Quotes by Social Critics - Page 8

Politics and Sport were invented to give unknowledgeable people an opportunity to share their knowledge.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A very, in a sense, terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe [war]. I think that's more terrifying than the occasional Hitler or LeMay or other that crops up. These people would not be able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity...and therefore I think that it's, in some sense, the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who share a very serious burden of guilt that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and violent.
Noam Chomsky
You can only manage to convince a person to admit to being wrong, not ignorant, arrogant, or stupid.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Not every person that speaks less than you do is more ignorant than you are.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Our ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like.
Noam Chomsky
Some books sold because they are (said to be) great. Some are (said to be) great because they sold.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Back then: to be regarded as well-known, one had to be great. Today: to be regarded as great, one has to be well-known.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If it's wrong when they do it, it's wrong when we do it.
Noam Chomsky
... if we adopt the principle of universality: if an action is right (or wrong) for others, it is right (or wrong) for us. Those who do not rise to the minimal moral level of applying to themselves the standards they apply to others -- more stringent ones, in fact -- plainly cannot be taken seriously when they speak of appropriateness of response; or of right and wrong, good and evil
Noam Chomsky
The principle of universality is not a 'theory'. Just moral truism.
Noam Chomsky
Chances are that there are white people who brag about being the first to move out of a suburb that has been intruded by blacks.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I am usually able to tolerate all kinds of victims of indoctrination except those who have been infected with xenophobia, racism, or homophobia.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To leave a man's ego bigger, retweet him. To leave his faculty of reasoning better, challenge his tweet.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A tapping foot isn’t the best a listener can get from a song: A good song makes a listener dance. A great song makes him think.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The classical anthropological question, What is man?—"how like an angel, this quintessence of dust!"—is not now asked by anthropologists. Instead, they commence with a chapter on Physical Anthropology and then forget the whole topic and go on to Culture.
Paul Goodman
You don’t tell a boy that he is a boy. You simply act like a man.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
An angry artist tells people what (he thinks) they need to hear. A hungry artist tells people what (he thinks) they want to hear.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
By “the Permanent Things” [T. S. Eliot] meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in that continuity of belief and institution called the great mysterious incorporation of the human race.
Russell Kirk
To most Americans, a dog is a potential mate. To some Chinese, a dog is potential meat.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A gold tooth is to some blacks, what braces are to all whites.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We are all born agnostics. Atheism and theism is sold to us.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Thanks to arranged marriages: There are countless women who have never been their husband's girlfriend.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Culture, religion, and education, are conspiracies to standardize worldviews.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Contrary to popular belief, some animals would not have each chosen to be a human being, if they were given the choice between being what they are and being human.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Since the end of the postwar economic boom, certain strategies have been intensified to stimulate consumption, especially strategies aimed at American youth that project sexual activity as instant fulfillment and violence as the locus of machismo identity. This market activity has contributed greatly to the disorientation and confusion of American youth, and those with less education and fewer opportunities bear the brunt of this cultural chaos.
Cornel West
I just have one of those faces. People come up to me and say, 'What's wrong?' Nothing. 'Well, it takes more energy to frown than it does to smile.' Yeah, you know it takes more energy to point that out than it does to leave me alone?
Bill Hicks
To a blind man, pawn shop and porn shop are one. To an unintelligent man, oversleeping and sleeping over are opposites.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You are. Before you are whatever you are labeled.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Thou shalt not use the 140 characters limit as an excuse for bad grammar and/or incorrect spelling.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A rumor is usually a lie that the media can legally profit from.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In rational inquiry, we idealize to selected domains in such a way (we hope) as to permit us to discover crucial features of the world. Data and observations, in the sciences, have an instrumental character. They are of no particular interest in themselves, but only insofar as they constitute evidence that permits one to determine fundamental features of the real world, within a course of inquiry that is invariably undertaken under sharp idealizations, often implicit and simply common understanding, but always present.
Noam Chomsky
Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.
Paul Goodman
Most of the people who have verbally asserted that ‘there is no master of pronounciation’ have intentionally made a claim and unintentionally made their claim believable. (It is ‘pro-nun-ciation’ not ‘pro-noun-ciation’.)
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Happiness is a temporary recurring human experience.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In a materialistic society, an employed boy is older than an unemployed man.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Everybody is talking about the Law of Attraction. Nobody is talking about the Law of Action.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Speaking about work isn’t working.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Being a philosopher requires a lot of thinking and no action. Being a model requires a lot of action and no thinking.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
New York City is finished," he said. "They can't keep order there, and you can't have business without order. It'll take a hundred years to sort things out and get it all going again."t"What do you hear of the U.S. government? I said. "We don't have electricity an hour a month anymore and there's nothing on the air but the preachers anyway."t"Well, I hear that this Harvey Albright pretends to be running things out of Minneapolis now. It was Chicago, but that may have gone by the boards. Congress hasn't met since twelve twenty-one." Ricketts said, using a common shorthand for the destruction of Washington a few days before Christmas some years back. "We're still fighting skirmishes with Mexico. The Everglades are drowning. Trade is becoming next to impossible, from everything I can tell, and business here is drying up. It all seems like a bad dream. The future sure isn't what it used to be, is it?"t"We believe in the future, sir. Only it's not like the world we've left behind," Joseph said.t"How's that?"t"We're building our own New Jerusalem up the river. it's a world made by hand, now, one stone at a time, one board at a time, one hope at a time, one soul at a time. . .
James Howard Kunstler
A high self-esteem having artist works hard to be understood. A low self-esteem having artist works hard to be agreed with.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself.
Bill Hicks
The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.
Albert Jay Nock
It is probable that the most inhuman monsters, even the Himmlers and the Mengeles, convince themselves that they are engaged in noble and courageous acts.
Noam Chomsky
When rich, being poor seems *adventurous.*
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A writer's pen depreciates with every word that it writes. Whereas she appreciates with every word that she writes.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A writer is merely a reader that had the guts to be read, and, heard.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There are more writers who read than readers who write.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To put an arrogant 'famous' writer in his place: pretend to be illiterate.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Sometimes it is the reader that sucks, not the book.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A writer’s primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore’s is to make cents.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
When reading a book, you are sold what some writer thought. When reading a newspaper, you are sold what someone did, and, what some advertiser made.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Every artist takes their final work to the grave.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. --Aristotle
Cornel West
The Poverty Tour provided the opportunity to meet many people who had been living paycheck to paycheck even before the economic downturn. To so quickly slide from the great middle into the underworld of the poor validated our suspicions that perhaps these citizens never really were bona fide, middle class Americans. Indeed, some economists assert that the middle class evaporated decades ago.
Cornel West
Peanut butter is a poor man’s marmalade.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Shyness is a luxury reserved for those who are above the poverty line. To a beggar, being shy is deadly.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There’s a very fine line between being broke and being humble.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Juice is a poor man’s dessert.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Using money in one’s attempt to put an end to poverty is like using a border in one’s attempt to put an end to xenophobia.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Rich people read their bills. Poor people dread theirs.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana