Top 100 Quotes About Social Commentary
#1. I'm the rap version of Dave Chappelle. I'm not sayin' I'm nearly as talented as Chappelle when it comes to political and social commentary, but like him, I'm laughing to keep from crying.
Kanye West
#2. As a writer, it is my job to tell a story. I don't want to get involved in social commentary; I just want to show issues from a different point of view. I want to show issues from a perspective that may not be highlighted.
Nicola Monaghan
#3. Now most of 'Alice' isn't really a political social commentary, but I think a big message is here is that the culture we're involved in is fascinated with very quick fixes and instant gratification.
Caterina Scorsone
#4. Jill had three basic statements about life,
1. It is your life, usually with some added social commentary.
2. What you want and what you get are usually two entirely different things.
3. No one ever said that life was fair.
Nicholas Sparks
#5. When I think about writers who use fiction as social commentary and to raise social awareness but who are also very popular, I think of Dickens.
Jodi Picoult
#6. I think that my films are basically family stories, beyond the fact that they are global and have political and social commentary.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#7. I don't want to offend people and I don't want to be mean, but social commentary and comedy for me are part and parcel. I think the greatest social activists are comedians.
Alanis Morissette
#8. If you read the first page of one of my novels, I can guarantee that you will read the last one. This isn't just social commentary. This is also about writing good page-turners. I want people to keep reading.
Jodi Picoult
#9. I'm incapable of writing without social commentary. I like to think that it's integrated and not really heavy handedly didactic.
John Shirley
#10. I had made all these rules for myself: I'm not writing social commentary, I'm not writing love songs.
Joni Mitchell
#11. I like singing all songs, really, but I find that writing social commentary comes naturally.
Damian Marley
#12. 'Twisted' is similar to 'Pretty Little Liars' in that it's about trying to find out who did it, but it's more about the human relationships between characters and the strain that things can put on them. It's also a little bit of a social commentary piece, because it covers very timely issues.
Avan Jogia
#13. I think 'The Thing' is so good because it's not just a scary movie. It's also social commentary, which works on multiple levels, which is something I really respond to.
Drew Goddard
#14. Dickens writes such brilliant characters and stories, and his themes and social commentary are still so relevant. I think that's why he's still so loved today.
Douglas Booth
#15. Society in the English countryside is still strangely, quaintly divided. If black comedy and a certain type of social commentary are what you want, I think English rural communities offer quite a lot of material.
Rachel Cusk
#16. Movies can be effective in influencing people to think in ways they might not otherwise be exposed to. Social commentary in films is most effective when you're not aware of a soapbox. Making the point without force-feeding the audience is the most desirable approach.
Walter Koenig
#17. I try to tell the best story, and the story that has some heart and some genuine terror and some social commentary and some comedy and some romance and some sex and some violence.
Alan Ball
#18. You were doing a TV show - you don't realise that you're also making social commentary at the same time.
Amber Benson
#20. Something outrageous, in the truest sense of the word, is always happening. On social networks, we're always voicing our reactions to these outrageous events. We read essays and 'think pieces' about these outrageous events. We comment on the commentary. We do this because we can.
Roxane Gay
#21. I love social media. I love the connectivity it provides, the creativity it allows, and the breathtaking wealth of information we all have at our fingertips because of it.
Galit Breen
#22. One good thing about being an immigrant in the US, no one cares about my sociopolitical opinion. I exist like a bland wallpaper to all races.
Fidelis O. Mkparu
#23. Binkie, the one and only. He can hear her rings clacking on the plastic phone, and he chuckles, envisioning with amusement the bejeweled and suntanned manicured grip his grandmother thinks she has on his balls. And she does.
Jardine Libaire
#24. The problem is just too big to solve. This life is much easier if we all just pretend to have a heart.
E.P. Shelky
#25. From school desks with inkwells and scratchy nibs on paper to sweaty finger prints on a tablet... technology progression yes... style?
David H. Millar
#26. We will not be dictated to by men with less intelligence, energy, initiative and ambition than we ourselves possess.
Elbert Hubbard
#27. Immature citizens in several sizes were massed before a large factorylike structure where advanced techniques transformed them into true-thinking right-acting members of the three social classes, lower, middle, and upper middle.
Donald Barthelme
#28. Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
James Baldwin
#29. Did you notice there aren't any average kids anymore - only Gifted and Disposable?
Heather Choate Davis
#30. Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
George Macaulay Trevelyan
#31. Nick sat alone reading a copy of The Independent . Cocaine socialists were trying their hardest to juice up Britain's economy with super casinos
Saira Viola
#33. When we forget our essential similarities, we forget how to get along, and that cannot but lead to prejudice, discrimination, and eventually, conflict.
G. Norman Lippert
#34. Events cast their shadows ahead; before a harsh winter, wild animals grow thicker fur, and the beaver puts on a thicker layer of fat. What kind of times and what sort of tasks can lie ahead for a generation that must think so harshly, even at such a young age, in order to survive?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#35. I simply refuse to deal with idiots ... It has cut my social obligations in half.
Julia Quinn
#36. A fortunate birth, in other words, is a shock absorber. -The Thought Experiment
George Saunders
#37. Before civilization, artists painted for the living. Today, most paint for a living.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#38. A public outcry usually masks a private obsession.
Eric Schlosser
#39. Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.
Margaret Atwood
#40. I felt I had an opportunity to follow in the footsteps of great soul musicians of the past, who made a lot of social and political commentary through their music.
Aloe Blacc
#41. Welcome to Hell. Here's your accordion.
Gary Larson
#42. Reality Tv had become the preferred drug of choice for the George Clooney obsessed housewives strung out on empty promises and splintered dreams
Saira Viola
#43. As music becomes less of a thing
a cylinder, a cassette, a disc
and more ephemeral, perhaps we will begin to assign an increasing value to live performances again.
David Byrne
#44. There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe.
Edith Wharton
#45. After all, if a community could reach some sort of an equilibrium without having to be guided by an outsider, then so much the better.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#46. Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.
Neil Postman
#47. Just because all the rats are gone doesn't mean I trust the rattlesnake that got rid of them.
John Steiner
#48. Human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism ... inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon) ... And through it all there has always been some truly awful food.
Matt Haig
#49. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#50. Like us, those vanished warriors planted their standards in the sands of their own self-summoned extinction.
Steven Pressfield
#51. To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion? ... There is nobody - here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.
Virginia Woolf
#52. He was no stranger to compassion: his heart was open to many good impulses, though his rank often prevented their manifestation.
Nikolai Gogol
#53. Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
Iris Murdoch
#54. All those happy, pretty, successful people- he hated them because he knew they didn't really exist, and he hated even more the magazine that glorified them and in a way that made them exist, actors, rock musicians, famous writers, politicians. Those aren't people, he fumed, they're photographs.
Russell Banks
#55. I saw America's economy last night, people raiding dumpsters at a higher rate than normal in my home town. Digging through garbage shouldn't be a career. Thanks Democrats. Thanks Republicans.
Carroll Bryant
#56. I alternate between feeling sympathetic toward humanity and being a misanthrope. When I'm sympathetic, it usually means I haven't been around people in awhile.
John Raptor
#58. Considering our backgrounds, I found it a strange irony that Ian and I should meet in central Borneo. Both of us were set in motion by the war in Southeast Asia. Ian enlisted. I left the country several weeks before an FBI agent arrived at my parents' front door.
Eric Hansen
#59. You see man we are just fucking extras!! Extras in a capitalist blockbuster!~page 75
Winshluss
#60. ... does not need Facebook, Twitter and Stumble Upon. She is a whole social media network all by herself.
Pandora Poikilos
#61. Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is; the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived ... (Bk2:3)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#62. Riding in a carriage without an escort is modern. But traveling out and about unescorted is unheard of.
Jordan Stratford
#63. A hero would die for his country, but he'd much rather live for it.
Aaron Sorkin
#64. Everyone knew that fat had become the new cancer, yet they bellyached about the dieting hysteria and applauded the "real" women's body. As though doing no exercise and being overfed was some kind of sensible mold.
Jo Nesbo
#65. Everyone in life has a purpose, even if it's to serve as a bad example
Carroll Bryant
#66. Our modern history begins in 1788 with the dumping of the human detritus of Britain ... Yet repositioned in the sunlight , they flourished. ...This was colonial Australia's great gift to the world: practical proof that, when it comes to human society, the soil is more important than the seed.
Richard Glover
#67. Being in prison for seven years was like being in an army that never drilled, never deployed, and only fought itself.
Raegan Butcher
#68. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.
William Gibson
#69. The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.
Larry Niven
#70. She was handed more personality than other mortals, and chemically fertilized in a glasshouse - now her bionic strength allows her to teleport platters of watercress sandwiches from the kitchen to the library, where she's beating her friends at backgammon.
Jardine Libaire
#72. If you won't admit there are kooks among those who share your political viewpoint, chances are, you're one of the kooks.
Raul Ramos Y Sanchez
#73. The world's evaluations of an individual's social worth, like the slits in my eyeballs, change with time and circumstance. In point of fact my pupil-slits vary but modestly between broad and narrow, but mankind's judgements turn somersaults and cartwheels for no conceivable reason.
Soseki Natsume
#74. He remembers noticing his dad's shadow was shorter than the others, and he had a visceral sense his father was weaker than the rest, and that he was more dangerous as a weak person with a lot of power than a powerful person with a lot of power.
Jardine Libaire
#75. Social proof is a flame to the human mind moth, and it leaves a fire trail of destruction across the path of enough.
Will Jelbert
#76. since men are equal and thus have the same wish for happiness, and since there is not enough wealth to satisfy them all to the same extent, they necessarily fight against each other and want power to secure the future enjoyment of what they have at present.
Erich Fromm
#77. I know all those words, but that sentence makes no sense to me.
Matt Groening
#78. Goodreads sports some of the social awkwardness of middle school. If you are looking for a friend, I promise no matter your background or book preferences I will be your friend.
Red Phoenix
#79. It was the age of confidence. Arrogance was epidemic.
David Laskin
#80. Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.
Margaret Atwood
#81. I can't give you the white picket fence, and if I did, you'd set it on fire.
Ilona Andrews
#82. People only need the right amount of bullshit for things to start exploding. Sad, but it's human nature.
Gabbo De La Parra
#83. I think it is just a matter of getting into the mind of the writer," Vetinari went on, looking at a letter covered with grubby fingerprints and what looked like the remains of someone's breakfast. He added: "In some cases, I imagine, there is a lot of room.
Terry Pratchett
#85. All these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust
Nathanael West
#86. If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe - but not a personality.
Charlie Brooker
#87. Hollywood is McWorld's storyteller, and it inculcates secularism, passivity, consumerism, vicariousness, impulse buying, and an accelerated pace of life, not as a result of its overt themes and explicit story lines but by virtue of what Hollywood is and how its products are consumed.
Benjamin R. Barber
#89. That's how you keep someone tied to you, not set them free. You say no to a man and don't give him the peace of repayment.
Erri De Luca
#91. We Greeks believe that a man who takes no part in public affairs is not merely lazy, but good for nothing
Thucydides
#92. In America, there's no idea so patently absurd that it can't catch on.
Bill Maher
#93. Only a bitter little adolescent boy could confuse realism with pessimism.
Grant Morrison
#94. Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?
Douglas Adams
#96. You can take the ape out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the ape.
John Steiner
#97. But I had no idea who this person might be, or who any of the people might be who sat at that table and watched me at the door and claimed to have feelings not exactly for me, but at me.
Alexandra Kleeman
#98. This is America. We don't have adult discussions. We have Twitter.
Bill Maher
#99. The Jury had each formed a different view
Long before the indictment was read
And they all spoke at once so that none of them knew
One word that the other had said
Lewis Carroll
#100. The moment you have massive social and political commentary trying to explain a phenomenon, then you know we are no longer dealing with a strictly psychiatric question.
Norman Finkelstein
