Social Critique Quotes

“Few women come into maturity unscathed by the suffocating pink press of girlhood, and even psychopaths are touched by the long, frilly arm of feminine expectations. It’s not that women psychopaths don’t exist; it’s that we fake it better than men.”
― Chelsea G. Summers, A Certain Hunger

“what society dictates
we consume
cattle gathering around
learning devices called
television
mouths opening wider
while addictive morsels
of consumerism are
violently jammed into
us
and we lose more
bits and pieces
of our collective identity
daily”
― Scott C. Holstad, Hang Gliding on X

“از آنجایی که در این زمانه دیگر عنصر اصیلی پیدا نمی شود، از آنجایی که شرابی که می نوشیم و آزادی ای که مدعی اش هستیم تقلبی و تمسخرآمیزند، از آنجایی که در نهایت نیاز به حسن نیتی یگانه و منحصر داریم تا باور بیاوریم که طبقات فرادست قابل احترام اند و طبقات فرودست سزاوار آنند که از مصایبشان بکاهیم و بر محنت هایشان دل بسوزانیم، به اعتقاد من، نظری مسخره و جنون آمیز نخواهد بود، اگر از همنوع ام بخواهم که کمی تخیل به خرج دهد- تقریبا معادل اوهامی که، در زندگی روزمره اش صرف اهداف ابلهانه می شود.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature

“تنبلی بیماری وحشتناکی است. باید از بچگی این مرض درمان بشود، چون اگر درمان نشود این مرض در او باقی می ماند و در پیری هم هیچ کاریش نمی توان کرد‌.”
― Carlo Collodi, Pinicchio

“Maturity sees that the past is not to be rejected, destroyed, or replaced, but rather that it is to be judged and corrected, that the work of judgment and correction is endless, and that it necessarily involves one's own past.

The industrial economy has made a general principle of the youthful antipathy to the past, and the modern world abounds with heralds of "a better future" and with debunkers happy to point out that Yeast was "silly like us" or that Thomas Jefferson may have had a Negro slave as a mistress - and so we are disencumbered of the burden of great lives, set free to be as cynical or desperate as we please. Cultural forms, it is held, should change apace to keep up with technology. Sexual discipline should be replaced by the chemicals, devices, and procedures of "birth control," and poetry must hasten to accept the influence of typewriter or computer.

It can be better argued that cultural forms ought to change by analogy with biological forms. I assume that they do change in that way, and by the same necessity to respond to changes of circumstance. It is necessary, nevertheless, to recognize a difference in kinds of cultural change: there is change by necessity, or adaptation; and there is contrived change, or novelty. The first is the work of species or communities or lineages of descent, occurring usually by slow increments over a long time. The second is the work of individual minds, and it happens, or is intended to happen, by fiat. Individual attempts to change cultural form - as to make a new kind of marriage or family or community - are nearly always shallow or foolish and are frequently totalitarian. The assumption that it can easily be otherwise comes from the faith in genius.

To adopt a communal form with the idea of chain or discarding it according to individual judgment is hopeless, the despair and death of meaning. To keep the form is an act of faith in possibility, not of the form, but of the life that is given to it; the form is a question addressed to life and time, which only life and time can answer.

Individual genius, then, goes astray when it proposes to do the work of community. We rightly follow its promptings, on the other hand, when it can point out correctly that we have gone astray - when forms have become rigid or empty, when we have forgot their use or their meaning. We then follow our genius or our geniuses back to reverence, to truth, or to nature. This alternation is one of the long rhythms.

But the faith in genius and the rebellions of genius, at the times when thee are necessary, should lead to the renewal of forms, not to their destruction.”
― Wendell Berry, Standing by Words

“Yet women weren't always the angles of the house, and angels weren’t always benevolent... we like to forget that men imprisoned women in the house and expected gratitude in return.”
― Chelsea Summers

“Woman was an idol of belly-magic. She seemed to swell and give birth by her own law... Man honored but feared her. She was the black maw that had spat him forth and would devour him anew. Men, bonding together, invented culture as a defense against female nature... from this ... has come the spectacular glory of male civilization, which has lifted woman with it. The very language and logic modern woman uses to assail patriarchal culture were the invention of men.

Hence, the sexes are caught in a comedy of historical indebtedness. Man, repelled by his debt to a physical mother, created an alternate reality, a heterocosm to give him the illusion of freedom. Woman, at first content to accept man's protections but now inflamed with desire for her own illusory freedom, invades man's systems and suppresses her indebtedness to him as she steals them.”
― Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism

“Embedded within these systems of family, friendship, and community, these creepy men may appear harmless, their evil obscured by a benign collective presence, a fog of sorts. This softness swaddles and protect them. This fog abets.”
― Myriam Gurba, Creep: Accusations and Confessions

“Joshua took another small sip from his wine glass as his gaze and his thoughts drifted away from the flat-screen television mounted above the marbled fireplace to ponder a roomful of sports jackets and pantsuits and in some cases cocktail dresses but only of neutral tones and minimal detailing if for no other reason than to avoid becoming the subject of the next petty scandal that would nevertheless send shockwaves through their haughty and insular world. The way they stood in their intimate clusters. Their drink glasses held in various poses of sophistication. And whenever they did bring glass to mouth in accordance with judiciously preset intervals it was also for show, as he believed was true of their subdued conversations, which, from where he was sitting, appeared to be nothing more than the unintelligible murmurings of barely moving lips. A whole list of observations came to mind. Not one of them flattering in any way. The atmosphere thick with that certain stuffiness and elitist redolence of an ivy league alumni fundraising gala. Of course, he readily admitted to himself that out of everyone in the room he was very likely the most materially bereft and least credentialed and that this stinging truth undoubtedly inflamed his plebeian impulse. But that’s not what was bugging him.”
― Casey Fisher, The Subtle Cause

“But the people of Harappa lived in peace and prosperity for a period about as long as Christianity has been on the earth. And yet, not a single war. Quite the contrast, wouldn’t you say?”
― Casey Fisher, The Subtle Cause

“Oh, I don’t know,” Karen groaned, feeling suddenly very feisty. “I just don’t think anyone with a loose appendage swinging between their legs—which we know corresponds to a loose screw in the brain—could ever be trusted with something as delicate as the well-being of someone not similarly encumbered.”
― Casey Fisher, The Subtle Cause

“Swimming against the tide is a waste of time — the system is the one that makes the waves.”
― Paulo Ricardo Zargolin

“Writing trivialities is the task of legislators. For thinkers, what remains is to delve into the everyday, as if words were opioids.”
― Paulo Ricardo Zargolin

“Beauty is the product of the dominant ideology. (Thus when ideology changes, the ideal body follows.) We can see that in the history of art.”
― Orlan

“Full schedules, empty hearts.
Maxed-out memory, corrupted essence.”
― Phoenix Moon, Emotional Roller Coaster: Confessions of a soul reborn from the ashes