social-commentary

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

It was the age of confidence. Arrogance was epidemic.

To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?_There is nobody__ere among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.

He was no stranger to compassion: his heart was open to many good impulses, though his rank often prevented their manifestation.

Points of views that are expressed on Twitter don__ intend to offend, but rather defend and open the conversation up to everyone so that no one has to pretend.

If they do these things when the tree is green, what will they do when it is dry?

What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?

Remember it is not you who supports the root, but the root that supports you.

Half of life is lost in charming others.The other half is lost in going through anxieties caused by others.Leave this play. You have played enough.

When the Rule of Law disappears, we are ruled by the whims of men.

...because the great beauty of embryo development, the bit that human beings find so hard to grasp, is that it is a totally decentralised process...no cell need wait for instructions from authority; every cell can act on its own information and the signals it receives from its neighbours. We do not organise societies that way...Perhaps we should try.

People turned out to be alive. Hitherto he had supposed that they were what he pretended to be - flat pieces of cardboard stamped with a conventional design_ there came by no process of reason a conviction that they were human beings with feelings akin to his own.

since men are equal and thus have the same wish for happiness, and since there is not enough wealth to satisfy them all to the same extent, they necessarily fight against each other and want power to secure the future enjoyment of what they have at present.

One problem with the division of labor in our complex economy is how it obscures the lines of connection, and therefore of responsibility, between our everyday acts and their real-world consequences. Specialization makes it easy to forget about the filth of the coal-fired power plant that is lighting this pristine computer screen, or the back-breaking labor it took to pick the strawberries for my cereal, or the misery of the hog that lived and died so I could enjoy my bacon. Specialization neatly hides our implication in all that is done on our behalf by unknown other specialists half a world away.

There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe.

There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.

To me, the best zombie movies aren__ the splatter fests of gore and violence with goofy characters and tongue in cheek antics. Good zombie movies show us how messed up we are, they make us question our station in society_ and our society__ station in the world. They show us gore and violence and all that cool stuff too_ but there__ always an undercurrent of social commentary and thoughtfulness.

Or was he merely a mollycoddled favorite, enjoying capriciously prejudiced love? Schenback was inclined to believe the latter. Inborn in nearly every artist__ nature is a voluptuous, treacherous tendency to accept the injustice if it creates beauty and to grant sympathy and homage to aristocratic preferences.