Quotes by Social Critics - Page 4

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....
Noam Chomsky
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
Noam Chomsky
Though you can love what you do not master, you cannot master what you do not love.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A question is far more subversive, biblically, than a statement.
Os Guinness
You ever noticed how people who believe in Creationism look really un-evolved? You ever noticed that? Eyes real close together, eyebrow ridges, big furry hands and feet. "I believe God created me in one day". Yeah, looks like He rushed it
Bill Hicks
I'm not into those kind of rivalries. I remember standing out in front of Stratford, minding my own business. Carload of about eighty kids would pull up: 'STRATFORD SUCKS!' Am I supposed to run after these guys? I'd just stand there, you know. They'd back up. 'STRATFORD SUCKS! ...STRATFORD SUCKS!' I'd say, 'I know. I go there. You're wasting gas, man.
Bill Hicks
We can’t all be comedians, some people have to do the laughing.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
98% of all comedians feel obliged to be funny when interviewed. Less than 2% succeed.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The best kind of comedy to me is when you make people laugh at things they’ve never laughed at, and also take a light into the darkened corners of people’s minds, exposing them to the light.
Bill Hicks
Let me tell you about gays in the military. I don't want any gay people hanging around me while I'm killing kids. I just don't want to see it.
Bill Hicks
Finding a new ethics or esthetics, as Dr. Douglass asks, will not put us in a state of grace. Existence is not given meaning by importing it into a revelation from the outside. The meaning is —there, in more closely contacting the actual situation, the only situation that there is, whatever it is. As our situation is, closely contacting it would surely result in plenty of trouble and perhaps in terrible social conflicts, terrible opportunities and duties, during which we might learn something and at the end of which we might know something, even a new ethics; for it is in such conflicts that new ethics are discovered. But it is just these conflicts that we do not observe happening. Everybody talks nice. At most there is some unruliness and dumb protest, and some withdrawal.So urging the juveniles to go to church is not serious, for how will the church give them faith? What opportunity will it open?
Paul Goodman
My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it. So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one's actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.
Noam Chomsky
Listen, the next revolution is gonna be a revolution of ideas.
Bill Hicks
If unconventional ideas = sperm, then public opinion = abortion.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Opinions of the masses kill the 'extra' in an 'extraordinary' idea.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Public opinion is to an unconventional idea … what abortion is to sperm.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Committees kill unconventional ideas for a living.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I have tried to be a man of letters in love with ideas in order to be a wiser and more loving person, hoping to leave the world just a little better than I found it.
Cornel West
Capitalism has turned human beings into commodities. To the owner of a restaurant: the cook and a bag of potatoes are equally important.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
That comes to about one hundred million people in India alone from 1947 to 1980. But we don’t call that a crime of democratic capitalism. If we were to carry out that calculation throughout the world… I wont even talk about it. But Sen is correct; they’re not intended, just like the Chinese famine wasn’t intended. But they are ideological and institutional crimes, and capitalist democracy and its advocates are responsible for them, in whatever sense supporters of so-called Communism are responsible for the Chinese famine. We don’t have the entire responsibility, but certainly a large part of it
Noam Chomsky
It [predatory capitalism] is incapable of meeting human needs that can be expressed only in collective terms, and its concept of competitive man who seeks only to maximize wealth and power, who subjects himself to market relationships, to exploitation and external authority, is antihuman and intolerable in the deepest sense.
Noam Chomsky
First of all, we've never had capitalism, so it can't end. We have some variety of state capitalism. If you fly on an airplane, you're basically flying in a modified bomber. If you buy drugs, the basic research was done under public funding and support. The high-tech system is permeated with internal controls, government subsidies. And if you look at what are supposed to be the growing alternatives, China is another form of state capitalism...The question is whether these systems, whatever they are, can be adapted to current problems and circumstances. For example, there's no justification, economic or other, for the enormous and growing role of financial institutions since the 1970s. Even some of the most respected economists pint out that they're just a drag on the economy. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times says straight out that the financial institutions shouldn't be allowed to have anything like the power they do. There's plenty of leeway for modification and change. Worker-owned industries can take over. There's interesting work on this topic by Gar Alperovitz, who has been right at the center of a lot of organizing around worker control. It's not a revolution, but it's the germ of another type of capitalism, capitalism in the sense that markets and profit are involved.
Noam Chomsky
One should attend carefully to the fear and desperation of the powerful. They understand very well the potential reach of the "ultimate weapon," and only hope that those who seek a more free and just world will not gain the same understanding and put it effectively to use.
Noam Chomsky
Our philosophy is to rob everything as much as possible and forget about tomorrow...But it makes a certain sense if the sole human value is making as much wealth as you can tomorrow. You don't care what happens down the road and you don't care what happens to anybody else. It makes perfect sense. If it destroys the world, well, it's not my problem.
Noam Chomsky
There is tons of work to be done, and lots of people who would like to do the work. It's just that the economic system is such a grotesque catastrophe that it can't even put together idle hands and needed work, which would be satisfying to the people and which would be beneficial to all of us. That's just the mark of a failed system. The most dramatic mark of it.
Noam Chomsky
There is one problem, however, at least for alternative experiments of the American variety (and possibly some European as well), namely that we have no clear litmus test to determine which models are truly steady-state (non-expansionist) and which are business as usual hiding under “green wigs.” This latter trend is known as “greenwashing,” in which the language is hip and the bottom line remains profit. Thomas Friedman and Al Gore are major (and wealthy) players in this category, perpetuating the notion of “green corporations.” Other examples include a 2012 conference on “Sustainable Investing,” sponsored by Deepak Chopra, among others, which had as its slogans “Make Money and Make a Difference” and “Capitalism for a Democratic Society.” All of this is the attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too (or simply eat someone else’s cake); there is no real interest in disconnecting from growth, and it is growth that is the core of the problem. As Professor Magnuson tells us, while traveling around the U.S. to interview varous alternative businesses and experiments, he discovered that many of them were shams—capitalist wolves in green clothing.
Morris Berman
This market way of life promotes addictions to stimulation and obsessions with comfort and convenience.
Cornel West
The black conservatives claim that the decline of values such as patience, deferred gratification, and self-reliance have resulted in the high crime rates, the increasing number of unwed mothers, and the relatively uncompetitive academic performances of black youth. And certainly these sad realities must be candidly confronted. But nowhere in their writings do the new black conservatives examine the pervasiveness of sexual and military images used by the mass media and deployed by the advertising industry in order to entice and titillate consumers. Black conservatives thus overlook the degree to which market forces of advanced capitalist processes thrive on sexual and military images.
Cornel West
The times are too difficult and the crisis too severe to indulge in schadenfreude. Looking at it in perspective, the fact that there would be a financial crisis was perfectly predictable: its general nature, if not its magnitude. Markets are always inefficient.
Noam Chomsky
In a time in which Communist regimes have been rightfully discredited and yet alternatives to neoliberal capitalist societies are unwisely dismissed, I defend the fundamental claim of Marxist theory: there must be countervailing forces that defend people's needs against the brutality of profit driven capitalism.
Cornel West
How people themselves perceive what they are doing is not a question that interests me. I mean, there are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster'; instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do. If you ask the CEO of some major corporation what he does he will say, in all honesty, that he is slaving 20 hours a day to provide his customers with the best goods or services he can and creating the best possible working conditions for his employees. But then you take a look at what the corporation does, the effect of its legal structure, the vast inequalities in pay and conditions, and you see the reality is something far different.
Noam Chomsky
Not smoking is not an achievement. Like virginity, it comes standard.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Generally, a woman would rather be married to any man that she doesn’t hate, than remain unmarried to a man that she loves.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A 'good man' is a male creature that survives the endless episodes that its woman spends complaining about women who she hates, and, women who hate her.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Courtship is an activity whereby one losses oneself … whilst trying to win someone’s love.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If love wasn’t conditional, every single first encounter with individuals of your 'preferred' gender would result in *love at first sight.*
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Courting is an activity where a man and a woman flaunt their virtues. Dating is an activity where life exposes the other’s vices.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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
Love songs are nothing without exaggeration.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Women who do not play hard to get are hard to get.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Money cannot buy you love. But it sure can buy you things that some people will love you for having.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Once a woman goes over 25, she prioritizes 'financial security' in a potential lover. Love and good looks are just a bonus.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A wedding is a ceremony men fund with money they know they don’t have … to prove the love they think they have.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most people can’t stand spending a few minutes by themself. Yet they expect others to spend an hour, a day, or, even a lifetime, with them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You know you’ve reached the end of a relationship: when your lover now demands that your jokes be funny before they laugh.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Not every happy person is married, and, Not every married person is happy.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some wo/men are so possessive … you end up missing missing them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The phrase *You complete me* is nonsensical. A couple is a *we* … not a complete *me.*
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Those who say that money can’t buy you love make it sound as if love can buy you money.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Marriage is the commodification of affection, copulation, and, reproduction.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A broke man’s lover doesn’t feel ‘loved’ on her Birthday, Christmas, and, on Valentine’s Day.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A humanitarian seldom makes a good lover. For a lover’s world revolves around their lover, while a humanitarian’s world revolves around the world.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Mr. Right' is usually two or eight men.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Be ashamed not of being single, or, unemployed. That comes standard.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A love triangle is a threesome delayed.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A tomboy is a bisexual girl’s dream lover.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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
Nobody enjoys the company of others as intensely as someone who usually avoids the company of others.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.
Noam Chomsky
Not all ‘whites’ are racists. Not all racists are ‘white.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana