In the age of social media and dating apps, so many people are able to hide behind their Instagram page or their Raya page or Facebook.
The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.
We have preachers and savants who dilate endlessly on the sanctity of family and childhood but who tolerate a system in which a casual observer can correlate a child's social origin with its physical well-being.
What you create when you're teaching fiction writing is a kind of literary salon, not a social club or a mutual admiration society, not a debating society, not a repair shop, not a fight club or a soap box. It's a place to have a conversation about a story.
To understand how people organize social systems, we have to discover the principles that we create to make some societies intelligible.
Currently, 94 out of 100 of us pay the Social Security tax all year round.
To be rapeable, a position that is social, not biological, defines what a woman is.
Indeed, the sort of crimes and even the amount of delinquency that fill the prophets of Israel with dismay do not go beyond that which we regard as normal, as typical ingredients of social dynamics. To us a single act of injustice--cheating in business, exploitation of the poor--is slight; to the prophets, a disaster. To us injustice is injurious to the welfare of the people; to the prophets it is a deathblow to existence: to us, an episode; to them, a catastrophe, a threat to the world.
[The US] budget is dominated by the retirement programs, Social Security and Medicare - loosely speaking, the post-cold-war federal government is a big pension fund that also happens to have an army.
Social networks are these intricate things of beauty, and they're so elaborate and so complex and so ubiquitous that one has to ask what purpose they serve.
There is a species of moral, legal, and social modernism which we condemn, no less decidedly than we condemn theological modernism.
As the social self can only be developed by contact with society, so the spiritual self can only be developed by contact with the spiritual world.
Dogs are indeed the most social, affectionate, and amiable animals of the whole brute creation.
There is a universal respect and even admiration for those who are humble and simple by nature, and who have absolute confidence in all human beings irrespective of their social status.
America is a remarkable place in that social attitudes change almost imperceptibly, and then you wake up the next day and they've changed. But they've been changing all the time.
A little bit of good can turn into a whole lot of good when fueled by the commitment of a social entrepreneur.
I'm not a party animal. I'm a chill homebody. I like to watch movies and go out to eat. That's my idea of a good time. I'm definitely able to be social.
The merging of the military-industrial complex, surveillance state and unbridled corporate power points to the need for strategies that address what is specific about the current warfare and surveillance state and the neoliberal project and how different interests, modes of power, social relations, public pedagogies and economic configurations come together to shape its politics.
I think a very important aspect of language has to do with the establishment of social relations and interactions. Often, this is described as communication. But that is very misleading, I think.
Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.