated than subterfuge as a man; the guise of femininity required further insight, required understanding of the cultural context in which the costume would be viewed.

For a man, changes in accoutrements and clothing created changes in status perception, but, no matter the culture, a man was a man. A woman, on the other hand, was never JUST a woman.

A woman was an object, a canvas, upon which society and culture painted labels and framed unspoken expectations, a collectively owned piece upon which shame, scorn, and punishment should be heaped if she failed to confirm to the prescribed design. Even in the most forward-thinking countries, subconscious collusion and tacit social agreement put the value of the opinions and contributions of women at less than those of a full person - somewhere between child and adult. Subterfuge as a woman was always more complicated because a man in a suit was a man in a suit, but a woman in a dress with a hemline two inches too short was a slut, and, in the wrong part of town, a whore, and, in the wrong country, a corpse not quite yet dead. ~ Taylor Stevens

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

One night I begged Robin, a scientist by training, to watch Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' with me on PBS. He lasted about one act, then turned to me in horror: 'This is how you spend your days? Thinking about things like this?' I was ashamed. I could have been learning about string theory or how flowers pollinate themselves.
I think his remark was the beginning of my crisis of faith. Like so many of my generation in graduate school, I had turned to literature as a kind of substitute for formal religion, which no longer fed my soul, or for therapy, which I could not afford ... I became interested in exploring the theory of nonfiction and in writing memoir, a genre that gives us access to that lost Middlemarch of reflection and social commentary. ~ Mary Rose O'Reilley

It's not oil that runs the world, it's shame. ~ Sherman Alexie

Hollywood is McWorld's storyteller, and it inculcates secularism, passivity, consumerism, vicariousness, impulse buying, and an accelerated pace of life, not as a result of its overt themes and explicit story lines but by virtue of what Hollywood is and how its products are consumed. ~ Benjamin R. Barber

Sexual and domestic abuse are already romanticized in mainstream media without critical social commentary, if there is any commentary at all. Horror isn't there for you to consume and enjoy as a sadist, it's a radical subversion of social taboos made to literally horrify you. It's made to give you the perspective of victims who constantly have their voices silenced. ~ Christy Leigh Stewart

I have little tolerance for noise and stupidity. ~ Andrew J. Robinson

If she did not wish to lead a virtuous life, at least she desired to enjoy a character for virtue, and we know that no lady in the genteel world can possess this desideratum, until she has put on a train and feathers and has been presented to her Sovereign at Court. From that august interview they come out stamped as honest women. The Lord Chamberlain gives them a certificate of virtue. ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

A fortunate birth, in other words, is a shock absorber. -The Thought Experiment ~ George Saunders

You can take the ape out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the ape. ~ John Steiner

In America, there's no idea so patently absurd that it can't catch on. ~ Bill Maher

A hero would die for his country, but he'd much rather live for it. ~ Aaron Sorkin

What interests me, personally, is work which in some way, speaks the truth to power ... I don't think we speak the truth to power for power's ear, but for the ear and the imagination of future generations, who would seek to live in a world free from the malign and self-serving influence of those who wield it. ~ Irvine Welsh

When we forget our essential similarities, we forget how to get along, and that cannot but lead to prejudice, discrimination, and eventually, conflict. ~ G. Norman Lippert

The problem is just too big to solve. This life is much easier if we all just pretend to have a heart. ~ E.P. Shelky

Dickens's final book, 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood,' forms the jumping-off point for my new novel, 'The Last Dickens'. This last work by Dickens has very little social commentary and a pretty tightly efficient storyline and cast of characters. Not necessarily what we think of when we think what characterizes Dickens. ~ Matthew Pearl

..the happy hum of humanity. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

This is America. We don't have adult discussions. We have Twitter. ~ Bill Maher

since men are equal and thus have the same wish for happiness, and since there is not enough wealth to satisfy them all to the same extent, they necessarily fight against each other and want power to secure the future enjoyment of what they have at present. ~ Erich Fromm

Our right to communicate is usurped by those with the access to audience. ~ Heather Marsh

Captain Dave is a salt-and-pepper guy who looks older than forty-six. He doesn't have kids of his own. Some people are born to be uncles and Captain Dave is that kind of people. He's also a recovering alcoholic who's obsessed with what everyone else is drinking at all times. Life is hard for some people. ~ Caroline Kepnes

I like singing all songs, really, but I find that writing social commentary comes naturally. ~ Damian Marley

He remembers noticing his dad's shadow was shorter than the others, and he had a visceral sense his father was weaker than the rest, and that he was more dangerous as a weak person with a lot of power than a powerful person with a lot of power. ~ Jardine Libaire

To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion? ... There is nobody - here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone. ~ Virginia Woolf

Jill had three basic statements about life,
1. It is your life, usually with some added social commentary.
2. What you want and what you get are usually two entirely different things.
3. No one ever said that life was fair. ~ Nicholas Sparks

The moral of that story, I think, is that being poor will kill you. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

Poor Sasha. Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of live. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get. The treacled pop songs, the dresses described in the catalogs with words like 'sunset' and 'Paris.' Then the dreams are taken away with such violent force; the hand wrenching the buttons of the jeans, nobody looking at the man shouting at his girlfriend on the bus ~ Emma Cline

We're living in a funny world kid, a peculiar civilization. The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police duty. The politicians are preachers, and the preachers are politicians. The tax collectors collect for themselves. The Bad People want us to have more dough, and the good people are fighting to keep it from us. It's not good for us, know what I mean? If we had all we wanted to eat, we'd eat too much. We'd have inflation in the toilet paper industry. That's the way I understand it. That's about the size of some of the arguments I've heard. ~ Jim Thompson

I think 'The Thing' is so good because it's not just a scary movie. It's also social commentary, which works on multiple levels, which is something I really respond to. ~ Drew Goddard

We Greeks believe that a man who takes no part in public affairs is not merely lazy, but good for nothing ~ Thucydides

One problem with the division of labor in our complex economy is how it obscures the lines of connection, and therefore of responsibility, between our everyday acts and their real-world consequences. Specialization makes it easy to forget about the filth of the coal-fired power plant that is lighting this pristine computer screen, or the back-breaking labor it took to pick the strawberries for my cereal, or the misery of the hog that lived and died so I could enjoy my bacon. Specialization neatly hides our implication in all that is done on our behalf by unknown other specialists half a world away. ~ Michael Pollan

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death. ~ Neil Postman

... does not need Facebook, Twitter and Stumble Upon. She is a whole social media network all by herself. ~ Pandora Poikilos

She was handed more personality than other mortals, and chemically fertilized in a glasshouse - now her bionic strength allows her to teleport platters of watercress sandwiches from the kitchen to the library, where she's beating her friends at backgammon. ~ Jardine Libaire

The "health, education, and welfare" section of government is another boondoggle. First we manufacture indigent and superfluous people by legal monopolies in land, money and idea patents, erecting tariff barriers to protect monopolies from foreign competition, and taxing laborers to subsidize rich farmers and privileged manufacturers. Then we create "social workers, " etc., to care for them and thereby establish a self-aggravating and permanent institutionalized phenomenon ... ~ Laurance Labadie

The hypocrisy and social sham of the world, and that I have mastered the following hard truths of life--that there is no love without lust--no friendship without self-interest--no religion without avarice--and no so-called virtue without its accompanying stronger vice. Who, knowing these things, would care to take part in them! ~ Marie Corelli

It's good netiquette to avoid information that offends or challenge errors when confronted. NetworkEtiquette.net ~ David Chiles

Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I'm intensely interested in change - probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next? ~ J.G. Ballard

No matter what federal program one selects - Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the drug war, the income tax and the IRS, education, foreign interventions and wars - they are all a giant mess. ~ Jacob G. Hornberger

Why aren't you in school? I see you every day wandering around."
"Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this." She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. "Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball. Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lampposts, playing 'chicken' and 'knock hubcaps.' I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abn ~ Ray Bradbury

Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.
- Bell Hooks ~ Win Quier

If Europe today accounts for just over 7 per cent of the world's population, produces around 25 per cent of global GDP and has to finance 50 per cent of global social spending, then it's obvious that it will have to work very hard to maintain its prosperity and way of life, ~ Angela Merkel

With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home anywhere. ~ Edmund De Waal