Social Constructs Quotes

“It’s the invention of clothes, not nature, that made “private parts” private.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“I see walking bombs on the street
Hearts not beating, but ticking”
― Henry Rollins, The Portable Henry Rollins

“A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.”
― Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

“The rich are poor without the poor's acknowledgment of money.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Using money in one’s attempt to put an end to poverty is like using a border in one’s attempt to put an end to xenophobia.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, N for Nigger: Aphorisms for Grown Children and Childish Grown-ups

“If working-hours were natural, then employed men would only get erections between 5 p.m. and 9 a.m. … during the week.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Because of the power that we have given money: The government would rather have taxpayers who do not vote, than voters who do not pay tax.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Gender is a psychosocial virtual entity without location in a person's body. It solely exists in, and is perpetuated by, the society in which the person lives.”
― Az Hakeem, TRANS: Exploring Gender Identity and Gender Dysphoria

“Dating isn't a natural need; it is a social want.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“There is something immoral about abandoning your common sense in matters of social importance.”
― A.E. Samaan

“First there is the World. Then there is the Other World. The Other World is where I sometimes lose my footing. In its calendar turnings, its preinvented existence. The barrage of twists and turns where I sometimes get weary trying to keep up with it, minute by minute adapt: the world of the stoplight, the no-smoking signs, the rental world, the split-rail fencing shielding hundreds of miles of barren wilderness from the human step. A place where by virtue of ha ing been born centuries late one is denied access to earth of space, choice or movement. The brought up world; the owned world. The world of coded sounds: the world of language, the world of lies. The packaged world; the world of speed in metallic motion. The Other World where I've always felt like an alien.”
― David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

“Marriage and dating are man-made ideologies; if having a lover was a prerequisite to living, we’d all be born in pairs; as couples.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Parsons argued that medicine was a social institution that regulated social deviance through the provision of medical diagnoses for nonconforming behavior. Medicine was, in this understanding, engaged in social control.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism

“Marriage is the commodification of affection, copulation, and, reproduction.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Mother Nature made continents. Human beings made countries.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Bodies are not only biological phenomena but also complex social creations onto which meanings have been variously composed and imposed according to time and space.”
― Katrina Karkazis, Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience

“Biological, phenotypic, and chromosomal sex differences of 'male' and 'female' are considered as having a biological (organic) basis, in contrast to the role meanings afforded to these sexes in the form of 'masculine' and 'feminine' genders, which may be considered as social constructs.”
― Az Hakeem, TRANS: Exploring Gender Identity and Gender Dysphoria

“If nature really acknowledged the so-called women’s month, the entire month would have been period-pains-free.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“What I was pointing to was that, yeah, blackness is a fiction; whiteness is a fiction. When we live according to these categories, we’re living within a fiction. Of course, it’s a fiction with very real consequences.”
― Jess Row

“Our Iraq was the one that lived on in our parents’ memories, frozen at the moment of their 1970s departure, immune to time.”
― Huda Al-Marashi, First Comes Marriage: My Not-So-Typical American Love Story

“Family isn’t just a social construct, you know darling, it is formed in the heart. It’s instinctive, this feeling of belonging to someone whose absence keeps you incomplete. . .”
― Franciska Soares, They Whisper in my Blood

“let me tell you something, little girl.
the line is gray.
you can like lipstick
and worms.”
― Jenny Noble Anderson

“Sam didn't know if Sadie wanted him to visit, and he had always been bad at going places where he was not certain he was wanted.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“One day he decided he was more dependent on the kindness of women than he liked so he went off to hunt wild beasts with his bare hands. But all he found was a stray dog & a couple of old pigeons & it was cold & he missed the sound of soft voices, so finally he came back & never worried about it again.
—Iron John”
― Brian Andreas, Still Mostly True: Collected Stories & Drawings

“To proste - myślał Mieczyś Wojnicz, łykając łzy, które mieszały się z krwią zwierzęcia w jego wątłym ciele - być mężczyzną to nauczyć się ignorować to, co sprawia kłopot. Oto cała tajemnica.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Empuzjon

“Prosperity is nothing but an illusion.”
― Kevin Kwan, Crazy Rich Asians

“Time is a fantasy, arrived at by those with enough imagination to dream of death.”
― Garrett Godsey, The Rivener

“Gender's a social construct, anyway.”
― Genevieve Wheeler, Adelaide