A Quote by Tana French

Our entire society is based on discontent. People wanting more and more and more. Being constantly dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their décor, their clothes, everything – taking it for granted that that’s the whole point of life. Never to be satisfied. If you are perfectly happy with what you got, especially if what you got isn’t even all the spectacular then you’re dangerous. You’re breaking all the rules. You’re undermining the sacred economy. You’re challenging every assumption that society is built on.
Society is based on discontent: people wanting more and more and more, being continually dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their decor, their clothes, everything.
The classics of Marxism talked of communism as a society to which a modern society should aspire, a society truly fair, where the relations of monetary exchange were not the priority but one wher the people's needs could be satisfied, and where people would not be worth more according to how much monetary wealth they acquired. Instead their value would be based on their contribution to society as a whole. It would be a society without class that would accept people based on their capabilities and their potential to contribute to that society.
Any fool can be happy. What I'm interested in is satisfaction. There's got to be more to life than just being happy. You've got to be fulfilled. You've got to be satisfied; philosophically satisfied is what I mean.
Some people say we have this inequality because some people have been contributing much more to our society, and so it's fair that they get more. But then you look at the people who are at the top, and you realize they're not the people who have transformed our economy, our society.
When you are discontent, you always want more, more, more. Your desire can never be satisfied. But when you practice contentment, you can say to yourself, 'Oh yes - I already have everything that I really need.'
I find more and more, as time goes on, these people I meet, they are starting to become these people I look up to more and more. Like Julianne Moore, also, on Crazy Stupid Love: kids, husband, priorities straight. Or Woody Harrelson's like that. Those are the people I really admire, and that's success to me: being able to balance that life and not buy into it. And do the work that you want to do and makes you happy, because you're lucky enough to do it. But if I never got a role again, I've got this incredible life.
The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy. They are more: they are the best basis of public liberty, and the strongest bulwark of public safety. It follows, that the greater the proportion of this class to the whole society, the more free, the more independent, and the more happy must be the society itself.
Western society is a society of ever richer, more varied, more productive, more self-defined, and more satisfying lives; it is a society of boundless private charity; it is a society that broke, on behalf of merit, the seemingly eternal chains of station by birth.
The only chance of satisfaction we can imagine is getting more of what we have now. But what we have now makes everybody dissatisfied. So what will more of it do -- make us more satisfied, or more dissatisfied?
Our families and our homes are the center of American life, Everything we do is to make those homes-and the lives in them-more beautiful, more comfortable, more functional and more full of life and light and joy for those we love.
Our economy is based upon people wanting more; their happiness on wanting less.
I thought what if death is more like thinking, well, war is like the boss at your shoulder, constantly wanting more, wanting more, wanting more, and then that gave me the idea that Death is weary, he's fatigued, and he's haunted by what he sees humans do to each other because he's on hand for all of our great miseries.
Neoliberalism is going to fail by being replaced. The system is entirely broken. Whenever you have a system that equates a market economy with a market society and claims that capitalism is democracy, you've not only got a massive lie being imposed on the people, but you've got the foundation for a form of authoritarianism and a much more intensive form of class warfare.
Everything in life and business, you only earn more if you become more valuable. Because if you can do more for people than anybody else does, you can prosper. But you can't do that unless you're constantly educating yourself with the cutting edge. My whole life, even when I had no money, I would invest in education.
It's not that everything needs to have substance, but when nothing does then you know we're living in a bankrupt society, an artistically bankrupt society, and that's not okay. I think there's room for forms of entertainment that are very light and frivolous and fun, but when those forms of entertainment, forms of "art" if you will, become presented as something more than that, and are believed to be something more than that, then we've got a lot of problems.
I find the whole concept of being 'SEXY' embarrassing and confusing. If I do an interview with photographs people desperately want to change me- dye my hair blonder, pluck my eyebrows. Then there's the choice of clothes. I know everyone wants a picture of me in a mini skirt, BUT THATS NOT ME. I feel uncomfortable. I'd never go out in a mini skirt. Personally, I don't actually think it's even that sexy. Whats sexy about saying, 'I'm here with my boobs out and a short skirt, have a look at everything I've got?' My idea of sexy is that less is more. The LESS you reveal the MORE people can wonder.
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