#society

If blues culture had developed under the conditions of oppressive, forced labor, hip-hop culture would arise from the conditions of no work ↗

— Jeff Chain in "Can't Stop Won't Stop A History of the Hip-Hop Generation "

#music #society-thinking #music

Hip Hop Generation “captures the collective hopes and nightmares, ambitions and failures of those who would otherwise be described as “post-this” or “post-that.” ↗

— Jeff Chain in "Can't Stop Won't Stop A History of the Hip-Hop Generation "

#hip-hop #music #society #society-thinking #music

Poets sing our human music for us. ↗

— Carol Ann Duffy

#poet-laureate #poetry #poets #song #music

All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place. ↗

— Edward W. Said

#human-society #interpretation #knowledge #nature

Participating in Society in not a thing one can do naturally; one has to rehearse for it. ↗

— Michel Faber

#society #nature

Men who read it [beauty pornography] don't do so because they want women who look like that. The attraction of what they are holding is that it is not a woman, but a two-dimensional woman-shaped blank. The appeal of the material is not the fantasy that the model will come to life; it is precisely that she will not, ever. Her coming to life would ruin the vision. It is not about life. Ideal beauty is ideal because it does not exist; The action lies in the gap between desire and gratification. Women are not perfect beauties without distance. That space, in a consumer culture, is a lucrative one. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage, its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion. ↗

— Naomi Wolf

#beauty #body-image #consumer #cosmetic-surgery #cosmetics

So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine destiny; so long as the three great problems of the century—the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light—are unsolved; so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world;—in other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use. HAUTEVILLE HOUSE, 1862. [Translation by Isabel F. Hapgood] ↗

— Victor Hugo

#les-misérables #political #poverty #society #victor-hugo

What separates or unites people is not their language, their laws, their customs, their principles, but the way they hold their knife and fork. ↗

— Irène Némirovsky

#human-nature #society #nature

Nadie ha visto nunca a un perro hacer un intercambio justo y deliberado de un hueso por otro con otro perro. Nadie ha visto a un animal que, con gestos y sonidos naturales, indique a otro: esto es mío y esto es tuyo; estoy dispuesto a darte esto a cambio de eso ↗

— Adam Smith

#nature

How was she created? I'm not sure if you realize this, but it was in God's image. How can anybody dare to speak ill of something which bears such a noble imprint? ↗

— Christine de Pizan

#god #medieval #misogyny #nature #society