Society Quotes

As soon as a woman's primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women.

~ Naomi Wolf

Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never complete.

~ Naomi Wolf

The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking beautiful. If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.

~ Naomi Wolf

In a sexual double standard as to who receives consumer protection, it seems that if what you do is done to women in the name of beauty, you may do what you like. It is illegal to claim that something grows hair, or makes you taller, or restores virility, if it does not. It is difficult to imagine that the baldness remedy Minoxidil would be on the market if it had killed nine French and at least eleven American men. In contrast, the long-term effects of Retin-A are still unknown--Dr. Stuart Yusps of the National Cancer Institute refers to its prescription as a human experiment--and the Food and Drug Administration has not approved it yet dermatologists are prescribing it to women at a revenue of over $150 million a year.

~ Naomi Wolf

The surgeons' market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women's faces or bodies that social change won't cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.

~ Naomi Wolf

Men won't easily give up a system in which half the world's population works for next to nothing...[and recognizes that]precisely because that half works for so little, it may have no energy left to fight for anything else.

~ Marilyn Waring

Since middle-class Western women can best be weakened psychologically now that we are stronger materially, the beauty myth, as it has resurfaced in the last generation, has had to draw on more technological sophistication and reactionary fervor than ever before. The modern arsenal of the myth is a dissemination of millions of images of the current ideal; although this barrage is generally seen as a collective sexual fantasy, there is in fact little that is sexual about it. It is summoned out of political fear on the part of male-dominated institutions threatened by women's freedom, and it exploits female guilt and apprehension about our own liberation -- latent fears that we might be going too far.

~ Naomi Wolf

The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us...During the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing specialty...pornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal...More women have more money and power and scope and legal recognition than we have ever had before; but in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers.

~ Naomi Wolf

In drawing attention to the physical characteristics of women leaders, they can be dismissed as either too pretty or too ugly. The net effect is to prevent women's identification with the issues. If the public women is stigmatized as too 'pretty,' she's a threat, a rival--or simply not serious; if derided as too 'ugly,' one risks tarring oneself with the same brush by identifying oneself with her agenda.

~ Naomi Wolf

The stronger that women grow, the more prestige, fame, and money is accorded to the display professions: They are held higher and higher above the heads of rising women, for them to emulate.

~ Naomi Wolf

Why does the social order feel the need to defend itself by evading the fact of real women, our faces and voices and bodies, and reducing the meaning of women to these formulaic and endlessly reproduced beautiful images? Though unconscious personal anxieties can be a powerful force in the creation of a vital lie, economic necessity practically guarantees it. An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that justify the institution of slavery. Western economies are absolutely dependent now on the continued underpayment of women. An idealogy that makes women feel worth less was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more. This does not require a conspiracy; merely an atmosphere. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth.

~ Naomi Wolf

Where woman do not fit the Iron Maiden [societal expectations/assumptions about women's bodies], we are now being called monstrous, and the Iron Maiden is exactly that which no woman fits, or fits forever. A woman is being asked to feel like a monster now though she is whole and fully physically functional. The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking beautiful. If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.

~ Naomi Wolf

Sexual satisfaction eases the stranglehold of materialism, since status symbols no longer look sexual, but irrelevant. Product lust weakens where emotional and sexual lust intensifies. The price we pay for artificially buoying up this market is our heart's desire. The beauty myth keeps a gap of fantasy between men and women. That gap is made with mirrors; no law of nature supports it. It keeps us spending vast sums of money and looking distractedly around us, but its smoke and reflection interfere with our freedom to be sexually ourselves.

~ Naomi Wolf

Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her Health: if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.

~ Naomi Wolf

Modern cosmetic surgeons have a direct financial interest in a social role for women that requires them to feel ugly. They do not simply advertise for a share of a market that already exists: Their advertisements create new markets. It is a boom industry because it is influentially placed to create its own demand through the pairing of text with ads in women's magazines. The industry takes out ads and gets coverage; women get cut open. They pay their money and they takes their chances. As surgeons grow richer, they are able to command larger and brighter ad spaces.

~ Naomi Wolf

Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history, a quietly mad population is a tractable one.

~ Naomi Wolf

Aging in women is 'unbeautiful' since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken.

~ Naomi Wolf

Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight.

~ Naomi Wolf

The mass depiction of the modern woman as a beauty is a contradiction: Where modern women are growing, moving, and expressing their individuality, as the myth has it, beauty is by definition inert, timeless, and generic. That this hallucination is necessary and deliberate is evident in the way beauty so directly contradicts women's real situation.

~ Naomi Wolf

Vogue began to focus on the body as much as on the clothes, in part because there was little they could dictate with the anarchic styles...In a stunning move, an entire replacement culture was developed by naming a 'problem' where it had scarcely existed before, centering it on the women's natural state, and elevating it to the existential female dilemma...The number of diet-related articles rose 70 percent from 1968 to 1972...The lucrative 'transfer of guilt' was resurrected just in time.

~ Naomi Wolf

Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.

~ Naomi Wolf

Not easy, not at all for everyone to see the beauty of one's self/soul. It's all about money, nothing else.

~ Balakoteswara Panchakshari

To every corner of the planet, to the young and old, to all humanity. I see your beauty. I really do.

~ Nurudeen Ushawu

Sexual starvation forces a heterosexual man to see beauty in every single female who he can sleep with without his society’s disapproval.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The negative penalties of the Old Testament case laws were not harsh but just, not a threat to society but rather the necessary judicial foundation of civic freedom… the Old Testament was harsh on criminals because it was soft on victims.

~ Gary North

The break of a family is the break of society. We must never break the bond of love and peace that unite us in sacred harmony.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

We are brothers and sisters. We are a sacred family.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Humans are the greatest sacred resources.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The bond of love will unite the world.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Christmas is a sacred festival. It is celebration of Christ love for Humankind. And the love that bind us together.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

We may have different points of arguments from perspectives of belief, faith and religion.But we must not hate each other. We are one human family.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Without Christ a people may always have the freedom to do, but never the power to complete.

~ Criss Jami

Do not be overcome by hate. But conquer hate with love.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Almighty Father, do not destroy mankind. Save us from every calamity.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

His room was a sickly dual-tone of crimson and charcoal, like an Untitled Rothko, the colours bleeding into each other horribly and then rather serenely. The overall effect was overwhelmingly unapologetic but it grew on you like a wart on your nose you didn't realise it was a part of your identity until one day it simply was. His room was his identity. Fiercely bold, avant-garde but never monotonous. He was red, he was black, he was bored, and he was fire. At least to me he seemed like fire. A tornado of fire that burned all in its wake leaving only the wretched brightness of annihilation. His room was where he charmed and disarmed us. We were his playthings. Nobody plays with fire and leaves unscarred. The fire soon seeps into chard and soot. The colours of his soul, his aura, and probably his heart if he didn't stop smoking.

~ Moonshine Noire

Underneath an artist's preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions that allow the forebrain to chatter) there is a soul tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness in the world.

~ Lawrence Durrell

Why I Cannot RelateWhat do you think of this piece? Someone will askAbout some work or form of expression in timeWhat does it mean? They wantMeTo tell them my thoughtsBut sometimesMy thoughts run so deep I cannot tell themSo instead I want to sayi DoNt KnOwBecause that is the only thing that makes sense to themI cannot relate sometimesFrustration of societySo I seclude myselfBut I actually would like to find that one personWho would like to know those thoughts I cannot expressThat person will take the timeTo relateTruly understandSo that way when I sayi DoNt KnOwThey will actually realizeThat I know much more.

~ Kylee Carrier

The man who has dedicated himself to the success of the protect, the master builder, no longer has any freedom: his conduct is now determined altogether by the constraining force of the end. Logically, therefore, he is bound to require at every moment from his companions whatever will best serve that end, and he demands of them imperiously whatever he thinks is of that nature. This imperiousness, though to immediate view that of the master, springs ultimately from the project itself, for it is the project which is in command. In the eyes of those under him, however, it is the master who hustles them, and they think him inhuman by reason of his disregard of their moods and personalities and his inability to see them other than as servants of the project (like himself).

~ Bertrand De Jouvenel

The surest way to damage society is to call for a great man to lead it. The surest way to improve society is to become a great man to lead oneself and convince others to do likewise.

~ Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

Leaders try every possible means to leave the world better than they found it. They make an indelible impact and society remembers them for that.

~ Israelmore Ayivor