Society

“I think that, at the end of this century, people are coming to understand the damage, the psychic and spiritual damage that has been done to us by this oversecularised, overtechnological, overrationalistic, overexternalised worldview  that the Industrial Revolution just imposed upon us and under which most of us have grown up. And you have to make a conscious decision not to be – we’ve become almost slaves to it. And that kind of worldview marginalises the soul. It marginalises the spirit. So you have money, you have external things and you have soaring prozac levels. That’s really the issue here. So you make a decision – it’s like anything else in life – you move from here to there because you become aware of what your situation is. And you make an adult decision to make the changes necessary. And some of those changes include lifestyle decisions. You can’t watch that much bad TV and have the experience I’m talking about. You can’t be involved in that many cheap, distracted, externally-based pursuits and have the peace I’m talking about. But more and more people every day are saying, ‘That will kill me. I’m going somewhere else.” – Marianne Williamson (from an interview centred on her book Enchanted Love: The Mystical Power of Intimate Relationship, 1999).

Gandhi, according to Marianne Williamson, said “the problem with the world is that we’re not in our right minds.” (1999 interview). Man, it feels like we're all casualties of some kind of psychological holocaust who've dropped like flies spiritually, so far removed from how life is meant to be lived, dead not to the world but to cosmic Reality.

“In the old days, before I was married, or knew a lot of women, I would just pull down all the shades and go to bed for three or four days. I’d get up to shit. I’d eat a can of beans, go back to bed, just stay there for three or four days. Then I’d put on my clothes and I’d walk outside, and the sunlight was brilliant, and the sounds were great. I felt powerful, like a recharged battery. But you know the first bring-down? The first human face I saw on the sidewalk, I lost half my charge right there.” - Charles Bukowski. 

"Hell is other people." - John Paul Sartre.

"They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours." – Margaret Thatcher (interview in Women's Own magazine, 1987).

“Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.” - Oscar Wilde.

“We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named fair competition and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.” - Thomas Carlyle.

“Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.” - Simone de Beauvoir. 

“We live in the era of smart phones and stupid people.” - Uchan 15-year-old from Indonesia, February 2014 (source: tumblr).

“If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull.” - W. C. Fields.

AA committee is a group of the unprepared, appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary.@ - Fred Allen.

“Helter Skelter is Vincent Bugliosi’s idea of reality. He has in part caused Helter Skelter. Helter Skelter means confusion. Anyone who can’t see that this country is in a mass state of confusion is truly blind. Manson saw the confusion coming. He’s seen the roots of many of the problems that we have as a country, world. He’s seen these. He’s had years and years and years in prisons alone to reflect on things, plus he’s seen thousands of different people. He’s lived with them. He’s been exposed to law, justice, crime, all of his life. He has a huge mind in crime and in everything.” - Sandra ‘Blue’ Good (on Charles Manson).

“Society is indeed a contract. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” - Edmund Burke.

“Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.” - Victor Hugo.

“Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.” - George Santayana.

“A free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.” - Adlai Stevenson I.