Social Criticism Quotes

What is the use of making everybody rich if the rich themselves are miserable? ~ Bertrand Russell

Behold the complacent salesman retailing the Good and True.
One can even buy a so-called Religion, which is really but common
morality sanctified with flowers and music. Rob the Church of her
accessories and what remains behind? Yet the trusts thrive marvelously,
for the prices are absurdly cheap,
a prayer for a ticket to heaven,
a diploma for an honorable citizenship.Hide yourself under a bushel
quickly, for if your real usefulness were known to the world you would
soon be knocked down to the highest bidder by the public auctioneer. ~ Okakura Kakuzo

RoboCop the first movie was fantastic. But even if there was no movie, the concept of RoboCop is brilliant, first because it lends itself to a lot of social criticism, but also because it poses a question, 'When do you lose your humanity?' ~ Jose Padilha

A pun, though despicable in itself, can be the noblest vehicle of an artistic intention by serving as the abbreviation of a wittyview. It can be a social criticism in the form of an epigram. ~ Karl Kraus

Or as my dad always says: it only becomes a social problem when the working man joins in. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

In all ages there arise protests from tender men against the bitterness of criticism, especially social criticism. They are the same men who, when they come down with malaria, patronize a doctor who prescribes, not quinine, but marshmallows. ~ H.L. Mencken

Indeed, bribery, favoritism, and corruption in a great variety of forms were rampant not only in politics, but in all levels of society. ~ David McCullough

Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form. ~ Stendhal

By failing to take note of the gifts of modernity, social critics poison voters against responsible custodians and incremental reformers who can consolidate the tremendous progress we have enjoyed and strengthen the conditions that will bring us more. ~ Steven Pinker

Much of what is today called "social criticism" consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians. ~ Steven Pinker

It was an example of a common phenomenon in American journalism (perhaps in social criticism in general), the shallow focusing on agents or on individuals, thus concealing what a deeper analysis would reveal - the failure of the government itself, indeed, of the political system. ~ Howard Zinn

Because I want to have sex with him
and because that's sinful
I'm blushing and flushing furiously under his scrutinizing scrutiny. ~ Jess C. Scott

If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that. ~ John Cusack

Minds festooned with error, barnacled with bias, swollen with delusions of godhead. ~ Fritz Leiber

Almost everything we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization of cruelty. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Minds altogether horrible in their power, and in their ignorance - which their power protected. ~ Fritz Leiber

But this is the power of storytelling, isn't it? To make sense of the things we can't figure out ourselves. We make up gods and monsters and origin stories and archetypes and tell each other it's all explainable so we don't have to feel the weight of the unknown. That's the theory anyway. The practice is that we're all so much better at seeing the faults of others, at watching them make their mistakes and judging from afar, our social telescopes so much more powerful than the microscopes we forget to use on ourselves. ~ Eda J. Vor

The sophists were as a rule men who had traveled widely and seen different forms of government. Both conventions and local laws in the city-states could vary widely. This led the Sophists to raise the question of what was natural and what was socially induced. By doing this, they paved the way for social criticism in the city-state of Athens. ~ Jostein Gaarder

Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind of people who only ask one to pretend! ~ Edith Wharton

The writer's role is to menace the public's conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time. ~ Rod Serling

I intended to make it sound guileless and rather sweet but you will see in it the little blades of social criticism without which no book is worth a fart in hell. ~ John Steinbeck

We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow-citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion is our national disease. ~ H.L. Mencken

[On The Waste Land:] Various critics have done me the honor to interpret the poem in terms of criticism of the contemporary world, have considered it, indeed, as an important bit of social criticism. To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling. ~ T. S. Eliot

[I]n addition to being a Spirit person, healer, and wisdom teacher, Jesus was a social prophet. There was passion in his language. Many of his sayings (as well as actions) challenged the domination system of his day. They take on pointed meaning when we see them in the context of social criticism of a peasant society. His criticisms of the wealthy were an indictment of the social class at the top of the domination system. His prophetic threats against Jerusalem and the temple were not because they were the center of an "old religion" (Judaism) soon to be replaced by a new religion (Christianity) but because they were the center of the domination system. His criticism of lawyers, scribes, and Pharisees was not because they were unvirtuous individuals but because commitment to the elites led them to see the social order through elite lenses.

Jesus rejected the sharp social boundaries of the established social order and challenged the institutions that legitimated it. In his teaching, he subverted distinctions between righteous and sinner, rich and poor, men and women, Pharisee and outcasts. In his healings and behavior, he crossed social boundaries of purity, gender, and class. In his meal practice, central to what he was about, he embodied a boundary-subverting inclusiveness.

In his itinerancy he rejected the notion of a brokered kingdom of God and enacted the immediacy of access to God apart from institutional mediation. His prophetic act against the mon ~ Marcus J. Borg

An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question. ~ Mary McCarthy

It is crucial for everyone in society--but especially crucial for teachers, parents, and politicians--to realize that social freedom and personal autonomy depend on well-stocked imaginations, for freedom and autonomy depend on having and making choices. ~ Marshall Gregory

On a personal level, Freaking Out is a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking, dress, and social etiquette in order to express creatively his relationship to his immediate environment and the social structure as a whole. ~ Frank Zappa

Our sacred writ is advertising, our piety is shopping, our highest devotion is private choice. God and the soul too often hinder the purely acquisitive longings upon which the market depends, and confront us with values that stand in stark rivalry to the one truly substantial value at the center of our social universe: the price tag. ~ David Bentley Hart

Yours for the unshackled exercise of every faculty by every human being. ~ Lydia M. Child

The qualifications that I have to speak on world affairs are exactly the same ones Henry Kissinger has, and Walt Rostow has, or anybody in the Political Science Department, professional historians - none, none that you don't have. The only difference is, I don't pretend to have qualifications, nor do I pretend that qualifications are needed. I mean, if somebody were to ask me to give a talk on quantum physics, I'd refuse - because I don't understand enough. But world affairs are trivial: there's nothing in the social sciences or history or whatever that is beyond the intellectual capacities of an ordinary fifteen-year-old. You have to do a little work, you have to do some reading, you have to be able to think but there's nothing deep - if there are any theories around that require some special kind of training to understand, then they've been kept a carefully guarded secret. ~ Noam Chomsky

People do not consciously and rationally choose the form of their society. Societies develop through processes of social evolution that are not under rational human control. ~ Theodore Kaczynski

First, if you love the Kindle and it works for you, it isn't problematic, and you should ignore all my criticisms and read the way you want to read. ~ Nicholson Baker

I'm not actually pop culture or social media savvy. I really didn't know what Twitter was when I created an account. ~ Misha Collins

When museums are built these days, architects, directors, and trustees seem most concerned about social space: places to have parties, eat dinner, wine-and-dine donors. Sure, these are important these days - museums have to bring in money - but they gobble up space and push the art itself far away from the entrance. ~ Jerry Saltz

Counting obligations under Medicare and Social Security, the real debt of the United States is more than 10 times the reported national debt. ~ Addison Wiggin

Complaisance, though in itself it be scarce reckoned in the number of moral virtues, is that which gives a lustre to every talent a man can be possessed of. It was Plato's advice to an unpolished writer that he should sacrifice to the graces. In the same manner I would advise every man of learning, who would not appear in the world a mere scholar or philosopher, to make himself master of the social virtue which I have here mentioned. ~ Joseph Addison

This idea of doing it all is the enemy of equality, not the path to do it. It's impossible to do two full-time jobs, and an impossible definition of success is just another way of making women feel like failures ... Any definition of success has to include social policies that honor families and men who raise babies as much as women do. ~ Gloria Steinem

They had no previous connection whatever with Connemara; but they saw connections where others who should have seen them simply looked the other way. ~ Joseph O'Connor

The church wanted us to give out food to malnourished children, but they didn't want us to question why they were malnourished to begin with. ~ Elvia Alvarado

What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover. ~ Arthur Symons

When I grew up, scientists were anti-social people who worked in basements and wore coats and worked with bunson burners, and now they're in our technology every day, and our technology has almost become fashion accessories. ~ Johnny Galecki

The extreme intellectual elegance of the proposal to legalize the distribution and consumption of drugs, touted as the solution to so many problems at once (AIDS, crime, overcrowding in the prisons, and even the attractiveness of drugs to foolish young people) should give rise to skepticism. Social problems are not usually like that. Analogies with the Prohibition era, often drawn by those who would legalize drugs, are false and inexact: it is one thing to attempt to ban a substance that has been in customary use for centuries by at least nine-tenths of the adult population, and quite another to retain a ban on substances that are still not in customary use, in an attempt to ensure that they never do become customary. Surely we have already slid down enough slippery slopes in the last thirty years without looking for more such slopes to slide down. ~ Theodore Dalrymple

What is seen by all on FB becomes what each person also sees in the mirror when he sees himself. The others' gaze, but also the others' values, opinions, and judgements become one's own. ~ Nicos Hadjicostis

After long experience of politics, I have never found that there is any inhibition caused by ignorance as regards criticism. ~ Harold Macmillan

I'm a very social person and I love being out in the world, and the feeling of not having that is the scariest thing to me. ~ Elizabeth Olsen

There is no selfless righteousness in social media . People say or do good things , but having bad motives in them. They only sympathize and support the one with most likes. They do things for rating, acknowledgement and fame. They don't do or say things because they care. That is why those who have few friends or followers will never have a say and their problems will never be known. They wont even get the platform to be supported in what they do. Their voices wont be heard because they are seen as unimportant and not interesting enough. ~ De Philosopher DJ Kyos

I look back to the Great Depression, and what Roosevelt was able to do in very difficult times, to get Social Security through back in the time when it was seen as - well, it wasn't what it is today. It was sort of a last-ditch, if you really need it, you got it, but, today, it's much more a part of your retirement program. ~ Chris Matthews

Tom Walls' buddies remain an isolated minority, except during times of economic or social stress, when a mass following develops to blame cranky sociopaths for the problems besetting society. If it weren't for brown-nosing evil firebrands, he would have no friends. The ideas backing up his rejoinders are extremely superficial and sex-crazed. ~ Linda Chavez

We've come a long way from the time when the crowning achievement in a woman's life was her youthful marriage. And many would agree that this represents progress for women. But when did the search for someone to marry become self-absorbed and pathetic? This absence of social sympathy for women's ambitions to marry is all the more striking because the social world has cared so deeply about virtually every other aspect of these privileged young women's inner and outer lives. ( ... ) The achievement of a good marriage is the one area of life where the most privileged, accomplished, and high achieving young women in society face a loss of support and sympathy for their ambitions and where the social expectations are for disappointment and failure, not success. ~ Barbara Dafoe Whitehead

Men often have grievances against prominent and powerful persons. Historically, the grievances of the powerless against the powerful have furnished the steam for the engines of revolutions. My point is that in many of the famous medicolegal cases involving the issue of insanity, persons of relatively low social rank openly attacked their superiors. Perhaps their grievances were real and justified, and were vented on the contemporary social symbols of authority, the King and the Queen. Whether or not these grievances justified homicide is not our problem here. I merely wish to suggest that the issue of insanity may have been raised in these trials to obscure the social problems which the crimes intended to dramatize. ~ Thomas Szasz

The great ideas of the West - rationalism, self-criticism, the disinterested search for truth, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, equality before the law, freedom of conscience, thought, and expression, human rights, and liberal democracy- quite an achievement, surely, for any civilization- - remain the best, and perhaps the only, means for all people, no matter of what race or creed, to reach their full potential and live in freedom. ~ Ibn Warraq

The Big Investments of tomorrow need not be on the Stock Exchange. They need to be in our schools. ~ Sharad Vivek Sagar

Roughly speaking, any man with energy and enthusiasm ought to be able to bring at least a dozen others round to his opinion in the course of a year no matter how absurd that opinion might be. We see every day in politics, in business, in social life, large masses of people brought to embrace the most revolutionary ideas, sometimes within a few days. It is all a question of getting hold of them in the right way and working on their weak points. ~ Aleister Crowley

I entered medicine to use it as a vehicle for social change. ~ Patch Adams

In a sense, every form of expression is imposed upon one by social factors, one's own language above all. ~ Edward Sapir