Quotes About Society

Now we have a humanist's despair before the News,

Little attention was paid, because the German people, no matter how hungry, remained obedient.

T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.

Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.

Women were considered the snare of the Devil, while at the same time the cult of the Virgin made one woman the central object of love and adoration.

Any person who considers himself, and intends to remain, a member of Western society inherits the Western past from Athens and Jerusalem to Runnymede and Valley Forge, as well as to Watts and Chicago of August 1968. He may ignore it or deny it, but that does not alter the fact. The past sits back and smiles and knows it owns him anyway.

THE GENESIS OF THIS BOOK was a desire to find out what were the effects on society of the most lethal disaster of recorded history—that is to say, of the Black Death of 1348–50, which killed an estimated one third of the population living between India and Iceland.

Malignant phenomena do not come out of a golden age.

No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society.

Not a passing phenomenon nor an external force, the companies had become a way of life, a part of society itself, used and joined by its rulers even as they struggled to throw them off. They ate at society from within like Erysichthon, the "tearer up of earth," who, having destroyed the trees in the sacred grove of Demeter, was cursed by the goddess with an insatiable appetite and finally devoured himself attempting to satisfy his hunger. Discipline

Only the Church offered an organizing principle, which was the reason for its success, for society cannot bear anarchy.

Doctors were admired, lawyers universally hated and mistrusted.

Henry Adams, like most people, saw society in his own image.

Human behavior is timeless.

the ruling class in a just society should be men apprenticed to the art of ruling, drawn from the rational and wise.

England's traditional tolerance was outraged at last.

The castle's predecessor, the Roman villa, had been unfortified, depending on Roman law and the Roman legions for its ramparts. After the Empire's collapse, the medieval society that emerged was a set of disjointed and clashing parts subject to no central or effective secular authority.

Proper society did not think about MAKING money, only about spending it.

Why, since folly or perversity is expected of individuals, should we expect anything else from government?

Connection" was the cement of the governing class.

Their credo was the exact opposite of the idea prevailing in the more newly minted United States, that there was a peculiar extra virtue in being lowly born, that only the self-made carried the badge of ability and that men of easy circumstances were more likely than not to be stupid or wicked, if not both.

Society's revenge matched its fright.

Bourgeois might be forbidden to own a carriage or wear ermine, and peasants to wear any color but black or brown. Florence allowed doctors and magistrates to share the nobles' privilege of ermine, but ruled out for merchants' wives multicolored, striped, and checked gowns,

Expenditure of money by commoners pained the nobles not least because they saw it benefiting the merchant class rather than themselves.