#soc

She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness. ↗

— Ruth Ozeki

#humanity #new-york-city #society #architecture

Again, we find that the space standards of twenty-first century luxury are below the required minimum for dockworkers in 1962. ↗

— Owen Hatherley

#housing #social #architecture

The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution! ↗

— Albert Einstein

#democracy #freedom #history #hope #individualism

Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols ... Art tells gorgeous lies that come true. ↗

— Hakim Bey

#art #radical-theory #social-change #art

Macey couldn't decide whether to be intrigued that Hale was walking around with a state-of-the-art covert communications device or be jealous because she'd been caught without one of her own. ↗

— Ally Carter

#heist-society #art

The suicide passes a judgment. Society does not care to examine the judgment, but in defense of itself as is, condemns the suicide. ↗

— Robert E. Neale

#society #suicide #art

It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#self-belief #society #attitude

Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It's terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal. I can't see how to avoid it, without being very rich or very unpopular, & it does worry me, for time is slipping by , and nothing is done. It isn't as if anything was gained by this social frivolity, It isn't: it's just a waste. ↗

— Philip Larkin

#energy #socialising #solitude #art

The intersection of pork and man was circumscribed with vagueness. Until now sausage was a mysterious world: the fenced-in landscapes of strange, exotic muds, the cloak-and-dagger butchers that veiled their conversations in Old French, the silencing of whole towns upon a nocturnal report of a flying swarm of oinks, the secret herbs and spices involved in the intestinal displacement before my screen. My own sacred art suddenly stirred a sense of understanding in me as to why pig farmers were so reluctant to explain their missing bicuspids to outsiders: sausage could not have effects. ↗

— Benson Bruno

#mystery #sausage #secret-society #art

Millions of couples out there practiced the art of sadomasochism every day, without even realizing it. They went to work, came back, complained about everything, insulted their wife or were insulted by her, felt wretched, but were, nonetheless, tightly bound to their own unhappiness, not realizing that all it would take was a single gesture, a final goodbye, to free them from that oppression. ↗

— Paulo Coelho

#limits #oppression #sadomasochism #sex #sexuality