Stephen King quote: “In polite society, we call our obsessions hobbies.”

“Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

“When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of Hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

Quoted in the Manchester Guardian (31 December 1977), and Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations (1988) https://web.archive.org/web/20000709051930/http://www.bartleby.com/63/90/4790.html edited by James B. Simpson; Says Who?: A Guide To The Quotations Of The Century (1988) by Jonathon Green, p. 17 http://books.google.com/books?id=xUwOAQAAMAAJ&q=%22When+childhood+dies,+its+corpses+are+called+adults%22&dq=%22When+childhood+dies,+its+corpses+are+called+adults%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KZO4U_WwFJSlqAaquoKoCg&ved=0CK0BEOgBMBk and The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1989), p. 45 http://books.google.com/books?id=bs0J36MpieIC&pg=PA45&dq=%22When+childhood+dies,+its+corpses+are+called+adults%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KZO4U_WwFJSlqAaquoKoCg&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=%22When%20childhood%20dies%2C%20its%20corpses%20are%20called%20adults%22&f=false

“We are now in a period of social transition, a period characterized, that is, by an unusually rapid rate of change of the most important economic, social, political, and cultural institutions of society. This transition is from the type of society which we have called capitalist or bourgeois to a to a type of society which we shall call managerial.”

James Burnham (1905–1987) American philosopher

Source: The Managerial Revolution, 1941, p. 71; cited in: Robert Manley (ed) (1962) Age of the manager http://archive.org/stream/ageofmanager00manl#page/n15/mode/2up. p. xiii

“We live in a global economy, but the political organization of our global society is woefully inadequate.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

The Crisis of Global Capitalism (1998)
Context: We live in a global economy, but the political organization of our global society is woefully inadequate. We are bereft of the capacity to preserve peace and to counteract the excesses of the financial markets. Without these controls, the global economy, is liable to break down