May not the complaint, that common people are above their station, often take its rise in the fact of uncommon people being below theirs?

I like everything. Boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny. Which is a problem when I’m walking down the street.

You can’t move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it. That doesn’t mean you do nothing, but it means that you do the things that need to be done according to priority.

Everything the working class has been told to do, the rich do not do. That is my message.

What ‚multiculturalism‘ boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture – and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.

Modern cynics and skeptics… see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

I think I’ve committed the one really bad English crime, which is I’ve risen above my station. I was supposed to be a pop star, and suddenly I’m claiming that I’m an artist of some kind.

We do not want the men of another color for our brothers-in-law, but we do want them for our brothers.

Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

I don’t pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.

I don’t want to be fake. I’m just being me. And I have the power to break stereotypes and whatever useless rules that society puts on us.

The public doesn’t mind people living together without being married, providing they don’t overdo it.

My aim is to make the poor look rich and the rich look poor.

I can’t imagine what it is like to be raised in a society where their only statues that exist are to you and your father.

The secular argument, or the liberal argument, is to as much as possible remove taboos so things do not become unmentionable; to let some air into the discussion.

All women have a perception much more developed than men. So all women somehow, being repressed for so many millennia, they ended up by developing this sixth sense and contemplation and love. And this is something that we have a hard time to accept as part of our society.

Some of these Ivy League kids want to have it both ways. They want to be baby members of the 1 percent, which they most certainly are, and yet still portray themselves as the oppressed.

To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.

Say there’s a white kid who lives in a nice home, goes to an all-white school, and is pretty much having everything handed to him on a platter – for him to pick up a rap tape is incredible to me, because what that’s saying is that he’s living a fantasy life of rebellion.

Chinese people need to be controlled; otherwise, they will do whatever they want.

I feel like the way I was raised was to be able to see through all the titles in this world – from religion to race.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

Regarding marriage, it – somehow, it didn’t happen. One fellow in such a big family not getting married is not an issue.

I’m gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we’re not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want.

Consciously or unconsciously most of us adhere to what is expected of our role because we realize our social success depends on this. Some may refuse to play this game, but in the end they are marginalized and forced to play the outsider role, with limited options and decreasing freedom as they get older.

If you see everything from the point of view of women being victims in some way, you don’t see the wood for the trees. It is better to be a person than a woman.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane… There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.

People like to build their own story about my life. I don’t know if it makes them feel better, or if it makes it okay for them to not like me, but the last thing I grew up as was rich.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

Affluence means influence.

I think people should be allowed to do anything they want. We haven’t tried that for a while. Maybe this time it’ll work.

I think Americans generally are not used to working very hard, in terms of working for the collective. I think in our country we have taken individualism to its farthest reaches, possibly.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane.

Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.

Nothing is as approved as mediocrity, the majority has established it and it fixes its fangs on whatever gets beyond it either way.

The basic thing nobody asks is why do people take drugs of any sort? Why do we have these accessories to normal living to live? I mean, is there something wrong with society that’s making us so pressurized, that we cannot live without guarding ourselves against it?

Nothing can be more absurd than the practice that prevails in our country of men and women not following the same pursuits with all their strengths and with one mind, for thus, the state instead of being whole is reduced to half.

I was not raised with wealth or resources or any social standing to speak of.

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

The more people rationalize cheating, the more it becomes a culture of dishonesty. And that can become a vicious, downward cycle. Because suddenly, if everyone else is cheating, you feel a need to cheat, too.

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

Sometimes I’ve been to a party where no one spoke to me for a whole evening. The men, frightened by their wives or sweeties, would give me a wide berth. And the ladies would gang up in a corner to discuss my dangerous character.

The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It’s fine to be a pop star. ‚Oh, it’s great, lots of fun, aren’t they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!‘

Regardless of what society says, we can’t go on much longer in the sea of immorality without judgment coming.

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

I have noticed… that men usually leave married women alone and are inclined to treat all wives with respect. This is no great credit to married women.

Our modern society – especially in the West, and especially now – reveres youth.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

Before I do anything, I think, well what hasn’t been seen. Sometimes, that turns out to be something ghastly and not fit for society. And sometimes that inspiration becomes something that’s really worthwhile.

Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

Housework never really bothered me… what bothered me about it later was that it was expected to be your life… when you’re a housewife, you are constantly interrupted. You have no space in your life. It isn’t the fact that you do the laundry.