Quotes by Social Critics - Page 3

Most people do not have a problem with you thinking for yourself, as long as your conclusions are the same as or at least compatible with their beliefs.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Being rich is an untalented artist’s consolation prize.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Virginity comes standard. A good head is earned.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In other words, we are never freer than when we become most ourselves, most human, most just, most excellent, and the like.
Os Guinness
(On his addiction to opiods): I'll die young, but it's like kissing God.
Lenny Bruce
I loved when Bush came out and said, 'We are losing the war against drugs.' You know what that implies? There's a war being fought, and the people on drugs are winning it.
Bill Hicks
Nothing matters when you are dead, and, you are dead when nothing matters.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To halve the number of times that other people hurt you: halve the number of expectations that you have from other people.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A slave that acknowledges its enslavement is halfway to its liberation.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We are slaves whose masters are dead. For we are mostly controlled by doctrines which were established centuries heretofore.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A realist is a slave to reality.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A freedom-fighter is a slave to freedom.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Not untill all babies are born from glass jars will the combat cease between mother and son. But in a totalitarian future that has removed procreation from woman's hands, there will also be no affect and no art. Men will be machines, without pain but also without pleasure. Imagination has a price, which we are paying every day. There is no escape from the biologic chains that bind us.
Camille Paglia
Generally, people need less than a quarter of what they want.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A man’s bank balance is the new penis size.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A cowardly critique starts with a compliment.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I will only start taking book reviews seriously from the day that books are able to review readers.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Criticism at its best is re-creative, not spirit-killing.
Camille Paglia
Not everybody that says that you suck is a hater. There are people who suck.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Procrastination threatens critics’ livelihood.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Critiquing a doer isn’t doing.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most people say that Shakespeare rocked merely because most people say that Shakespeare rocked.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
As uncomfortable as it might be, I refuse to let the comfort of being agreed with suffocate my opinions.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Back then: to be paid more, one needed to increase the number of things that are by him known. Today: to be paid more, one needs to increase the number of people by whom he is known.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"-- they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity. (p. 107-108)
Cornel West
Needless to say, this fragile experiment began by taking for granted the ugly conquest of Amerindians and Mexicans, the exclusion of women, the subordination of European working-class men and the closeting of homosexuals. These realities made many of the words of the revolutionary Declaration of Independence ring a bit hollow. yet the enslavement of Africans -- over 20 percent of the population -- served as the linchpin of American democracy; that is, the much-heralded stability and continuity of American democracy was predicated upon black oppression and degradation. Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white -- they would be only Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and others engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity.
Cornel West
To flatter a young man, tell him that you thought that he was older than he is. To flatter an old woman, tell her that you thought that she was younger than she is.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Getting older comes with abilities. Being old comes with disabilities.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The only things that old age comes standard with: grey hair and wrinkles. Wisdom and intellect are earned.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If we really exist merely to fulfill God’s plan: then life is a television drama; with God being the scriptwriter, the director, and, the audience.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to their anxieties.
Paul Goodman
To be American is to be part of a dialogical and democratic operation that grapples with the challenge of being human in an open-ended and experimental manner. Although America is a romantic project in which a paradise, a land of dreams, is fanned and fueled with a religion of vast possibility, it is, more fundamentally, a fragile experiment-precious yet precarious-of dialogical and democratic human endeavor that yields forms of modern self-making and self-creating unprecedented in human history. From Thomas Jefferson to Elijah Muhammad, Geronimo to Dorothy Day, Jane Adams to Nathaniel West, it holds out the possibility of self-transformation and self-reliance to New World dwellers willing to start anew and recast themselves for the purpose of deliverance and betterment. This purpose requires only a restlessness, energy and boldness that galvanizes people to organize and mobilize themselves in a way that makes new opportunities and possibilities credible and worth the
Cornel West
Life among clones would not be worth living, and a sane person will only rejoice that others have abilities that they do not share. That should be elementary.
Noam Chomsky
Eyes are a deaf man’s ears. Ears are a blind man’s eyes.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If love wasn't conditional, everybody would be in love with everybody.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Primary purposes of a mirror: (1) To help civilized men realize their imperfections, and, (2) To help the imperfect hide their imperfections.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In practice it undermines the transformation of faith. When Christians concentrate their time and energy on their own separate spheres and their own institutions-whether all-absorbing megachurches, Christian yellow-page businesses, or womb-to-tomb Christian cultural ghettoes-they lose the outward thrusting, transforming power that is at the heart of the gospel. Instead of being 'salt' and 'light' -images of a permeating and penetrating action-Christians and Christian institutions become soft and vulnerable to corruption from within.
Os Guinness
Retro is a symptom of a generation that is too lazy to innovate.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In some cases, people with a body (whose size) they did not long for are victims of having a bank balance (whose size) they longed for.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Whenever they are given the choice, some people choose a bath over a shower; they, too, would like to do their bit to waste water.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Ambition’ is ‘greed’ rebranded.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Ambition is greed without makeup.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Life enslaves the poor by giving them problems that money can resolve, or, dissolve
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Life humbles the rich by giving them problems that money can’t resolve, or, dissolve. Life enslaves the poor by giving them problems that money can resolve, or, dissolve.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A satirist that criticizes religion is seen as a satanist.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The advertising industry's prime task is to ensure that uninformed consumers make irrational choices, thus undermining market theories that are based on just the opposite.
Noam Chomsky
By now, they rank people by income level or wages roughly the same: The bottom seventy per cent or so are virtually disenfranchised; they have almost no influence on policy, and as you move up the scale you get more influence. At the very top, you basically run the show.
Noam Chomsky
He wants to focus on what he calls 'cultural issues.' That makes sense, because when you're going to rob people blind you don't want to have them focus their attention on economic issues.
Noam Chomsky
If sexual physiology provides the pattern for our experience of the world, what is woman's basic metaphor? It is mystery, the hidden. Karen Horney speaks of a girl's inability to see her genitals and a boy's ability to see his as the source of "the greater subjectivity of women as compared with the greater objectivity of men." To rephrase this with my different emphasis: men's delusional certitude that objectivity is possible is based on the visibility of their genitals. Second, this certitude is a defensive swerve from the anxiety-inducing invisibility of the womb. Women tend to be more realistic and less obsessional because of their toleration for ambiguity which they learn from their inability to learn about their own bodies. Women accept limited knowledge as their natural condition, a great human truth that a man may take a lifetime to reach.The female body’s unbearable hiddenness applies to all aspects men’s dealings with women. What does it look like in there? Did she have an orgasm? Is it really my child? Who was my real father? Mystery surrounds women’s sexuality. This mystery is the main reason for the imprisonment man has imposed on women. Only by confining his wife in a locked harem guarded by eunuchs could he be certain that her son was also his.
Camille Paglia
A man who lives long enough will be a boy twice.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A face-lift is a woman’s attempt to lower the odds of the next person accurately guessing her age.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You can only be twice someone’s age once.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A murderer is a killer without a uniform.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To be better equipped for the tests that the year will bring — read a textbook. To prepare for the tests that life will bring — read a book.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A true survivor is someone who, after 12+ years of being schooled, remains independent in their thinking.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
School forces unique individuals to think, act, and, look alike.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
School overpopulates students’ minds with too much of what happened yesterday; seldom with what the students can do today, or, tomorrow.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You don’t really need to be intelligent to be a 'top student.' All that you have to do is to forget the least in an exam.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
With homework, school prepares students for overtime. With reports, it prepares them for payday.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Case by case, we find that conformity is the easy way, and the path to privilege and prestige; dissidence carries personal costs that may be severe, even in a society that lacks such means of control as deathsquads, psychiatric prisons, or extermination camps. The very structure of the media is designed to induce conformity to established doctrine. In a three-minute stretch between commercials, or in seven hundred words, it is impossible to present unfamiliar thoughts or surprising conclusions with the argument and evidence required to afford them some credibility. Regurgitation of welcome pieties faces no such problem.
Noam Chomsky