Quotes by Social Critics - Page 15

That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.
Noam Chomsky
If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.
Lenny Bruce
Men (who cheat) do not cheat because they are dogs. They are (regarded as) dogs because they cheat.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In practice it undermines the transformation of faith. When Christians concentrate their time and energy on their own separate spheres and their own institutions-whether all-absorbing megachurches, Christian yellow-page businesses, or womb-to-tomb Christian cultural ghettoes-they lose the outward thrusting, transforming power that is at the heart of the gospel. Instead of being 'salt' and 'light' -images of a permeating and penetrating action-Christians and Christian institutions become soft and vulnerable to corruption from within.
Os Guinness
Because of the power that we have given money: The government would rather have taxpayers who do not vote, than voters who do not pay tax.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Unbeknown to us, some of the people who we hope are missing us wherever they are do miss us; some miss someone else; and some are dead.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The fact that the person who you are sleeping with is also sleeping with another person or other people does not necessarily mean that he or she does not love you. And the fact that you are the only person who someone is sleeping with does not necessarily mean that he or she loves you.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
After our loved one dies: we cry, not because they left; but because they left us.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The whole image is that eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God's infinite love. That's the message we're brought up with, isn't it? Believe or die! Thank you, forgiving Lord, for all those options.
Bill Hicks
A very, in a sense, terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe [war]. I think that's more terrifying than the occasional Hitler or LeMay or other that crops up. These people would not be able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity...and therefore I think that it's, in some sense, the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who share a very serious burden of guilt that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and violent.
Noam Chomsky
Destroying hope is a critically important project. And when it is achieved, formal democracy is allowed—even preferred, if only for public relation purposes. In more honest circles, much of this is conceded. Of course, it is understood much more profoundly by beasts in men's shapes who endure the consequences of challenging the imperatives of stability and order.
Noam Chomsky
Sense isn’t democratic. A senseless opinion that’s advocated by 'the majority' is still senseless.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
An enlightened thinker does not waste his precious time thinking about what others think of what he thinks.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A realist is a slave to reality.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most human beings would have never been pained by the death of a human being if they had never seen a human being or pretending to be pained by that.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I am against justice … whenever it is carried out by a mob.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In many a case, the phrase ‘I’d like to get to know you better’ is a euphemism for ‘I want us to fuck.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Hypocrisy is when you get mad at a friend for telling their other friend a secret that your other friend told you.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If ours is an examined faith, we should be unafraid to doubt. If doubt is eventually justified, we were believing what clearly was not worth believing. But if doubt is answered, our faith has grown stronger. It knows God more certainly and it can enjoy God more deeply.
Os Guinness
A cowardly critique starts with a compliment.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Insurance companies sell what might happen tomorrow. Historians sell what certainly happened yesterday.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Starving whilst schooled is like a man’s finding out that his wife is on her periods … a few seconds after he took Viagra.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Technically, according to the notion of the will of God, there is no such a thing as a competent surgeon.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
With regard to things such as independence, mental capabilities, and sexuality, a very old man is nothing but a gigantic infant with white hair and wrinkles.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Back in the day, it was either both a mother and her daughter had pubic hair, or the daughter didn’t. Today, in many a case, the mother is the one who doesn’t.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Whilst lovers: to control her man, a woman uses (the man’s access to) her vagina. When ex-lovers: she uses (the man's access to) their kids.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Granted, not all uneducated women are prostitutes, and, not all prostitutes are uneducated. However, where building a family is employment, an uneducated woman's womb is her diploma.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Education inspires the educated to think for themselves. Schooled programs the schooled to work for others.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
So I'm over there in England, you know, trying to get news about the [L.A.] riots... and all these Brit people are trying to sympathize with me... 'Oh Bill, crime is horrible. Bill, if it's any consolation crime is horrible here, too.' ...Shutup. This is Hobbitown and I am Bilbo Hicks, Okay? This is a land of fairies and elves. You do not have crime like we have crime, but I appreciate you trying to be, you know, Diplomatic. You gotta see English crime. It's hilarious, you don't know if you're reading the front page or the comic section over there. I swear to God. I read an article - front page of the paper - one day, in England: 'Yesterday, some Hooligans knocked over a dustbin in Shafsbry.' Wooooo... 'The hooligans are loose! The hooligans are loose! What if they become roughians? I would hate to be a dustbin in Shafsbry tonight.
Bill Hicks
An 'Employee of the Month' is a titled given to someone who best helped someone else actualize their dream—in that particular month.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.
Albert Jay Nock
Dear Whoever-that-just-found-out-that-they-have-a-terminal-illness, don't let that put you down. Technically, we are all dying.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Spam is a waste of the receivers’ time, and, a waste of the sender’s optimism.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In some rare cases, a friendship between two people benefits both of them, and what’s more, in some rarer cases, it benefits both of them equally.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We betray our modern arrogance and forget the place of mystery in God's dealing with us.
Os Guinness
School fools a lot of people. Professionally, one thing is not the most that one person can be.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If you're teaching, say, physics, there's no point in persuading a student that you're right. You want to encourage them to find out what the truth is, which is probably that you're wrong.
Noam Chomsky
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
There is tons of work to be done, and lots of people who would like to do the work. It's just that the economic system is such a grotesque catastrophe that it can't even put together idle hands and needed work, which would be satisfying to the people and which would be beneficial to all of us. That's just the mark of a failed system. The most dramatic mark of it.
Noam Chomsky
To leave a man's ego bigger, retweet him. To leave his faculty of reasoning better, challenge his tweet.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Your friends love you for who you are. Your family loves you for what you are.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Life ups the self-esteem of a low-paid man by giving him things that the high-paid man that he envies cannot buy (intellect, looks, sex appeal, etc.).
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I have learned to have very modest goals for society and myself things like clean air green grass children with bright eyes not being pushed around useful work that suits one's abilities plain tasty food and occasional satisfying nookie.
Paul Goodman
Faeces by any other name would smell as gross
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Critiquing a doer isn’t doing.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Capitalism has turned human beings into commodities. To the owner of a restaurant: the cook and a bag of potatoes are equally important.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In some cases, it is the woman’s stomach—not her heart—that has left her man for another.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Thou shalt not use the 140 characters limit as an excuse for bad grammar and/or incorrect spelling.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Coco Chanel is said to have said that a girl should be two things: who and what she is. I say a girl should do two things: what and who she wants.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
..begin by talking about the kind of existentialist chaos that exists in our own lives and our inability to overcome the sense of alienation and frustration we experience when we try to create bonds of intimacy and solidarity with one another. Now part of this frustration is to be understood again in relation to structures and institutions. In the way in which our culture of consumption has promoted an addiction to stimulation - one that puts a premium on packaged and commodified stimulation. The market does this to convince us that our consumption keeps oiling the economy for it to reproduce itself. But the effect of this addiction to stimulation is an undermining, a waning of our ability for qualitatively rich relationships.
Cornel West
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
Noam Chomsky
Alcohol is one of the quickest vehicles with which we escape shyness, our problems, and self-consciousness, for a few hours.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
When in court, the primary role of lawyers is not to prove or disprove innocence; unbeknown to almost all lawyers and their clients, it is to save the court time.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We sometimes reveal how ignorant or bored we were when we read a book by giving it 5-stars.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A slice of bread eaten is a million times more nourishing than a loaf of bread imagined.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Among other possibilities, money was invented to make it possible for a foolish man to control wise men; a weak man, strong men; a child, old men; an ignorant man, knowledgeable men; and for a dwarf to control giants.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To evade arrogance, remind yourself (from time to time) that your talent or success could have been better. To be thankful, remind yourself (every now and then) that your illness or failure could have been worse.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
So the organisation of society on the basis of functions, instead of on the basis of rights, implies three things. It means, first, that proprietary rights shall be maintained when they are accompanied by the performance of service and abolished when they are not. It means, second, that the producers shall stand in a direct relation to the community for whom production is carried on, so that their responsibility to it may be obvious and unmistakable, not lost, as at present, through their immediate subordination to shareholders whose interest is not service but gain. It means, in the third place, that the obligation for the maintenance of the service shall rest upon the professional organisations of those who perform it, and that, subject to the supervision and criticism of the consumer, those organisations shall exercise so much voice in the government of industry as may be needed to secure that the obligation is discharged.
R.H. Tawney
A historian is a risk-terrified prophet.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Whoever that came up with the idea of people having to have 'a dream' sure knew how to keep these creatures called human beings preoccupied.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana