Quotes by Social Critics - Page 4

By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself.

Bill Hicks

Being a philosopher requires a lot of thinking and no action. Being a model requires a lot of action and no thinking.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

We usually learn from debates that we seldom learn from debates.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Calling resists privatization by insisting on the totality of faith. Calling resists politicization by demanding a tension with every human allegiance and association. Calling resists polarization by requiring an attitude toward, and action in, society that is inevitably transforming because it is constantly engaged. Grand Christian movements will rise and fall. Grand campaigns will be mounted and grand coalitions assembled. But all together such coordinated efforts will never match the influence of untold numbers of followers of Christ living out their callings faithfully across the vastness and complexity of modern society.

Os Guinness

Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning.

Noam Chomsky

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

To leave a man's ego bigger, retweet him. To leave his faculty of reasoning better, challenge his tweet.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.

Lenny Bruce

Your friends love you for who you are. Your family loves you for what you are.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I am obsessed with not being obsessed with acquiring material things.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Some men would not still be HIV negative or alive, if they had managed to sleep with some of the women with whom they want or wanted to have sex.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Though man needs to live to believe, he does not need to believe to live.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Contrary to popular belief: Knowing where you are from will not really tell you where you are going. It will merely tell you why you are where you are.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

To know what should be going on in a household: spend a few minutes with the wife, or, the husband. To know what’s really going on: spend a few minutes with their kid(s).

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The two main criminals are France and the United States. They owe Haiti enormous reparations because of actions going back hundreds of years. If we could ever get to the stage where somebody could say, 'We're sorry we did it,' that would be nice. But if that just assuages guilt, it's just another crime. To become minimally civilized, we would have to say, 'We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes. A large part of the wealth of France comes from the crimes we committed against Haiti, and the United States gained as well. Therefore we are going to pay reparations to the Haitian people.' Then you will see the beginnings of civilization.

Noam Chomsky

I think maybe the classic formulation was by David Hume in "Of the First Principles of Government," where he pointed out that "Force is always on the side of the governed." Whether it's a military society, a partially free society, or what we - not he - would call a totalitarian state, it's the governed who have the power. And the rulers have to find ways to keep them from using their power. Force has its limits, so they have to use persuasion. They have to somehow find ways to convince people to accept authority. If they aren't able to do that, the whole thing is going to collapse.

Noam Chomsky

Some people have contracted HIV during their separate endeavours to give someone or some people a curable STD.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Masturbation = Imagination + Activity. Worry = Imagination + Negativity.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Professional’ does not necessarily mean that the person so labelled is good or knows what they are doing. In many a case, it merely means that they do whatever that they are a professional at for a living, not as a hobby.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

An employer’s fart is music to his employees’ ears.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

We all pay for life with death, so everything in between should be free.

Bill Hicks

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

Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.

Cornel West

Culture is a symbolic veil with which we hide our animal nature from ourselves … and other animals.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Nothing humbles a rich man better than a poor man that isn’t willing to do ‘anything’ for money.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Over the last 25 years, the major popular movements that have had significant impact on the general society and have changed it, that have had a major civilizing effect – the feminist movement, the environmental movement, and so on – these are mostly developments of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Their roots might be in the activism of the ‘60s, but the movements themselves developed and extended later. The same is true of the changes in respect for other cultures, rights of oppressed people, and so on. These are quite significant changes. If you compare the United States now to what it was, say, 35 years ago, the changes are quite dramatic. These are changes in popular consciousness that are quite deeply embedded.

Noam Chomsky

Not all ‘whites’ are racists. Not all racists are ‘white.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Most people believe most of the things they believe only because they believe that most people believe them.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Friends are family members we have a choice over.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The opposite of having faith is having self-pity.

Og Guinness

Every artist takes their final work to the grave.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

No single bad person regards themselves as a bad person.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

...the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon.

Noam Chomsky

As we all know, as if forever exploiting or attempting to exploit each other were not enough, a group of sane human beings who have just reached the end of a war against a common enemy of theirs will sooner or later start or continue killing and/or fighting against each other.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Every single living thing is food to at least one living thing.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Millions of deaths would not have happened if it weren’t for the consumption of alcohol. The same can be said about millions of births.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Boredom is probably more frequent and more tormenting if you do not have sight or hands.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The question the doubter does not ask is whether faith was really useless or simply not used. What would you think of a boy who gave up learning to ride a bicycle, complaining that he hurt himself because his bicycle stopped moving so he had no choice but to fall off? If he wanted to sit comfortably while remaining stationary, he should not have chosen a bicycle but a chair. Similarly faith must be put to use, or it will become useless.

Os Guinness

A satirist that criticizes religion is seen as a satanist.

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

Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Heres Tom with the Weather.

Bill Hicks

There are hundreds of political prisoners right now in America’s jails who were so taken by Malcolm [X’s} spirit that they became warriors and the powers that be understood them as warriors. They knew that a lot of these other middle-class [black] leaders were not warriors; they were professionals; they were careerists. But these warriors had callings, and they have paid an incalculable and immeasurable price in those cells.

Cornel West

All wars are popular for the first 30 days.

Arthur Schlesinger

In the Bible, a woman was made from a man. In real life, a man is made from a woman.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

What 'primitive' men called gossip, 'civilized' men call news.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Opinions of the masses kill the 'extra' in an 'extraordinary' idea.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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