Quotes by Social Critics - Page 5

A 'black' man who draws a 'black' person with big lips is called observant. A 'white' man who does the same is called a racist.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There is oppression that shouldn't exist. There is a struggle for freedom all the time. There are very serious dangers: the species may be heading toward extinction. I can't see how anybody can fail to have an interest in trying to help people become more engaged in thinking about these problems and doing something about them.
Noam Chomsky
Sense isn’t democratic. A senseless opinion that’s advocated by 'the majority' is still senseless.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Sense isn’t democratic. An opinion uttered by 99 people does not necessarily make more sense than an opposing opinion that was uttered by one person.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
[A]s long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if meaningful.
Noam Chomsky
Talk about corporate greed and everything is really crucially beside the point, in my view, and really should be recognized as a very big regression from what working people, and a lot of others, understood very well a century ago. Talk about corporate greed is nonsense. Corporations are greedy by their nature. They’re nothing else – they are instruments for interfering with markets to maximize profit, and wealth and market control. You can’t make them more or less greedy; I mean maybe you can sort of force them, but it’s like taking a totalitarian state and saying “Be less brutal!” Well yeah, maybe you can get a totalitarian state to be less brutal, but that’s not the point – the point is not to get a tyranny to be less brutal, but to get rid of it. Now 150 years ago, that was understood. If you read the labour press – there was a very lively labour press, right around here [Massachusetts] ; Lowell and Lawrence and places like that, around the mid nineteenth century, run by artisans and what they called factory girls; young women from the farms who were working there – they weren’t asking the autocracy to be less brutal, they were saying get rid of it. And in fact that makes perfect sense; these are human institutions, there’s nothing graven in stone about them. They [corporations] were created early in this century with their present powers, they come from the same intellectual roots as the other modern forms of totalitarianism – namely Stalinism and Fascism – and they have no more legitimacy than they do. I mean yeah, let’s try and make the autocracy less brutal if that’s the short term possibility – but we should have the sophistication of, say, factory girls in Lowell 150 years ago and recognize that this is just degrading and intolerable and that, as they put it “those who work in the mills should own them ” And on to everything else, and that’s democracy – if you don’t have that, you don’t have democracy.
Noam Chomsky
Of course, the aim of a constitutional democracy is to safeguard the rights of the minority and avoid the tyranny of the majority. (p. 102)
Cornel West
Hamas is regularly described as 'Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.' One will be hard put to find something like 'democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus'—blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable.
Noam Chomsky
The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.
Noam Chomsky
Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
Noam Chomsky
Actually, Bush, technically speaking, is not really President-because he refused to take the Oath of Office. I don’t know how many of you noticed this, but the wording of the Oath of Office is written in the Constitution, so you can’t fool around with it-and Bush refused to read it. The Oath of Of­fice says something about, ”I promise to do this, that, and the other thing,” and Bush added the words, ”so help me God.” Well, that’s illegal: he’s not President, if anybody cares.
Noam Chomsky
The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.
Russell Kirk
Ordinary human laws are the means -- however imperfect -- by which we express our understanding of the enduring moral law.
Russell Kirk
An enlightened thinker does not waste his precious time thinking about what others think of what he thinks.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
These ideas grew out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, Humboldt’s Limits of State Action, Kant’s insistence, in his defense of the French Revolution, that freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved. With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order. In fact, on the very same assumptions that led classical liberalism to oppose the intervention of the state in social life, capitalist social relations are also intolerable.
Noam Chomsky
Sleeping is the most common attempt to temporarily escape reality.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Life is merely one very long day that routinely gets dark to give people a sensible excuse to keep their eyes closed for 8 hours.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To teach, learn. To learn, teach.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
And when you love people, you hate the fact that they’re being treated unfairly. You tell the truth. You sacrifice your popularity for integrity. There is a willingness to give your life back to the people given that, in the end, they basically gave it to you, because we are who we are because somebody loved us anyway.
Cornel West
Not everyone who has helped or is helping you wanted or wants to help you.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Employees leave where they work. Employers live where they work.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To some people, employment is a distraction. To all entertainers, distraction is employment.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The difference between a retiring man and a used condom is that the condom isn’t given a golden watch to inspire the illusion that it still matters to whomever that has just used it.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Playing Solitaire is a non-smoking employee’s smoke break.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Give a typical employee a million, and, he is most likely to use the money to print his CV on fancier paper.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
An employee is sheep. His employer is the shepherd. His salary is grass.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most employees are smarter than their employers. All employers are braver than their employees.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A promotion is an illusionary solution out of an indebted employee’s pit of debt.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The more civilized people are, the more honorable working hard is to them. As a result, the more civilized we get, the less we live.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Absolute freedom is an illusion. For while an employed man might be free from starvation, he is a slave to his employer's financial aspirations, and, working-hours.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Belonging to the working class is the economy’s punishment for those who did what they were told to do in class.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Schooling is a manufacturing process whereby the raw material called curious boys is turned into products called obedient men.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The office’ is a cemetery of dreams.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some of today’s slaves sleep on king size beds.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Weekends are an employee’s parole.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Granted, not all uneducated women are prostitutes, and, not all prostitutes are uneducated. However, where building a family is employment, an uneducated woman's womb is her diploma.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Working overtime is an underpaid man’s salvation.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
School programs the schooled to type a CV. Life inspires the unschooled to type a business plan.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Education inspires the educated to think for themselves. Schooled programs the schooled to work for others.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Alcohol is evil … until your loved one gets employed by a brewery.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Retirement is a stage where an employer discards an employee that he cannot exploit further.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Old Age homes are civilization's dumpsites for human beings who it cannot exploit further.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Back then, work revolved around life. Today, life revolves around work.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A diploma is a piece of paper that is used to acquire another piece of paper: an employment contract.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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
A celebrity's body is an advertiser's canvas.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Weekends are life’s gift to those who hate their jobs.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We’re all geniuses. Life is merely overpopulated with singers who play drums, and, drummers who sing, to pay rent.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Self-employed people work where they live. Entrepreneurs live where they work.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
An education system is best belittled when the so-called educated gets hired by a company that’s owned by a so-called dropout.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Periods are a period when nature forces prostitutes to go on leave.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Once employed, the employed's friends are reduced to creatures that he only sees when he has a new problem, or, something new to show off.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
School is a factory where the raw material called student is turned into a product called employee.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Literacy makes man a victim of advertising. Education makes him a victim of employment.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To drive a woman away, tell her that you are unemployed. To bore her, tell her that you are single.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most self-employed people remain slaves to the employed’s working hours.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You know you are capitalism’s ideal puppet (and that education betrayed you) when winning the lottery is your only chance to realizing financial freedom.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If employment really cared about employees, people wouldn’t have to work until retirement comes to their rescue.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If being seen as worthy of employing is the best that school does for the schooled, then school is overrated.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Employers are at their happiest on Mondays. Employees are at their happiest on Fridays.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana