Quotes by Social Critics - Page 9

Unless they are off duty, no matter how wide it is, and even when it is sincere, a smile seems fake if the job description of the person who is smiling includes smiling.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I am not a committed pacifist. I would not hold that it is under all imaginable circumstances wrong to use violence, even though use of violence is in some sense unjust. I believe that one has to estimate relative justices. But the use of violence and the creation of some degree of injustice can only be justified on the basis of the claim and the assessment-which always ought to be undertaken very, very seriously and with a good deal of scepticism that this violence is being exercised because a more just result is going to be achieved.
Noam Chomsky
Let me tell you about gays in the military. I don't want any gay people hanging around me while I'm killing kids. I just don't want to see it.
Bill Hicks
Because he has finally realized that it is it and not him that is loved by the woman he loves, many a man is jealous of his own car, house, wardrobe, or salary.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A slave that acknowledges its enslavement is halfway to its liberation.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Only a visionary leadership that can motivate "the better angels of our nature," as Lincoln said, and activate possibilities for a freer, more efficient, and stable America -- only that leadership deserves cultivation and support. / This new leadership must be grounded in grassroots organizing that highlights democratic accountability. Whoever our leaders will be as we approach the twenty-first century, their challenge will be to help Americans determine whether a genuine multiracial democracy can be created and sustained in an era of global economy and a moment of xenophobic frenzy.
Cornel West
Life is an activity with which we kill time while we wait for something, someone, or the mere passage of time to kill us.
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
Few great men could pass personnel.
Paul Goodman
If we do not believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we do not believe in it at all.
Noam Chomsky
I don't want any gay people hanging around me while I'm killing kids. I just don't want to see it.
Bill Hicks
I'm glad mushrooms are against the law, because I took them one time, and you know what happened to me? I laid in a field of green grass for four hours going, "My God! I love everything." Yeah, now if that isn't a hazard to our country … how are we gonna justify arms dealing when we realize that we're all one?
Bill Hicks
In these downbeat times, we need as much hope and courage as we do vision and analysis; we must accent the best of each other even as we point out the vicious effects of our racial divide and pernicious consequences of our maldistribution of wealth and power. We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each other's throats, even as we acknowledge the weighty forces of racism, patriarchy, economic inequality, homophobia, and ecological abuse on our necks. We are at a crucial crossroad in the history of this nation--and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and degrade us or we hang separately. Do we have the intelligence, humor, imagination, courage, tolerance, love, respect, and will to meet the challenge? Time will tell. None of us alone can save the nation or world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so.
Cornel West
Everybody is talking about the Law of Attraction. Nobody is talking about the Law of Action.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category—except for the category of familiarity.
Noam Chomsky
To a man who was required to marry before he was allowed to have sex with his lover, marriage is a ‘righteous’ form of prostitution.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
...the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon.
Noam Chomsky
A first-rate story is easily killed by second-rate design.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To gain height, lose all your tall friends.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some people’s self-esteem was secretly improved when they discovered that their then-lovers had killed themselves over them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Civilization transformed man from a food gatherer to a gatherer of pieces of paper: diplomas, employment contracts, money, etc.
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
Most of the very few people who would choose a good heart over riches would eventually use that to either make a lot of money, or attract men or women who are rich.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
88% of what we call good songs aren’t really good. They merely remind us of a good time we once had.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Back then, work revolved around life. Today, life revolves around work.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To a man with an internet connection, every thought and every movement sounds like a tweet or status update.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Man is an extremely complex creature: he usually acts in an unselfish manner for selfish reasons.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely - to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away.
Cornel West
Life is a process during which one initially gets less and less dependent, independent, and then more and more dependent.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Technology has transformed the world into a global village. And communities, families, friends, etc., into local islands.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Distinctive facial features of a parent are poor people’s paternity test.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Employment is the exploitation of the employer’s courage, and, the employed’s fear of failure.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some mistakes are worse than others: wearing your underwear inside out isn’t as uncomfortable as wearing it back to front.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
When a dreamer loses his lover, his dream profits. (Unless, of course, the lover was the dreamer's dream.)
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Poverty does not always prevent a rich person from dating someone who is poor, unless the man is the one who is poor.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
An arrogant man whose arrogance we see from his own behaviour is more tolerable than a humble man whose humility we hear of from his own mouth.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Life occasionally humbles us by making us turned on by someone whom we turn off.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some people hate people who are overconfident, only because their overconfidence reminds them of their underconfidence.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Some social ills are preserved by the common misbelief that things such as ignorance, greed, and stupidity do not have the stamina required to reach old age.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
12% of employees eat because they are hungry. 88% of employees eat because it is 1 o’clock.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There’s only one way to improve society. Present it with a single improved unit: yourself.
Albert Jay Nock
Primary purposes of a mirror: (1) To help civilized men realize their imperfections, and, (2) To help the imperfect hide their imperfections.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The three of us ate a fine supper of grilled trout with sorrel cream sauce, and red potatoes out of Britney's old garden behind the ruins of the Watling place, and watercress sautéed in butter for hardly a moment with a dash of vinegar, and cream custard with wild blackberries for dessert.
James Howard Kunstler
Look, part of the whole technique of disempowering people is to make sure that the real agents of change fall out of history, and are never recognized in the culture for what they are. So it's necessary to distort history and make it look as if Great Men did everything - that's part of how you teach people they can't do anything, they're helpless, they just have to wait for some Great Man to come along and do it for them.
Noam Chomsky
Some men do not know the father of 'their' children.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There is absolutely nothing feminine about the colour pink, or, anything bad-luck'ish about the colour black — in itself.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Facebook gives people an illusory sense of being LIKED.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A writer is merely a reader that had the guts to be read, and, heard.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The principle of universality is not a 'theory'. Just moral truism.
Noam Chomsky
Some people will each start investing more of their salary on ‘their’ house and spending less of it on ‘their’ car or cars only when they start being able to take ‘their’ house to work, funerals, weddings, etc.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Interviews were invented to make journalism less passive. Instead of waiting for something to happen, journalists ask someone what should or could happen.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The classical anthropological question, What is man?—"how like an angel, this quintessence of dust!"—is not now asked by anthropologists. Instead, they commence with a chapter on Physical Anthropology and then forget the whole topic and go on to Culture.
Paul Goodman
Back then: to be paid more, one needed to increase the number of things that are by him known. Today: to be paid more, one needs to increase the number of people by whom he is known.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The role of a comedian is to make the audience laugh at a minimum of once every fifteen seconds.
Lenny Bruce
To some people, employment is a distraction. To all entertainers, distraction is employment.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A gold tooth is to some blacks, what braces are to all whites.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. --Aristotle
Cornel West
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
Because of self-doubt, the fear of failure, or laziness, most people usually bite off way less than they can chew.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
People who get offended by your not saying 'Thank you!' … after they’ve paid you a compliment were merely desperate to be thanked.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana