Mr. Tesla Explains Why He Will Never Marry (1924)
John Wayne Gacy on Todd Phillips: Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies, Skinny Nervous Guy Prod, 1994. 2007 DVD re-release watched March 1, 2010.
From 2006 interview with Ebadi by Harry Kreisler (translator, Banafsheh Keynoush) about her newly released book, Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope.
From May 10 2006 interview with Ebadi at Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley. http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people6/Ebadi/ebadi-con3.html (retrieved Oct. 15, 2008)
Lee Kuan Yew, Interview with Nathan Gardels of Global Viewpoint, Sept 26 1995 http://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/data/pdfdoc/017-1995-09-26.pdf
1990s
Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 8, "Law"
"Why I Joined the Independent Labour Party", New Leader (24 June 1939)
Man, Society, and Freedom (1871)
Vol. 1, Endnotes to the Chapters : Notes to the Introduction.
The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
“Women are the ones that bear the greatest burden. We are also the ones who nurture societies.”
Interview for Women's E News, 21 Leaders for the 21st Century (2008)
Human Action (1949)
Source: Review of Communism and Man by F. J. Sheed in Peace News (27 January 1939)
Address by His Highness the Aga Khan to the 2006 Convocation of the Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan (2 December 2006)]
Source: The Division of Labor in Society (1893), p. 40
On "Bozo", in Ch. 30
Down and out in Paris and London (1933)
Quoted by Masiela Lusha in a 2009 press conference http://www.masielalusha.com/board.php
"Second Thoughts on James Burnham," Polemic (summer 1946)
Source: Religion and Empire: People, Power, and the Life of the Spirit (2003), p. 51
Second Treatise of Civil Government, Ch. XIX, sec. 222
Two Treatises of Government (1689)
Source: Rules of Sociological Method, 1895, p. 3
Political questionnaire response (1952)
God and the State (1871; publ. 1882)
From Fukuzawa Yukichi on Japanese Women (1988), trans. Kiyooka Eiichi.
1. America's Search for a Public Philosophy
Public Philosophy (2005)
Gianluigi Buffon, as quoted after Cagliari Calcio 2-3 Juventus FC. Stadio Sant'Elia di Cagliari, September 2, 2007]
"As I Please" column in The Tribune (3 November 1944)<sup> http://alexpeak.com/twr/oocp/</sup>
"As I Please" (1943–1947)
Source: History and Class Consciousness (1968), p. 28
From the letter to Hemantabala Sarkar, written on 16the October, 1933, quoted in Bengali weekly `Swastika', 21-6-1999 http://hindusamhati.blogspot.com/2013/05/thoughts-of-rabindranath-tagore-on.html
"Greeting to the newly integrated illuminatos dirigentes", in Nachtrag von weitern Originalschriften vol. 2 (1787) p. 45.
Endorsement of President Jimmy Carter's Education Program - Feb. 7, 1979.
“If any changes were to be made in society it had to be by the mothers.”
Gruber Foundation, Women's Rights Prize (2009)
A Man Without a Country (2005)
Context: Socialism is no more an evil word than Christianity. Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.
"The Prevention of Literature" (1946)
Context: Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops. This was well illustrated by the Spanish civil war. To many English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving experience, but not an experience about which they could write sincerely. There were only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies: as a result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth reading.
Original preface to Animal Farm; as published in George Orwell: Some Materials for a Bibliography (1953) by Ian R. Willison
Context: I have never visited Russia and my knowledge of it consists only of what can be learned by reading books and newspapers. Even if I had the power, I would not wish to interfere in Soviet domestic affairs: I would not condemn Stalin and his associates merely for their barbaric and undemocratic methods. It is quite possible that, even with the best intentions, they could not have acted otherwise under the conditions prevailing there.
But on the other hand it was of the utmost importance to me that people in western Europe should see the Soviet regime for what it really was. Since 1930 I had seen little evidence that the USSR was progressing towards anything that one could truly call Socialism. On the contrary, I was struck by clear signs of its transformation into a hierarchical society, in which the rulers have no more reason to give up their power than any other ruling class. Moreover, the workers and intelligentsia in a country like England cannot understand that the USSR of today is altogether different from what it was in 1917. It is partly that they do not want to understand (i. e. they want to believe that, somewhere, a really Socialist country does actually exist), and partly that, being accustomed to comparative freedom and moderation in public life, totalitarianism is completely incomprehensible to them.
In his letter to Theo, from The Hague, 21 July 1882, http://www.vggallery.com/letters/245_V-T_218.pdf
1880s, 1882
Context: What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.
That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion.
Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.
‘Human beings never submit to human beings.’ Even slaves practice their mean retaliations. Human beings cannot conceive of any mean retaliations. Human beings cannot conceive of any means of survival except of a single then-and-there contest. They speak of duty to one’s country and such like things, but the object of their effort is invariably the individual, and, even once the individual’s needs have been met, again the individual comes in. The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This is how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror of the illusion of the ocean called the world. I learned to behave rather aggressively, without the endless anxious worrying I knew before, responding as it were to the needs of the moment.
Third Notebook: Part One
No Longer Human
“Every society is a moral society.”
Source: The Division of Labor in Society (1893), p. 228
Context: Every society is a moral society. In certain respects, this character is even more pronounced in organised societies. Because the individual is not sufficient unto himself, it is from society that he receives everything necessary to him, as it is for society that he works.
Cassandra (1860)
Context: Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity — these three — and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised? Men say that God punishes for complaining. No, but men are angry with misery. They are irritated with women for not being happy. They take it as a personal offence. To God alone may women complain without insulting Him!
“The whole of society rests upon industry.”
L'Industrie, in Œuvres de Saint-Simon, Vol. 18 (Paris, 1868), p. 13
Context: The whole of society rests upon industry. Industry is the sole guarantee of its existence, the single source of all its wealth and all its prosperity. The state of things most favorable to industry is by that very reason the most favorable to society.
"Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels," Polemic (September/October 1946) - Full text online http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/swift/english/e_swift
Context: In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.
Book II, Chapter I, On the Progress of Wealth, Section VIII, p. 382-383
Principles of Political Economy (Second Edition 1836)
Context: Every exchange which takes place in a country, effects a distribution of its produce better adapted to the wants of society....
If two districts, one of which possessed a rich copper mine, and the other a rich tin mine, had always been separated by an impassable river or mountain, there can be no doubt that an opening of a communication, a greater demand would take place, and a greater price be given for both the tin and the copper; and this greater price of both metals, though it might be only temporary, would alone go a great way towards furnishing the additional capital wanted to supply the additional demand; and the capitals of both districts, and the products of both mines, would be increased both in quantity and value to a degree which could not have taken place without the this new distribution of the produce, or some equivalent to it.
MD. Mahmudul Hasan on an article of the - Rokeya's wake-up call to women http://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/tribute/rokeyas-wake-call-women-1327171/
Context: She was much ahead of her time and society in understanding the causes of its degradation and in setting up a correct approach to address them. She rightly realised that without empowering women, a society can never flourish. Hence, the thematic thread that runs through all her intellectual efforts is a concern for equitable gender relations – feminism.
The Superstition of Divorce (1920)
Context: I do not ask them to assume the worth of my creed or any creed; and I could wish they did not so often ask me to assume the worth of their worthless, poisonous plutocratic modern society. But if it could be shown, as I think it can, that a long historical view and a patient political experience can at last accumulate solid scientific evidence of the vital need of such a vow, then I can conceive no more tremendous tribute than this, to any faith, which made a flaming affirmation from the darkest beginnings, of what the latest enlightenment can only slowly discover in the end.
"The Reaction in Germany" (1842)
Context: Everywhere, especially in France and England, social and religious societies are being formed which are wholly alien to the world of present-day politics, societies that derive their life from new sources quite unknown to us and that grow and diffuse themselves without fanfare. The people, the poor class, which without doubt constitutes the greatest part of humanity; the class whose rights have already been recognized in theory but which is nevertheless still despised for its birth, for its ties with poverty and ignorance, as well as indeed with actual slavery – this class, which constitutes the true people, is everywhere assuming a threatening attitude and is beginning to count the ranks of its enemy, far weaker in numbers than itself, and to demand the actualization of the right already conceded to it by everyone. All people and all men are filled with a kind of premonition, and everyone whose vital organs are not paralyzed faces with shuddering expectation the approaching future which will utter the redeeming word. Even in Russia, the boundless snow-covered kingdom so little known, and which perhaps also has a great future in store, even in Russia dark clouds are gathering, heralding storm. Oh, the air is sultry and pregnant with lightning.
And therefore we call to our deluded brothers: Repent, repent, the Kingdom of the Lord is at hand!
Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Context: The workers' militias, based on the trade unions and each composed of people of approximately the same political opinions, had the effect of canalizing into one place all the most revolutionary sentiment in the country. I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragón one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life--snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.--had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master. Of course such a state of affairs could not last. It was simply a temporary and local phase in an enormous game that is being played over the whole surface of the earth. But it lasted long enough to have its effect upon anyone who experienced it. However much one cursed at the time, one realized afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word 'comrade' stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality. I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy 'proving' that Socialism means no more than a planned state—capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the 'mystique' of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all. And it was here that those few months in the militia were valuable to me.
My Twisted World (2014), 19-22, UC Santa Barbara, Building to Violence
Source: The Bridge on the Drina (1945), Ch. 22
Source: The Bridge on the Drina (1945), Ch. 2
"Feminism: An Agenda" (1983)
Letters from a War Zone: Writings 1976-1987
Source: "Can Socialists Be Happy?" https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/can-socialists-be-happy/, Tribune (20 December 1943). Published under the name ‘John Freeman’.
“To be great you must divorce yourself from your society and culture.”
Source: Animals Matter: A Biologist Explains Why We Should Treat Animals with Compassion and Respect
Source: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
"What Can I Tell You about Myself which You Have Not Already Found Out from Those Who Do Not Lie?" in The Beatles Anthology (2000)
“A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.”
Source: The Diary of a Young Girl
“Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.”
Source: A Tale for the Time Being
Source: Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844/The Communist Manifesto
Lady Bracknell, Act III
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
Lorsque la Spoliation est devenue le moyen d’existence d’une agglomération d’hommes unis entre eux par le lien social, ils se font bientôt une loi qui la sanctionne, une morale qui la glorifie.
Economic sophisms, 2nd series (1848), ch. 1 Physiology of plunder ("Sophismes économiques", 2ème série (1848), chap. 1 "Physiologie de la spoliation").
Economic Sophisms (1845–1848)
(1857/58)
Source: MEW Vol. 42, p. 176.
Source: Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy
“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives.”
"What Can I Tell You about Myself which You Have Not Already Found Out from Those Who Do Not Lie?" in The Beatles Anthology (2000)
Context: Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. … I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.
Source: The Angel's Game
Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Quotations (1988), edited with Jason A. Shulman, p. 281
General sources
“All men are intellectuals: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.”
Source: Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971).
Source: A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power
Source: Sources of Strength: Meditations on Scripture for a Living Faith
Source: Politics
“Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.”
Lady Bracknell, Act III
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
