c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
A mountain had died, its skeleton had been scattered over the ground. Time had aged the mountain; time had killed the mountain-and here lay the mountain's bones.
— Vasily Grossman, An Armenian Sketchbook
Now I seen Mauna Kena from Honokaa b'fore, o'course, but a mountain you're planning on climbin' ain't the same as the one you ain't. It ain't so pretty, nay.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Don't focus on the mountain; focus instead on the mountain mover!" HS/el
— Evinda Lepins, A Cup of Hope for the Day: Coffee Hour with Chicklit Power
Don't judge people because someone's molehill could be another person's mountain.
— Uzoma Nnadi
But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.
— Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
That's the funny thing about trying to escape. You never really can. Maybe temporarily, but not completely.
— Jennifer L. Armentrout, Onyx
It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Maybe I'll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come.
— Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
I must apologize for calling so late," said he, "and I must further beg you to be so unconventional as to allow me to leave your house presently by scrambling over your back garden wall.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I
By God, I shall spend the rest of my life getting my heart back, healing and forgetting every scar you put upon me when I was a child. The first move I ever made, after the cradle, was to crawl for the door, and every move I have made since has been an effort to escape.
— Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
You don't need to know what you're escaping from to become a fugitive.
— Bella Pollen, Midnight Cactus
Escape is a commodity like anything else
— Iain Banks, The Player of Games
Eve engaged her On Duty sign and stepped out of the car. Immediately her ears were assaulted with a blast of music. Christmas carols pumped, full blast, into the air. She decided that people ran inside, ready to buy anything, just to escape the noise.
— J.D. Robb, Holiday in Death
Every American autobiography, someone once said, is about one thing—escape. Look into the frightened heart of an American life, and you’ll find a compulsion to flee—a seed planted in the national character at the start by those ships sailing out of Europe and landing on our shores. — Teller: A Novel
— Frederick Weisel
There is an abandonment, an escape, that physical labor bestows.
— Steven Gould, Jumper
They're gone. I let them chase me. I led them like a sunbeam and vanished like a shadow.
— Erin Bow, Plain Kate
One might have to be a little ruthless to seize back control of one's life, don't you think?
— Nina George, The Little French Bistro
The last great escape. I was done gambling, done betting on a ship that would never come in. I would cash in my chips while I was ahead. I didn't want to suffer the growing old, didn't want to wait until my memory went. It was all so tiresome. I would just go out in a blaze of glory before the parasites of sadness got at me and made me bitter. After that's the American way: take your own life before everything else takes it from you.
— Brian James, Pure Sunshine
Art is anything you can get lost in. A place to escape and a place to find yourself.
— Heloise Clough, The Art of Being a Little Bit Crazy
Escape the repetitive whirl wind that life can become through complacency.
— Steven Redhead, Life Is A Cocktail
Tracey hurriedly shut the door behind her to prevent the flames that had been licking hungrily at her caboose all the way down the corridor, from following her inside. Then, almost falling into one of the gravity couches, she hurriedly strapped herself into it before punching the emergency release. She hoped the escape system still worked. It did. The explosive dead-bolts fired, shaking the pod loose, dislodging it from the rapidly disintegrating wreck, just about shaking the crap out of her on its bone-jarring way into the great wide open.
— Christina Engela, Prodigal Sun
Don’t pretend, Bianca,” he said. “You’re smarter than that, and so am I. I finally figured out what you meant when you left. You said you were like Hester. I get it now. The first time you came to my house, when we wrote that paper, you said Hester was trying to escape. But everything caught up with Hester in the end, didn’t it? Well, something finally caught up with you, but you’re just running away again. Only, he”-Wesley pointed to my bedroom door-“is your escape this time.” He took a step toward me, forcing me to crane my neck even more to see his face. “Admit it, Duffy.”“Admit what?”“That you’re running away from me,” he said. “You realized you’re in love with me and you bailed because it scared the shit out of you.
— Kody Keplinger, The DUFF: Designated Ugly Fat Friend
I wasn't in danger today," I tell him in a choked voice. "I escaped danger today." And I did... I feel like the whole day has been an electrical shock, paddles straight to my heart, bringing me out of a lifelong torpor I hadn't even known I was in. "I escaped," I repeat.
— Gayle Forman, Just One Day
Here was the opportunity to free herself from all those identical days and nights. pg 30
— Paulo Coelho, The Devil and Miss Prym
Little thieves get shot, but great ones escape.” Kelly Oliver, WOLF: A Jessica James Mystery
— Kelly  Oliver, Wolf
Maybe that's why Claire had perfected the art of invisibility. It was a form of self-preservation. You couldn't resent what you could not see. She was so quiet, but she noticed everything. Her eyes tracked the world like it was a book written in a language that she could not understand. There was nothing timorous about her, but you got the feeling that she always had one foot out the door. If the situation got too hard, or too intense, she would simply disappear.
— Karin Slaughter, Pretty Girls
Anyway, what can one do here? I am seriously thinking of running away and joining the Foreign Legion or the North-West Mounted Police—whichever work the shorter hours.
— Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement
Promise me that if you get a chance to escape without me, you will do it. He won't kill me. Go find your men and come back for me."  His eyelids and brows lowered. " You don't know me very well or you wouldn't say such a thing. I won't leave you.
— Melanie Dickerson, The Captive Maiden
And so, now, it is almost midnight of the first day, and I have broken my resolution to go to bedearly - postponing sleep, and thereby the inevitable waking up in tomorrow. Another device of escape.
— Silvia Plath
If poetry escapes my mouth then it shall seek comfort in your heart. Will you keep it safe?
— Delano Johnson, Rare Images of Love
Woe be to the wug who forgets that destroying one part of a thing does not equal victory
— David Baldacci, The Finisher
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
— Graham Greene
There is no escape from me, not even in death.
— Conn Iggulden, Khan: Empire of Silver
If I could only escape, if I could only escape... he murmured the words to himself a dozen times; then metaphorically shook himself for being so impractical, so romantic, so dutiless.
— John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman
I lean back against the velvet-cushioned seat and close my eyes to the sound of hooves pounding hard against the cobblestone streets. Their clip-clopping harmony keeping perfect tempo with the rumble of carriage wheels, affording a sound as sweet as any symphony I've ever heard. It's the sound of escapeThe sound of goodbyeA sound that's served to soothe me in the past, providing the much-needed assurance that the unwelcome inquiries and suspicions of newly alerted acquaintances would soon fade - allowing for a brief respite in a new location, before I'm on the move again.I'm a gypsy.A nomad.A vagabond.A drifter.
— Alyson Noel, Eternal Flame
Sometimes all you know about where you're going is that it's away from where you are.
— Leah Raeder, Black Iris
Books were my escape, they transported me to other worlds without step-mothers.
— A.W. Exley, Ella, the Slayer
There’s one last reason why none of us ever tries to escape. There are a few of us who just don’t have anywhere else to go.
— Jason Medina, No Hope for the Hopeless at Kings Park
Angling is just a way of relaxing and escaping in the countryside.
— Fennel Hudson, A Meaningful Life - Fennel's Journal - No. 1
Escapers were the cream of the crop.
— Sara Sheridan, British Bulldog
Books make me happy, the help me escape from reality.
— Félix J. Palma, The Map of the Sky
Once we were alone, Imogen unfolded her hand. In it, she held the key to the chains. I had passed it to her while we were in the embrace. Roden noticed it and scowled. "You gave her the key and not me? I could be free already."I smiled at him. "Yes, but I wasn't going to kiss you.""Fair enough
— Jennifer A. Nielsen, The Shadow Throne
Change is coming, she whispered to the bugs bouncing off her window. You can’t escape it.
— A. Lynn, Itsy's Ugly
What's the use of the wind if it won't take you away on it?
— Samantha Young, Smokeless Fire
Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
You think you can get rid of things, and people too--leave them behind. You don't know yet about the habit they have, of coming back.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
When you talk about escape, know that it doesn’t take place from the front. Hidden paths are always on the back.
— Waheed Ibne Musa, Johnny Fracture
I thought about all the people who'd had to do this through history. The millions taking flight from disasters, fleeing tyrannical despots, making exodus from pogroms, escaping waring soldiers and pouring out of bombed cities. What had kept them going was the promise of safe haven, whether in some sprawling refugee camp or under the protection of a friendly army. We didn't have that.
— Michael Adams
Please,’ Neil shook the stinging fluid out of his eyes. Don’t beg. You’ll appear weak DO NOT BEG. ‘Please, I’m begging you. Don’t take my bike. It’s all I have left and I ... I ...’ he looked behind him in the direction of the city, ‘I can’t go back.
— Teresa Schulz, Barbed Wire and Daisies
Jesus, I’m not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they’re gonna do. I’m just going to do it. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.”	“Huh?” I asked.	“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
I was a good lawyer , and most days that was enough. I was aware, however, that I took refuge in my profession, as unlikely as that seemed considering the amount of human suffering I dealt with. It offered me a role to escape into, from what I no longer knew; perhaps nothing more significant than my own little ration of suffering.
— Michael Nava, The Little Death
The hurts from my last day with my father are healed now, but I want to remember where they were; I want to remember what I escaped for as long as I live.
— Veronica Roth, Four: A Divergent Story Collection
Forget it all, I told myself, escape into your mind and your work, into the place where you are only your living, breathing self, not a citizen of any state, not a stake in that infernal game, the place where only what reason you have can still work to some reasonable effect in a world gone mad.
— Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday
If all we seek is an escape, what does that say about the world we live in. We are desperate with our dreams. What - oh, what - does that say?
— Steven Erikson, The Crippled God
Only the ones who run are worth catching.
— Josephine Angelini
He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown. That is all. Apart from this he has a tremendous convex belly divided into segments and a hard rounded back suggestive of wing cases. In beetles these cases conceal flimsy little wings that can be expanded and then may carry the beetle for miles and miles in a blundering flight. Curiously enough, Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard covering of his back. (This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings.)
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature
Jess." He whispers. "That was far from manhandling you sweetheart. I'm just claiming what I want, and make no mistake," He places tender kisses along my jaw leading down to my neck. "I. Always. Get. What. I. Want." He breathes in between kisses. "You would do pretty well to remember that." -Max Wild
— S.M.  Phillips, Escape down under
There is no escape for me now, I know. Everything is over. I had my run. I was a murderer, a beautiful one, but I lived in a house of cards all my life and now it's all coming back to punish me, and there is no escape.
— Katherine Ewell, Dear Killer
All children want to go to space. Earth only offers parents wailing about overdraft notices and evening news playing in an empty den. Dead pets too. Childhood is a rot. And so they look up and see stars shiver, ancient information only just now arriving, because that is the only place left to look, and they yearn.
— David Connerley Nahm, Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky
son," Mr. P said. "You're going to find more and more hope the farther and farther you walk away from this sad, sad, sad reservation.
— Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Unfortunately, the escape became the trap.
— Marcia Cameron, Broken Child
He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street.
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The motive for our actions doesn't lie ahead of us. It's something behind us that we're trying to escape.
— Peter Høeg, The Quiet Girl
We fell, but we never let the box fall from our hands. Then we ran. We ran blindly, and men and houses streaked past us in a torrent without shape.
— Ayn Rand, Anthem
We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.
— Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
Faced with today's problems and disappointments, many people will try to escape from their responsibility. Escape in selfishness, escape in sexual pleasure, escape in drugs, escape in violence, escape in indifference and cynical attitudes. I propose to you the option of love, which is the opposite of escape.
— John Paul II
Unicorns know naught of shame, or need, or doubt, or debt;But mortals, as you may have noticed, take what they can get.
— Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
I came to this city to escape.
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
I close my eyes and try and shut him out. My fingers don’t want to stay in time. They want to race ahead in fury, plunging into the dense fog of black notes, pulling the music out by its roots, hurling it up out of the piano and into the air.
— Tabitha Suzuma, A Voice in the Distance
Your eyes, they shine so brightI wanna save that lightI can't escape this nowUnless you show me how
— anth
Nobody actually ever does this—escaping through a window.
— Kevin James Moore, The Go-Go Girl
Before I knew escape, life was something to be endured, passively. Now I hunger for it.
— Kristin Halbrook, Nobody But Us
Sometimes I wish I was in the movies...Not to be famous or nothing. I just wish I was made of light. Then nobody’d know me except for what they saw up on that screen. I’d just be light up on the silver screen, and not at all a man.
— Alan Heathcock, Volt
And you wanted to escape,' a man near me whispered to another man. 'You wanted to run off into the woods and fight. But do you see? Do you see what the rest of them think about us? These people would sell you back to the Nazis for a sack of potatoes and then toast you at their dinner table.
— Alan Gratz, Prisoner B-3087
We are the wilderness withinScreaming out for true expression.Even when we’re sleeping,There’s no escape from this obsession.
— Jay Woodman
The veneer of civilization fell away to reveal desperate animals, humanity at their worst.
— Travis Luedke, The Nightlife: Paris
If only they let me, I'll go right into the dense forest where you can't find your way. And where the honey-sipping hummingbird rocks himself on the end of the thinnest branch, I will flower out as a champa.
— Rabindranath Tagore, The Post Office
How much better it would be if they weren't so damn understanding--if they kicked me out of the house. To find yourself out in the street with two dollars to your name, to catch the streetcar downtown and get a job, perhaps as an airline stewardess. Think how wonderful it would be to fly to Houston and back three times a week for the next twenty years. You think I'm kidding? I'm not. It would be wonderful.
— Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
He let the hours go by lost in the magic of words, shedding his skin and his name, feeling like another person. He allowed himself to be carried away by the dreams of shadowy characters, the only refuge left for him.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
There's nowhere else to escape to ... Except in a wooden box, that is.
— H.M. Forester, Game of Aeons
Deanna Durbin's movies are about innocence and sweetness. They're from a different time and a different place. Outside the movie house, there was Depression, poverty, war, death, and loss. Audiences then were willing to pretend, to enter into a game of escape. No one really thought that the world was like a Deanna Durbin movie, they just wanted to pretend it was for about an hour and a half.
— Jeanine Basinger, The Star Machine
So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the oldfield pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. IT is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.
— Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men
I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.
— Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies
You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and M a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedoms swift winged angels, that fly around the world; I am confined in the bands of iron! O that I were free! O, that if I were on one of your gallant decks, under your protecting wing! Alas! Betwixt me and you, the turbid waters roll. Go on, go on. O, that I could also go! Could I but swim! If I could fly! O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! The glad ship is gone; she hides in the dim distance. I am left in the hottest hell of unending slavery. O God, save me! God, deliver me! Let me be free! Is there any God! Why am I a slave? I will run away. I will not stand. Get caught, or clear, I'll try it. I had as well die with ague as the fever. I have only one life to lose. I had as well be killed running as die standing. Only think of it; 100 miles straight north, and I am free! Try it? Yes! God is helping me, I will. It cannot be that I shall live and die a slave. I will take to the water. This is very bay shall yet bear me into freedom. The steamboats steered in the Northeast course from Northpoint. I will do the same; and when I get to the head of the bay, I will turn my canoe adrift, and walked straight through Delaware into Pennsylvania. When I get there, I shall not be required to have a pass; I can travel without being disturbed. Let but the first opportunity offer, and, come what will, I am off. Meanwhile, I will try to bear up under the yoke. I am not the only slave in the world. Why should I be free? I can bear as much as any of them. Besides I am but a boy, and all boys are bound to some one. It may be that my misery and slavery will only increase the happiness when I get free there is a better day coming. [62 – 63]
— Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Twentyone is too old to go anywhere alone, you know that. I want to go with someone. I don't mean as a bride, I'm not so gauche as that, but as a mistress or paramour or concubine or companion or friend or pal or anything else. I just don't want to be left alone! I want to get out of here!" She said it again for all the wide-faced flowers to hear: "I want to get out of here!
— Douglas Woolf, Wall to Wall
She walked forward, feeling the dew on the grass with each step. She tightened her eyes, welcoming the darkness.
— Eveli Acosta, Peaceful Darkness
Even in the darkness of the closed box she felt trapped inside, she could see light shining in through tiny holes on the lid.They were like the stars beckoning her towards a place where all would be simple . . . away from the shadows, away from the darkness.
— Umair Naeem, Drowning Shadows
I'm not interested in preserving the status quo
—  I want to overthrow it.
My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity . . . and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it. So now I do what pleases myself.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
I measure the progress of a community by the degree of progress which women have achieved.
— B.R. Ambedkar
One can't love humanity. One can only love people.
— Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear
Nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up.
— Stephen King, The Stand
That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.
— Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent.
— Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. From romantic to realistic, back to romantic. 
— Ray Bradbury, The October Country
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
If two people stare at each other for more than a few seconds, it means they are about to either make love or fight. Something similar might be said about human societies. If two nearby societies are in contact for any length of time, they will either trade or fight. The first is non-zero-sum social integration, and the second ultimately brings it.
— Robert Wright
Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.
— Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear
It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable.
— Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear
False fears are a plague, a modern plague!
— Michael Crichton, State of Fear
Society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience.
— Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire
We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.
— Karl R. Popper
The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more.
— Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire
What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall; conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon self-restraint, patience, and decision. And the institution of the family, and the emotions that arise therein, the fierce jealousy, the tenderness for offspring, parental self-devotion, all found their justification and support in the imminent dangers of the young.
— H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings
Perhaps the difference between a professor and a bus driver is that the professor can say stupid things with complete authority while the bus driver is not authorized to make brilliant insights.
— Les Back, The Art of Listening
The old man in the beard he felt convinced was wrong. He was too busy saving his own soul. Wasn't it better to take part even in the crimes of people you loved, if it was necessary hate as they did, and if that were the end of everything suffer damnation with them rather than be saved alone?
— Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear
Having wallowed in a delightful orgy of anti-French sentiment, having deplored and applauded the villains themselves, having relished the foibles of bankers, railwaymen, diplomats, and police, the public was now ready to see its faith restored in the basic soundness of banks, railroads, government, and police.
— Michael Crichton, The Great Train Robbery
They came to study the dreadful vulgarity of this imaginary Mass Man they pretend to hate. But they're fascinated with the snake-pit. 
— Ray Bradbury, The October Country
It takes centuries for sense to become common
— Anthony Steyning
At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.
— Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence
Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.
— Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
The deviant and the conformist...are creatures of the same culture, inventions of the same imagination.
— Kai Theodor Erikson
I believe, Messieurs, in loyalty---to one's friends and one's family and one's caste.
— Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express
Once the primary bonds which gave security to the individual are severed, once the individual faces the world outside of himself as a completely separate entity, two courses re-open to him since he has to overcome the unbearable state of powerlessness and aloneness. By one course he can progress to “positive freedom”; he can relate himself spontaneously to the world in love and work, in the genuine expression of his emotional, sensuous and intellectual capacities; he can thus become one again with man, nature, and himself, without giving up the independence and integrity of his individual self. The other course open to him is to fall back, to give up his freedom, and to try to overcome his aloneness by eliminating the gap that has arisen between his individual self and the world. This second course never reunites him with the world in the way he was related to it before he merged as an “individual,” for the fact of his separateness cannot be reversed; it is an escape from an unbearable situation which would make life impossible if it were prolonged. This course of escape, therefore, is characterized by its compulsive character, like every escape from threatening panic; it is also characterized by the more or less complete surrender of individuality and the integrity of the self. Thus it is not a solution which leads to happiness and positive freedom; it is, in principle, a solution which is to be found in all neurotic phenomena. It assuages an unbearable anxiety and makes life possible by avoiding panic; yet it does not solve the underlying problem and is paid for by a kind of life that often consists only of automatic or compulsive activities.
— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
Any industrial product that comes in per capita quanta beyond a given intensity exercises a radical monopoly over the satisfaction of a need.
— Ivan Illich
Air is no less heavy because we do not detect its weight.
— Union pour la Vérité
Phule had propounded the theory of the Aryan invasion as the source of oppression
—  dalit radicals of the 1920s took it to its extreme
In the savage horde the most vagabond, as well as in the most civilized nations of Europe, man is only what he is made to be by external circumstances; he is necessarily elevated by his equals; he contracts from them his habits and his wants; his ideas are no longer his own; he enjoys, from the enviable prerogative of his species, a capacity of developing his understanding bu the power of initiation, and the influence of society.
— Jean Marc Gaspard Itard
What a growing number of sociologists have found ought to be common sense: by locking millions of people out of the mainstream legal economy, by making it difficult or impossible for people to find housing or feed themselves, and by destroying familial bonds by warehousing millions for minor crimes, we make crime more—not less—likely in the most vulnerable communities.
— Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.
— Ernest Gellner
As for me, I prefer truth to goodthink. I feel surer on my ground.
— David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
Theory -the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees- theory can be a dew that rises from earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn't smell of the earth, it isn't good for earth. -Notes Toward a Politics of Location
— Adrienne Rich
I don’t really like organizations where people are “deemed” things.
— Mindy Kaling, Why Not Me?
People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.
— C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite
Postmodernity means the exhilarating freedom to pursue anything, yet mind-boggling uncertainty as to what is worth pursuing and in the name of what one should pursue it.
— Zygmunt Bauman
In monetary parlance, there are three types of people - who know how to make money from money (rich); who earn and spend (middle class); and those who don’t know either and remain poor. Their percentages vary from country to country.
— Sandeep Sahajpal
The meaning of man's existence is not to dominate over others, but to better humanity.
— Eraldo Banovac
But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.
— Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
Information and communication technologies have changed the way of life completely. Nowadays, many people reach for their smart phones and/or turn their computers on as soon as they wake up. They look at the news on social networks and check e-mails, before they get dressed or have breakfast.
— Eraldo Banovac
Granting that there is some truth to the theory that defects in society give rise to the emergence of criminals, I still maintain that those who use this theory as a defense of criminality are overlooking the fact that there are many people in this defective society who survive without resorting to crime. The argument to the contrary is pure sophistry.
— Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography
I set free the phantoms of my imagination.
— Frigyes Karinthy, Chains
Is it possible that power can conquer matter, that the soul makes a mightier truth than the body, that life has a meaning that survives life itself, that good survives evil as life survives death, that God, after all, is more powerful than the Devil?
— Frigyes Karinthy, Chains
Everything returns and renews itself. The difference now is that the rate of these returns has increased, in both space and time, in an unheard-of fashion. Now my thoughts can circle the globe in minutes. Entire passages of world history are played out in a couple of years.
— Frigyes Karinthy, Chains
Now we live in fairyland. The only lightly disappointing thing about this land is that it is smaller than the real world has ever been.
— Frigyes Karinthy, Chains
Stable husbanding of the land requires community-wide language and norms for resolving interpersonal conflict, facilitating barter and trade, determining shares of work and output and maintaining organizational hierarchies. Although such social functions are the requisites of community life everywhere, the ways of performing them evolve differently from place to place. Each society develops its practices and sets of myths, symbols and rational justifications, which usually are held to be superior to those of other societies........And just as material reasons for self-sufficiency can turn communities towards economic imperialism, so the ideational justifications for autonomy can turn them into presumptuous civilizers of other peoples.
— Seyom Brown
I dream of a world where Science shapes the structure of a society, rather than politics.
— Abhijit Naskar
Good sociologists have always had an insatiable curiosity about about even the trivialities of human behaviour, and if this curiosity leads a sociologist to devote many years to the painstaking exploration of some small corner of the social world that may appear quite trivial to others, so be it: Why do more teenagers pick their noses in rural Minnesota than in rural Iowa? What are the patterns of church socials over a twenty-year period in small-town Saskatchewan? What is the correlation between religious affiliation and accident-proneness among elderly Hungarians?
— Peter Berger
Lefebvre summarises this march of clock-time through society and nature (1991: 95–6). He argues that the lived time experienced in and through nature has gradually disappeared. Time is no longer something that is visible and inscribed within space. It has been replaced by measuring instruments, clocks, which are separate from natural and social space. Time becomes a resource, differentiated off from social space. It is consumed, deployed and exhausted. There is the expulsion of lived (and kairological) time as ‘clock-time’ dominates. Lefebvre describes this changing nature of time in terms of metaphor. In pre-modern societies lived time is encrypted into space as in a tree-trunk, and like a tree-trunk shows the mark of those years that it has taken to grow. While in modern societies time is absorbed into the city such that lived time is invisible or reduced to its methods of measurement. Lived time ‘has been murdered bysociety’ (Lefebvre 1991: 96).
— John Urry
In our society, defecation involves anindividual in activity which is defined as inconsistent withthe cleanliness and purity standards expressed in many of ourperformances. Such activity also causes the individual todisarrange his clothing and to 'go out of play," that is, todrop from his face the expressive mask that he employs inface-to-face interaction. At the same time ic becomes difficultfor him to reassemble his personal front should the need toenter into interaction suddenly occur. Perhaps that is areason why toilet doors in our society have locks on them.
— Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
The church and the scientific community are fighting at times a common enemy: the truth religion cannot deny and the positivist materialist scientist is unable to explain.
— Paul Greene, A Time of Change
To embrace the belief that man is the accidental product of a random and otherwise genetically and biologically impossible Darwinian gradual evolution allegedly monitored by a quasi-fictitious natural selection, a process that supposedly started with an amoeba nobody knows how it arrived on Earth that somehow became a fish with stumps for legs that turned crocodile, a creature that following successive transmutations “evolved” into an ape that ended up as Leonardo Da Vinci is an attitude that comes in conflict with the scientific method of research and it certainly violates its standard principles.
— Paul Greene, A Time of Change
Religion thrives on want and fear of the unknown, on lack of education. A frightened and confused human is fed by religious institutions with the illusion that the solution to his real problems is to appeal to the good will of an imaginary supernatural divinity religious institutions claim to represent. With one hand they offer a cup of rice and a pair of used shoes someone else has paid for. With the other, they place the Bible on the table, setting up the poor in spirit for the belief trap.
— Paul Greene, A Time of Change
Life on Earth is not the result of a series of miracles performed by a supernatural god-creator, and it is definitely not a product of matter having a mind of its own, of an equally miraculous evolutionary process supervised by Lady Natural Selection who would turn rabbits into lions.
— Paul Greene, A Time of Change
That everything in nature has “the appearance” of design is not exactly evidence against design. According to Dawkins, though, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is almost certainly something else.
— Paul Greene, A Time of Change
… between the irrational promoted in churches and the Darwinian pseudo-science taught in schools, a revolution in the way we understand reality is not only necessary but also long overdue.
— Paul Greene, A Time of Change
The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness. We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion. Very often, the fear of total permanent war paralyzes the kind of morally oriented politics, which might engage our interests and our passions. We sense the cultural mediocrity around us-and in us-and we know that ours is a time when, within and between all the nations of the world, the levels of public sensibilities have sunk below sight; atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial.
— C. Wright Mills, Letters and Autobiographical Writings
It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. Tranquilizers and anesthetics, private and corporate, become the largest business in the world just as the world is attempting to maximize every form of alert. Sound-light shows, as new cliché, are in effect mergers, retrievers of the tribal condition. It is a state that has already overtaken private enterprise, as individual businesses form into massive conglomerates. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
— Marshall McLuhan, From Cliche To Archetype
It seems very strange that one must turn back, and be transported to the very beginnings of history, in order to arrive at an understanding of humanity as it is at present.
— Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise----as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.
— Allan Bloom
I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.
— Charles Horton Cooley
It seemed strange to Kellan that the more people were crowded together, the less they were willing to acknowledge it; their interaction became a thing of unwelcome necessity and their gaze turned ever inward.
— B.R. Crichton, The Rage Within
Social change doesn’t happen overnight: It takes decades for momentum to build and for the once-radical edge to become mainstream.
— Dr. Jean M. Twenge
One of the anomalies of modern ecology is the creation of two groups, each of which seems barely aware of the existence of the other. The one studies the human community, almost as if it were a separate entity, and calls its findings sociology, economics and history. The other studies the plant and animal community and comfortably relegates the hodge-podge of politics to the liberal arts. The inevitable fusion of these two lines of thought will, perhaps, constitute the outstanding advance of this century.
— Aldo Leopold
I know how easy it is to sound like a corny version of Noam Chomsky when talking about something like this, but in a country where millions of dollars are spent on nuclear weapons, corporate welfare, and many ridiculous things, doesn't it just make sense to take care of people first? As soon as we can make the South Bronx, Compton, Taos, and Astoria look like Beverly Hills I'll have no problem watching a guy orbit Mars.
— Dito Montiel, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
On election days, the burdens of poverty and corruption and of a creaky economic system are put aside, and India celebrates. Many voters dress especially for the occasion... None quite voice the thought, but those who came in a steady stream to vote seemed to be saying that India may have fallen far behind its neighbors in the struggle for prosperity, but as long as it can choose its governments, it can hope for better in the future.
— Shashi Tharoor, India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond
Rich is my word for someone who can afford to make choices, who has enough resources to do more than merely survive.
— Seth Godin, We Are All Weird: The Myth of Mass and The End of Compliance
The attempt to interpret human behavior in terms of models derived from the natural sciences eventually destroys personal responsibility.
— Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture
Chicago is not the most corrupt of cities. The state of New Jersey has a couple. Need we mention Nevada? Chicago, though, is the Big Daddy. Not more corrupt, just more theatrical, more colorful in its shadiness.
— Studs Terkel, Chicago
If man--if each one of us--abdicates his responsibilities with regard to values; if each one of us limits himself to leading a trivial existence in a technological civilization, with greater adaptation and increasing success as his sole objectives; if we do not even consider the possibility of making a stand against these determinants, then everything will happen as I have described it, and the determinates will be transformed into inevitabilities.
— Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
Free love may try to dissolve, and the concubinate to desecrate, the holiest tie, as it pleases; but, for the vast majority of our race, marriage remains the foundation of human society and the family retains its position as the primordial sphere in sociology.
— Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism
To understand how that astounding moral blindness was possible, it is helpful to think of the workers of an armament plant who rejoice in the 'stay of execution' of their factory thanks to big new orders, while at the same time honestly bewailing the massacres visited upon each other by Ethiopians and Eritreans; or to think how it is possible that the 'fall in commodity prices' may be universally welcomed as good news while 'starvation of African children' is equally universally, and sincerely, lamented.
— Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust
In my early teens, [my grandfather] would sometimes stomp around his living room, where he used to shave towards mid-day with bowl, brush and open razor, deriding my ignorance and mocking the made-up discipline of sociology, which I at one stage claimed to be studying. 'What is sociology?' he roared derisively, twisting and rolling the silly word on his Hampshire tongue. I knew, alas, that he was quite right.
— Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith
We see the puppets dancing on their miniature stage, moving up and down as the strings pull them around, following the prescribed course of their various little parts. We learn to understand the logic of this theater and we find ourselves in its motions. We locate ourselves in society and thus recognize our own position as we hang from its subtle strings. For a moment we see ourselves as puppets indeed. But then we grasp a decisive difference between the puppet theater and our own drama. Unlike the puppets, we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first step toward freedom. And in this same act we find the conclusive justification of sociology as a humanistic discipline
— Peter Berger
They made a science out of people?" she said. "What a crazy science that must be."--"Mr. Z
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction
To recognize and comprehend what influences us and others is to function with purpose.
— Mark David Henderson, The Soul of Atlas
We measure the value of a civilized society by the number of Libraries it opens, not the number it closes down.
— Philip Pullman
In today's society conformity is more of a necessity than an option.
— Johan Coetzer
Humans are mortal. So are ideas. An idea needs propagation as much as a plant needs watering. Otherwise both will wither and die.
— B.R. Ambedkar
When modern sociologists talk of the necessity of accommodating one's self to the trend of the time, they forget that the trend of the time at its best consists entirely of people who will not accommodate themselves to anything. At its worst it consists of many millions of frightened creatures all accommodating themselves to a trend that is not there. And that is becoming more and more the situation...Every man speaks of public opinion, and means by public opinion, public opinion minus his opinion.
— G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
A great man is different from an eminent one in that he is ready to be the servant of the society.
— B.R. Ambedkar
With sociology one can do anything and call it work.
— Malcolm Bradbury, Eating People is Wrong
Political tyranny is nothing compared to the social tyranny and a reformer who defies society is a more courageous man than a politician who defies Government.
— B.R. Ambedkar
To begin an ethnographic project with a goal, with an object of research and a set of presumptions, is already to stymie the process of discovery; it blocks one's ability to learn something new that exceed the frameworks with which one enters.
— J. Jack Halberstam
Follow your inner moonlight
—  don't hide the madness.