The richer and more market-oriented societies have become, the nicer people have behaved.

Nation-states resemble war; city-states resemble commerce; families resemble stability; and individuals resemble entertainment

English does not distinguish between arrogant - up {irreverence toward the temporarily powerful} and arrogant - down {directed at the small guy}.

Thus, the path to creating a sovereign (or sacred) element — whether an institutional figure or a victim offered for consummation — is a negation of one of those taboos whose observance makes us...

You know, I think the main purpose of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps is to get poor Americans into clean, pressed, unpatched clothes, so rich Americans can stand to look at them.

But one way or another competing and weeding takes place . . . or a race goes downhill.

The wars of the twentieth century brought home the fundamental truth that people will fight for their country and unite in its defence, but will seldom fight for their class, even when the...

Given the American example, it should always have been obvious that the sacred canopy claims are silly. In the United States, in the most fully pluralistic nation that probably has ever existed,...

Impatience is a twentieth-century virtue. At twenty, when they saw, or thought they saw, what life could be, the sum of bliss it held, the endless conquests it allowed, they realised they would not...

Bantu Philosophy: People cling to life and are not yet at the stage where they will fight for the quality of that life. They feel as long as they are surviving, that is enough.

The boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary.

The middle classes, grown prosperous by the belated but staggering development of the industrial revolution and dazzled by the success of Bismarck's policy of force and war, had traded for material...

Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.

This country is without hope. Even its garbage is clean, its trade lubricated, its traffic pacified. The latent, the lacteal, the lethal - life is so liquid, the signs and messages are so liquid, the...

... if one gives sufficient social power to a class of people holding even the most outlandish ideas, they will, consciously or not, eventually contrive to produce a world organized in such a way that...

Edward Tylor, a distinguished nineteenth-century cultural anthropologist. For him, culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities...

The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the...

Tribal people get more out of life.

If one of them appears in company, he's a grain of yeast which ferments and gives back to everyone some part of his natural individuality. He shakes things up. He agitates us.

It seems there was a custom in Ireland at this time of showing obeisance to your king by sucking his nipples. No nipples, you could not be a king.

We need to theorize the meaning of beauty in our lives so that we can educate for critical consciousness, talking through the issues: how we acquire and spend money, how we feel about beauty, what the...

This is something that has been puzzling me for years. Women will stand there watching their items being rung up, and then when the till lady says, 'That's £4.20, love,' or whatever, they suddenly...

Personality and personal identity are in some ways like coordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships.

Like many academics, Howard was innocent of the world. He could identify thirty different ideological trends in the social sciences, but did not really know what a software engineer was.

The small family living unit lacks space, Earth, other animals, seasons, natural temperatures, and so on. The pet is either sterilized or sexually isolated, extremely limited in his exercise, deprived...

The rural Vietnamese was not regarded simply as a pawn in a power struggle but as the active element in the thrust. He was the thrust.

See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin, 1993). Note the often-overlooked second part where Fukuyama criticizes the end of history as leading to the last man.

the concept of amoral familism, whose code he describes as Maximize the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all others will do likewise. Cooperation

Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he'll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns...

In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the...