Social Quotes (page 46)
No matter what advantages you are born with-- money, intelligence, an appealing personality, a sunny outlook, or good social connections-- none of these provides a magic key to an easy existence. Somehow life manages to bring difficult problems, the causes of untold suffering and struggle. How you meet your challenges makes all the difference between the promise of success and the specter of failure.
Deepak Chopra
He rubbed his hands. For, of course, they didn't content themselves with merely hatching out embryos: any cow could do that. "We also predestine and condition. We decant our babies as socialized human beings, as Alphas or Epsilons, as future sewage workers or future..." He was going to say "future World Controllers", but correcting himself, said "future Directors of Hatcheries" instead.
Aldous Huxley
Despite the fact that an Indonesian island chicken has probably had a much more natural life than one raised on a battery farm in England, people who wouldn't think twice about buying something oven-ready become much more upset about a chicken that they've been on a boat with, so there is probably buried in the Western psyche a deep taboo about eating anything you've been introduced to socially.
Douglas Adams
The vast differences in power contributed to faulty social theories of these differences that are still with us today. When a society is economically dominant, it is easy for its members to assume that such dominance reflects a deeper superiority--whether religious, racial, genetic, cultural, or institutional--rather than an accident of timing or geography.
Jeffrey Sachs
The prevalence of social ugliness made commitment to physical beauty all the more essential. And the very presence in life of double-wide mobile homes, Magic Marker graffiti, and orange shag carpeting had the effect of making ills such as poverty, crime, repression, pollution and child abuse seem tolerable. In a sense, beauty was the ultimate protest, and, in that it generally lasted longer than an orgasm, the ultimate refuge. The Venus de Milo screamed "No!" at evil, whereas the Spandex...
Tom Robbins
Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.
Aristotle
Say what we will, you may be sure that ambition is an error; its wear and tear of heart are never recompensed, --it steals away the freshness of life, --it deadens its vivid and social enjoyments, --it shuts our souls to our own youth, --and we are old ere we remember that we have made a fever and a labor of our raciest years.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.
Marcel Proust
Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called 'educated' making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? [...] The best thing that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness—in plain English, the stupidity which is still the average mark of our culture.
George Eliot
The social function of economic science consists precisely in developing sound
economic theories and in exploding the fallacies of vicious reasoning. In the pursuit of
this task the economist incurs the deadly enmity of all mountebanks and charlatans
whose shortcuts to an earthly paradise he debunks. The less these quacks are able to
advance plausible objections to an economist’s argument, the more furiously do they
insult them.
Ludwig von Mises