Quotes by Social Critics - Page 4

Chances are that there are white people who brag about being the first to move out of a suburb that has been intruded by blacks.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
When you are suffering from sexual starvation, a spank or even a hug seems like a porn scene.
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
If heaven really exists: then, technically, living is an activity that believers keep themselves busy with — while they wait for their death.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Twitter gives people an illusionary sense of leadership.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Life sometimes reminds us that it is sometimes heartless by giving something or someone we really need to someone who does not need or even want them or it.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
That comes to about one hundred million people in India alone from 1947 to 1980. But we don’t call that a crime of democratic capitalism. If we were to carry out that calculation throughout the world… I wont even talk about it. But Sen is correct; they’re not intended, just like the Chinese famine wasn’t intended. But they are ideological and institutional crimes, and capitalist democracy and its advocates are responsible for them, in whatever sense supporters of so-called Communism are responsible for the Chinese famine. We don’t have the entire responsibility, but certainly a large part of it
Noam Chomsky
Looking but not seeing is the hearing but not understanding of the eye.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.
Noam Chomsky
Finding out that you are not your lover’s only lover hurts, but not as much as discovering that you are the side chick … or the side dick.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A tie is what you get after ice cubes have wrestled with hot water.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In a materialistic society, man is likely to value the opinion of a rich man over that of a poor one; even when coming to opinions that have absolutely nothing to do with moneymaking.
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
Responsibility I believe accrues through privilege. People like you and me have an unbelievable amount of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility. We live in free societies where we are not afraid of the police; we have extraordinary wealth available to us by global standards. If you have those things, then you have the kind of responsibility that a person does not have if he or she is slaving seventy hours a week to put food on the table; a responsibility at the very least to inform yourself about power. Beyond that, it is a question of whether you believe in moral certainties or not.
Noam Chomsky
Thanks to bad graphic design, some readers love only the electronic version of some books.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
People often ask me where I stand politically. It's not that I disagree with Bush's economic policy or his foreign policy, it's that I believe he was a child of Satan sent here to destroy the planet Earth. Little to the left.
Bill Hicks
When the going gets tough: the poor close their eyes, the rich open their wallets.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Worry is to human beings … what a condom is to a man with erectile dysfunction.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It is only if the primary or only reason you do what you do is to make money that you will envy every random person who made or makes a lot of money (or money that exceeds what you made or make).
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
One of the reasons God did not make a lover for Himself when He made one for Adam is because He knew that fewer people would take Him seriously once He had an ex.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The boring thing with taking a walk with someone is that your thoughts are then dictated by the subject or subjects of your conversation and that is made worse by the fact that most sane people are terrified of silence whenever they are with or near someone.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
People who smile while they are alone used to be called insane, until we invented smartphones and social media.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
People who wear G-strings suffer from indecision.
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
To some women, a job plays the role of a man. To most women, a man plays the role of a job.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Mr. Right' is usually two or eight men.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Happiness is a temporary recurring human experience.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Bigheadedness is usually a symptom of small-mindedness.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If there were something that Mother Nature or God could do with money, She or He would have sold immortality to the rich a long time ago.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
As a historian, I confess to a certain amusement when I hear the Judeo-Christian tradition praised as the source of our concern for human rights. In fact, the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary sense. They were notorious not only for acquiescence in poverty, inequality, exploitation and oppression but for enthusiastic justifications of slavery, persecution, abandonment of small children, torture, genocide.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
You are more likely to find three TVs inside a randomly selected house than you are to find a single book that is or was not read to pass an exam, to please God, or to be a better cook.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We human beings regard ourselves as (or compare ourselves to) animals only when it suits us.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Man is more likely to believe an opinion that he wanted to hear … than a fact that he wishes was an opinion.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A propaganda model has a certain initial plausibility on guided free-market assumptions that are not particularly controversial. In essence, the private media are major corporations selling a product (readers and audiences) to other businesses (advertisers). The national media typically target and serve elite opinion, groups that, on the one hand, provide an optimal “profile” for advertising purposes, and, on the other, play a role in decision-making in the private and public spheres. The national media would be failing to meet their elite audience’s needs if they did not present a tolerably realistic portrayal of the world. But their “societal purpose” also requires that the media’s interpretation of the world reflect the interests and concerns of the sellers, the buyers, and the governmental and private institutions dominated by these groups.
Noam Chomsky
The real purpose of the opposition is to minimize the amount of money the ruling party will have stolen from the people at the end of its term.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Religion makes people kill each other. Science supplies them with weapons.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Willingness to be puzzled is a valuable trait to cultivate, from childhood to advanced inquiry.
Noam Chomsky
Israel's demonstration of its military prowess in 1967 confirmed its status as a 'strategic asset,' as did its moves to prevent Syrian intervention in Jordan in 1970 in support of the PLO. Under the Nixon doctrine, Israel and Iran were to be 'the guardians of the Gulf,' and after the fall of the Shah, Israel's perceived role was enhanced. Meanwhile, Israel has provided subsidiary services elsewhere, including Latin America, where direct US support for the most murderous regimes has been impeded by Congress. While there has been internal debate and some fluctuation in US policy, much exaggerated in discussion here, it has been generally true that US support for Israel's militarization and expansion reflected the estimate of its power in the region.The effect has been to turn Israel into a militarized state completely dependent on US aid, willing to undertake tasks that few can endure, such as participation in Guatemalan genocide. For Israel, this is a moral disaster and will eventually become a physical disaster as well. For the Palestinians and many others, it has been a catastrophe, as it may sooner or later be for the entire world, with the growing danger of superpower confrontation.
Noam Chomsky
A belief is an uneducated guess.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Reality is a hallucination shared by most sane men.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some of the people we feel sorry for feel sorry for us for thinking that they are the ones who should be felt sorry for.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
New York City is finished," he said. "They can't keep order there, and you can't have business without order. It'll take a hundred years to sort things out and get it all going again."t"What do you hear of the U.S. government? I said. "We don't have electricity an hour a month anymore and there's nothing on the air but the preachers anyway."t"Well, I hear that this Harvey Albright pretends to be running things out of Minneapolis now. It was Chicago, but that may have gone by the boards. Congress hasn't met since twelve twenty-one." Ricketts said, using a common shorthand for the destruction of Washington a few days before Christmas some years back. "We're still fighting skirmishes with Mexico. The Everglades are drowning. Trade is becoming next to impossible, from everything I can tell, and business here is drying up. It all seems like a bad dream. The future sure isn't what it used to be, is it?"t"We believe in the future, sir. Only it's not like the world we've left behind," Joseph said.t"How's that?"t"We're building our own New Jerusalem up the river. it's a world made by hand, now, one stone at a time, one board at a time, one hope at a time, one soul at a time. . .
James Howard Kunstler
They declare that it is unpatriotic and disruptive to question the workings of authority--but patriotic to institute harsh and regressive policies that benefit the wealthy, undermine social programs that serve the needs of the great majority, and subordinate a frightened population to increased state control.
Noam Chomsky
In a materialistic society, the dead body of a rich man’s dog is regarded as a corpse; that of a poor man, a carcass.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Doing the forbidden is a normal function of growth.
Paul Goodman
Retirement is a stage where an employer discards an employee that he cannot exploit further.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
These ideas grew out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, Humboldt’s Limits of State Action, Kant’s insistence, in his defense of the French Revolution, that freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved. With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order. In fact, on the very same assumptions that led classical liberalism to oppose the intervention of the state in social life, capitalist social relations are also intolerable.
Noam Chomsky
Success is subjective. Your dream bank balance could be someone else’s nightmare.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Old Age homes are civilization's dumpsites for human beings who it cannot exploit further.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You know you are capitalism’s ideal puppet (and that education betrayed you) when winning the lottery is your only chance to realizing financial freedom.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You ever noticed how people who believe in Creationism look really un-evolved? You ever noticed that? Eyes real close together, eyebrow ridges, big furry hands and feet. "I believe God created me in one day". Yeah, looks like He rushed it
Bill Hicks
Dating a wo/man with a kid is the new adoption.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Politics and Sport were invented to give unknowledgeable people an opportunity to share their knowledge.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Hamas is regularly described as 'Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.' One will be hard put to find something like 'democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus'—blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable.
Noam Chomsky
Death is number one on the list of things that we wish were possible to leave behind when we escaped barbarism.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It is still cheating, even if nobody comes.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The phrase *You complete me* is nonsensical. A couple is a *we* … not a complete *me.*
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Just like how most if not all poor boys look up to and aspire to someday be rich men, most if not all underdeveloped and developing countries look up to and aspire to someday be developed countries.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Most people who are would each not be in love with their partner, if they did not have the kind of genitals they have.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A horny man is seen. A horny woman is heard.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana