Social Critique Quotes & Sayings

I don't think that early hip hop stood out to be a social critique. A lot of fans of mine think that hip hop's ultimate responsibility is to critique social structures. — Talib Kweli

We have everywhere an absence of memory. Architects sometimes talk of building with context and continuity in mind, religious leaders call it tradition, social workers say it's a sense of community, but it is memory we have banished from our cities. We have speed and power, but no place. Travel, but no destination. Convenience, but no ease. — Howard Mansfield

When they first emerged in their present shape around the turn of the 18th century, the so-called humane disciplines had a crucial social role. It was to foster and protect the kind of values for which a philistine social order had precious little time. The modern humanities and industrial capitalism were more or less twinned at birth. To preserve a set of values and ideas under siege, you needed among other things institutions known as universities set somewhat apart from everyday social life. This remoteness meant that humane study could be lamentably ineffectual. But it also allowed the humanities to launch a critique of conventional wisdom. — Terry Eagleton

Of course, there are also faculty who are discouraged from speaking critically about social issues because of the increasing assumption in American society that any form of critique which calls official power into question is somehow un-American. This absurd attempt to define any critique of official power as unpatriotic has a chilling effect on faculty, especially when such views and the names of the people to whom they are ascribed are widely disseminated in right-wing and dominant media outlets. — Henry Giroux

A social critic is someone whose work revolves around where and how our successes are failing us. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

But we need more than a broader understanding of what is a good society or a moral and political critique of the existing market fundamentalism engulfing American society, we also need to create new forms of solidarity, new and broad based social movements that move beyond the isolated and fractured politics of the current historical moment. — Henry Giroux

The conservative social critique always boils down to the same simple message: liberalism - meaning everything from racy TV to deconstructionists in the Yale French Department - is an affectation of the loathsome rich, as bizarre as their taste for Corgi dogs and extra-virgin olive oil. — Thomas Frank

The behavioral programme of the post-social society during the post-capitalism interregnum is governed by a neoliberal ethos of competetive self-improvement, of untiring cultivation of one's marketable human capital, enthusiastic dedication to work, and cheerfully optimistic, playful acceptance of the risks inherent in a world that has outgrown government. That this programme is dutifully implemented is essential, as the reproduction of the post-capitalist society lite hangs on the thin thread of an accommodating systematic architecture. Structuralist critique of false institutions may therefore have to be complemented by a renewed culturalist critique of false consciousness. — Wolfgang Streeck

Niebuhr [Oden's Doctoral adviser at Yale and leading 20th century Christian theological ethicist] wanted all of his graduate students to have some serious interdisciplinary competence beyond theology, so I chose to be responsible for the area of psychology of religion. I hoped to correlate aspects of contemporary psychotherapies with a philosophy of universal history. The psychology that prevailed in my college years was predominately Freudian psychoanalysis, but my clinical beginning point in the late 1950's had turned to Rogerian client-centered therapy. The psychology that prevailed in my Yale years was predominantly the empirical social psychologists like Kurt Lewin and Musafer Sherif. I gradually assimilated those views in order to work on a critique of therapies and assess them all in relation to my major interest in the meaning of history. — Thomas C. Oden

We must experiment, fail, and try again, but beginning with a critique of legal reform and a commitment to center the most vulnerable moves us away from some of the most common, obvious pitfalls of neoliberal social movement strategies. — Dean Spade

I haven't the stature to critique one of our literature's great novels, Tobias; and I'm not one of those who believe The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn needs critiquing for literary or social reasons. — Norman Lock

It is a truly radical experience for a clergyperson to admit that their beliefs, and the faith that they have long articulated, have lost their meaning. It is more than the dark night of the soul; it is the utter abandonment of a worldview that, after thorough study, reflection, and lived experience, fails to withstand critique both intellectually and emotionally. It is a revelation that uncomfortably exposes the internal architecture of self-delusion and the social and religious constructs that buttress these imaginative ideologies. It is a journey that all members of the Clergy Project have taken, myself included. — Catherine Dunphy

All churches must understand, love, and identify with their local community and social setting, and yet at the same time be able and willing to critique and challenge it. — Timothy Keller

In his early text, somewhat cumbersomely titled 'Towards a Critique of Hegel's PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT,' the young Karl Marx famously noted that religion - the Christian faith, he meant primarily - is 'the opiate of the people.' It's a drug, and it's a 'downer' or 'depressant' insulating people from the pain of oppressive social realities and consoling them with a dream world of heavenly bliss. Alternatively, religion can function as an 'upper,' a 'stimulant' energizing people for the tasks at hand - a function of religion Marx failed to grasp. — Miroslav Volf

Of course, Kafka doesn't see himself as a sort of party. He doesn't even pretend to be revolutionary, whatever his socialist sympathies may be. He knows that all the lines link him to a literary machine of expression for which he is simultaneously the gears, the mechanic, the operator, and the victim. So how will he proceed in this bachelor machine that doesn't make use of, and can't make use of, social critique? How will he make a revolution?
He will act on the German language such as it is in Czechoslovakia. Since it is a deterritorialized language in many ways, he will push the deterritorialization farther, not through intensities, reversals and thickenings of the language but through a sobriety that makes language take flight on a straight line, anticipates or produces its segmentations. Expression must sweep up content; the same process must happen to form ... It is not a politics of pessimism, nor a literary caricature or a form of science fiction. — Gilles Deleuze

The critique of social inequality, which is very much a part of my story, came about naturally from my recollection of Huck and Tom and the controversy surrounding [Mark] Twain's use of them and from my own passionate interest in civil rights, animal rights, and the right of Earth to survive humankind's reprehensible neglect of its stewardship. — Norman Lock

Because the utopian's worldview was framed around moving toward this perfected future, it helped stimulate the private exertions that add up to social progress. Progress is work. People need to build things and sacrifice and have a harder life for things to get better. On its own, I don't think even the most brilliant critique stimulates that kind of effort as well as an appealing vision of the future. — Christine Jennings

Hwang Jung-eun is one of the brightest stars of the new South Korean generation - she's Han Kang's favourite, and the novel we're publishing scooped the prestigious Bookseller's Award, for critically-acclaimed fiction that also has a wide popular appeal. She stands out for her focus on social minorities - her protagonists are slum inhabitants, trans women, orphans - and for the way she melds this hard-edged social critique with obliquely fantastical elements and offbeat dialogue. — Deborah Smith

Where these reduced (operational - E.W.) concepts govern the analysis of the human reality, individual or social, mental or material, they arrive at a false concreteness - a concreteness isolated from the conditions which constitute its reality. In this context, the operational treatment of the concept assumes a political function. The individual and his behavior are analyzed in a therapeutic sense - adjustment to his society. Thought and expression, theory and practice are to be brought in line with the facts of his existence without leaving room for the conceptual critique of these facts. — Herbert Marcuse

We live in a time that demands a discourse of both critique and possibility, one that recognizes that without an informed citizenry, collective struggle, and viable social movements, democracy will slip out of our reach and we will arrive at a new stage of history marked by the birth of an authoritarianism that not only disdains all vestiges of democracy but is more than willing to relegate it to a distant memory. — Henry A. Giroux

Online media is the future, and younger feminists are already instrumental in using social media and multi-media platforms on the web to document street harassment, archive and critique the media, and create art. — Jennifer Baumgardner

I think cultural criticism and long-form critique have their place and their purpose. But for a creator, it's so easy for the discussion surrounding a phenomenon to usurp the phenomenon itself. It's worse, of course, with comment sections on websites and blogs, particularly anonymous comments, or the incessant chatter and opinions on social media. Everyone gets to write a headline, and when you or the thing you do is being talked about, you get to feel like a headline - an addicting feeling for sure, but also a pernicious one. The discourse builds its own body, and it's usually a monster. — Carrie Brownstein

Happiness, after all, is generally measured as reported satisfaction with one's life - a state of mind perhaps more accessible to those who are affluent, who conform to social norms, who suppress judgment in the service of faith, and who are not overly bothered by societal injustice...The real conservatism of positive psychology lies in its attachment to the status quo, with all its inequalities and abuses of power. Positive psychologists' tests of happiness and well-being, for example, rest heavily on measures of personal contentment with things as they are. — Barbara Ehrenreich

The invocation of social necessity should alert us. It contains the seeds for Marx's critique of political economy as well as for his dissection of capitalism . — David Harvey

The poster art over the years, art with social critique in it, has always been trying to make that point - that we are larger than they are. — Eric Drooker

being critical is more than just doing critique, as social change that leads to equity also requires informing policy and practice through advocacy and activism — Jill Blackmore

Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test we can apply. We must forget the whole paraphernalia of social description, demonstration, expostulation, approbation, condemnation. We have to say to ourselves, How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad? — William Golding

Normative statements about "women's roles" and girls' and women's behaviour being "appropriately feminine" were replaced with more neutral statements about what women and girl versus boys and men do and think and say they want. In this way, conventionally gendered behaviour was taken out of the context of prescription and presented as simple description. This had the possibly unanticipated consequence, though, of taking these behaviours out of the context of the social world. The descriptive approach significantly deemphasised the role of norms, social structures, and modelling in developing gendered traits. Instead, disembodied as "naked facts" of sex differences, they began to look more and more like simple reflections of male and female behaviour. — Rebecca M. Jordan-Young

Belloc led the charge in his critique of this misguided sense of superiority and myopic view of progress. But it was he alone among historians, social commentators, and counter-cultural voices who predicted that Islam - or as he called it, "Mohammedanism" - would rise again and, as it had in the past, harness the technology of the West as a weapon to turn back on the West and crush it by degrees. After September 11, 2001, no one is surprised to learn that Islam is turning the West's superiority back on itself; what is surprising is that a lone historian and essayist saw this coming in the 1930s. That he captivates and places the reader in the middle of the action is an added bonus to the prophetic vision of what embroils our age. — Hilaire Belloc

The Marxist critique is only a critique of capital, a critique coming from the heart of the middle and petit bourgeois classes, for which Marxism has served for a century as a latent ideology ... The Marxist seeks a good use of economy. Marxism is therefore only a limited petit bourgeois critique, one more step in the banalization of life toward the "good use" of the social! — Jean Baudrillard

the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances. But a critique that grasps the spectacle's essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life - a negation that has taken on a visible form. — Guy Debord

My take on the various components of Maoist politics varies, depending on the philosophical, theoretical, strategic, or methodological element in question. In general, I consider Maoism to be an internal critique of Stalinism that fails to break with Stalinism. Over many years, Mao developed a critical understanding of Soviet society, and of the negative symptoms it displayed. But at the same time, he failed to locate the cause of these symptoms in the capitalist social relations of the USSR and so retained many shared assumptions with the Stalinist model in his own thinking. — Elliott Liu