Quotes About Society

By redirecting the focus of our lives from families and communities to institutions and networks, we, in effect, anoint a machine our king.

How many schoolteachers were aware of what they actually were a part of? Surely a number close to zero. In schoolteaching, as in hamburger-flipping, the paycheck is the decisive ingredient. No insult is meant, at bottom this is what realpolitik means. We all have to eat.

Any economy in which the most common tasks are the shuffling of paper, the punching of buttons, and the running of mouths isn't an order into which we should be pushing kids as if such jobs there were the avenue to a good life.

when competition is seen as essential to a good life, when winning against one's neighbors is put at the heart of society, business thrives. To win, others have to lose: the more losers, the better winning feels.

I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit to being schooled by strangers. Surely this is one of the most radical acts in human history, not the least of its breathtakingly radical assertions being that you must attend for your own good!

The whole weight of our economy and its job prospects is built on the outlook that people are empty.

the incredible inventiveness of the American people, a natural by-product of three factors: an open-source learning tradition; a heterogeneous, mixed-age society which didn't exclude the young from full participation; and a government presence without heavy-handedness.

When you flip hamburgers, sit at a computer all day, unpack and shelve merchandise from China year after year, you manage the tedium better if you have a shallow inner life, one you can escape through booze, drugs, sex, media, or other low level addictive behaviors. Easier to keep sane if your inner life is shallow. School, thought Harris the great American schoolman, should prepare ordinary men and women for lifetimes of alienation. Can you say he wasn't fully rational?

Wage-slaves, free in name only, are much cheaper to exploit, and work harder than slaves.

As redes operacionais tornam as pessoas solitárias.

Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

Em nossa sociedade secular, a escola se tornou o substituto da Igreja e, assim como na Igreja, é necessário que seus ensinamentos sejam aceitos com base na fé.

In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.

This was once a land where every sane person knew how to build a shelter, grow food, and entertain one another. Now we have been rendered permanent children. It's the architects of forced schooling who are responsible for that.

I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit to being schooled by strangers.

Thank haven, literally, for the moon," says the economist Susan George. "If it weren't there, supplying the gravity to slow down the earth's rotation, our days would last only about four hours, with constant gale-force winds. Nature doesn't work on the principle that faster is better". Industrial society, unfortunately, does work on that principle. As a consequence, it weighs heavily upon nature.

We've built a technology-focused society that is remarkable on means, but hazy about ends. It's no longer clear to which question all this stuff - tech - is an answer, or what value it adds to our lives.

There are more than 30 states, who either by statute or constitutional amendment, have defined marriage as being between a man and a woman.

Class is material consumed.

I spent my time drinking and staring at a television in the airport bar. More death and destruction. Crime. Pollution. All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things I didn´t need. The message was that people could only be passive victims or consumers.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore... and a healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it cost them.