Social Commentary Quotes

“Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“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, The Complete Prose Works Of Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

“Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).”
― Jess C Scott, The Other Side of Life

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
― James Baldwin

“I can't give you the white picket fence, and if I did, you'd set it on fire.”
― Ilona Andrews, Magic Bleeds

“Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“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, Off the Wall at Callahan's

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure.”
― H.L. Mencken

“Honest self-reflection is true self-reflection.”
― Milan Kordestani, I'm Just Saying: A Guide to Maintaining Civil Discourse in an Increasingly Divided World

“The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.”
― Larry Niven, Ringworld

“Welcome to Hell. Here's your accordion.”
― Gary Larson, The Complete Far Side, 1980–1994

“A city's only ever three hot meals away from anarchy.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Terminal World

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

“Isa rolled her eyes. “Are you serious? You’re the only person I know who’d get upset that the FBI’s not watching him.”
― Margarita Barresi, A Delicate Marriage

“Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“It’s the people who don’t worry—those who never have any doubts that what they’re doing is good and right—they’re the ones that cause the problems.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Redemption Ark

“I alternate between feeling sympathetic toward humanity and being a misanthrope. When I'm sympathetic, it usually means I haven't been around people in awhile.”
― John R Lindensmith

“Poor Sasha. Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. 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, The Girls

“Self-reflection improves civil discourse by pushing you toward reason.”
― Milan Kordestani, I'm Just Saying: A Guide to Maintaining Civil Discourse in an Increasingly Divided World

“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

“So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.”
― Elbert Hubbard, Elbert Hubbard's Scrap Book

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

“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, The Killer Inside Me

“It's not oil that runs the world, it's shame.”
― Sherman Alexie, War Dances

“Those who had nothing substantial to brag about bragged the loudest.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“I simply refuse to deal with idiots...It has cut my social obligations in half.”
― Julia Quinn, On the Way to the Wedding

“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, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“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

“Just because all the rats are gone doesn't mean I trust the rattlesnake that got rid of them.”
― John Steiner