Quotes by Social Critics

The news is glorified gossip.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Dear Whoever-that-just-found-out-that-they-have-a-terminal-illness, don't let that put you down. Technically, we are all dying.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society. In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category.
Noam Chomsky
The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category—except for the category of familiarity.
Noam Chomsky
In the case of Tunisia, it was indeed this single act that sparked what had been long-standing active protest movements and moved them forward. But that's not so unusual. Let's look at our own history. Take the civil rights movement. There had been plenty of concern and activism about violent repression of blacks in the South, and it took a couple of students sitting in at a lunch counter to really set it off. Small acts can make a big difference when there is a background of concern, understanding, and preliminary activism.
Noam Chomsky
I remember the philosopher Bertrand Russell was asked why he spent his time protesting against nuclear war and getting arrested on demonstrations. Why didn’t he continue to work on the serious philosophical and logical problems which have major intellectual significance? And his answer was pretty good. He said: “Look, if I and others like me only work on those problems, there won’t be anybody around to appreciate it or be interested.
Chomsky Noam
All wars are popular for the first 30 days.
Arthur Schlesinger
The opposite of having faith is having self-pity.
Og Guinness
Almost all important questions are important precisely because they are not susceptible to quantitative answer.
Arthur Schlesinger
Few great men could pass personnel.
Paul Goodman
Few great men could pass personnel.
Paul Goodman
The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.
Lenny Bruce
Enjoyment is not a goal it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity.
Paul Goodman
If a man has important work and enough leisure and income to enable him to do it properly he is in possession of as much happiness as is good for any of the children of Adam.
R.H. Tawney
Clever men are impressed in their differences from their fellows. Wise men are conscious of their resemblance to them.
R.H. Tawney
Few great men could pass Personnel.
Paul Goodman
I have learned to have very modest goals for society and myself things like clean air green grass children with bright eyes not being pushed around useful work that suits one's abilities plain tasty food and occasional satisfying nookie.
Paul Goodman
The family is the American fascism.
Paul Goodman
The opposite of having faith is having self-pity.
Og Guinness
Faith is to believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives: it is the only way we can leave the future open.
Lillian Smith
I won't say ours was a tough school but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like "What I'm Going to Be if I Grow Up."
Lenny Bruce
Faith and doubt both are needed not as antagonists but working side by side to take us around the unknown curve.
Lillian Smith
What we need is a rebirth of satire of dissent of irreverence of an uncompromising insistence that phoniness is phony and platitudes are platitudinous.
Arthur Schlesinger
It is by losing himself in the objective in inquiry creation and craft that a man becomes something.
Paul Goodman
It is an economic axiom as old as the hills that goods and services can be paid for only with goods and services.
Albert J. Nock
When you stop learning stop listening stop looking and asking questions always new questions then it is time to die.
Lillian Smith
The whole motivation for any performer is 'Look at me Ma.'
Lenny Bruce
He who makes fun of a short and fat man’s weight is much less cruel than he who makes fun of his height.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A killer is someone who killed another without their country’s permission.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We are all 'foreigners' to [the remainder of: the human race minus our countrymen].
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If you’ve ever taken an economics course you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. I don’t have to tell you, that’s not what’s done. If advertisers lived by market principles then some enterprise, say, General Motors, would put on a brief announcement of their products and their properties, along with comments by Consumer Reports magazine so you could make a judgment about it.That’s not what an ad for a car is—an ad for a car is a football hero, an actress, the car doing some crazy thing like going up a mountain or something. If you’ve ever turned on your television set, you know that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to try to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices—that’s what advertising is.
Noam Chomsky
Insurance companies sell what might happen tomorrow. Historians sell what certainly happened yesterday.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A model is an actor without a voice.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Speaking one’s mind once is more honorable than quoting a thousand men.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
An editor is someone who is paid to tell a writer what she thinks about how he wrote what he thinks about.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Interviews were invented to make journalism less passive. Instead of waiting for something to happen, journalists ask someone what should or could happen.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A makeover is the rebranding of a human being.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Modern industrial civilisation has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilisation has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits in the classic formulation.Now, it's long been understood very well that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist with whatever suffering and injustice it entails as long as it's possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited: that the World is an infinite resource, and that the World is an infinite garbage-can. At this stage of History, either one of two things is possible: either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community-interests, guided by values of solidarity and sympathy and concern for others; or, alternatively, there will be no destiny for anyone to control.As long as some specialised class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves. But the conditions of survival, let alone justice, require rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole and, by now, that means the Global Community. The question is whether privileged élites should dominate mass-communication, and should use this power as they tell us they must, namely, to impose necessary illusions, manipulate and deceive the stupid majority, and remove them from the public arena. The question, in brief, is whether Democracy and Freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided. In this possibly-terminal phase of human existence, Democracy and Freedom are more than values to be treasured, they may well be essential to survival.
Noam Chomsky
The boring thing about being interesting is that you bore boring people.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
People who wear G-strings suffer from indecision.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Man is more likely to believe an opinion that he wanted to hear … than a fact that he wishes was an opinion.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
119When you bring together the national security state and the military-industrial complex, when you bring together the prison-industrial complex and all the profits that flow from it, when you bring together the corporate media multiplex that don’t want to allow for serious dialogue... and then, when you bring together the Wall Street oligarchs and the corporate plutocrats, and they tell any person or any group, 'If you speak the truth, we’ll shoot you down like a dog and dehumanize you the way we did to dehumanize the brothers in Attica,' the only thing that will keep you going is you better have some love in your heart for the people.
Cornel West
The blues is relevant today because when we look down through the corridors of time, the black American interpretation of tragicomic hope in the face of dehumanizing hate and oppression will be seen as the only kind of hope that has any kind of maturity in a world of overwhelming barbarity and bestiality. That barbarity is found not just in the form of terrorism but in the form of the emptiness of our lives - in terms of the wasted human potential that we see around the world. In this sense, the blues is a great democratic contribution of black people to world history.
Cornel West
It is good for a student to be poor. Getting and spending, the typical American college student lays waste his powers. Work and contemplation don't mix, and university days ought to be days of contemplation.
Russell Kirk
Technically, according to the notion of the will of God, there is no such a thing as a competent surgeon.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
*You only get one chance to make a first impression.* Ah, whatever!!! Who said you get three chances to make the second impression?!!
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If you live in New York, even if you're Catholic, you're Jewish
Lenny Bruce
Some women are good-looking … until they change their hairstyle.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In his school, Bertrand Russell thought it was better if they had the sex, so they could give their undivided attention to mathematics, which was the main thing.
Paul Goodman
If we do not believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we do not believe in it at all.
Noam Chomsky
In the Bible, a woman was made from a man. In real life, a man is made from a woman.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Saying that someone is full of themselves is silly. Who else can one be full of … except self?
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Reading leads to knowing more. Knowing more leads to arrogance. Reading further leads to humbleness.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Creating is the closest thing to being immortal.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The streets are a poor kid’s PlayStation™
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Life humbles the rich by giving them problems that money can’t resolve, or, dissolve.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Not every happy person is rich, and, Not every rich person is happy.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
An afro is a poor man’s haircut.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Expensive clothing is a poor man’s attempt to appear prosperous.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To put an arrogant 'famous' singer in her place: pretend to be deaf.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana