Quotes About Society

We need to shed our unearthly and nonsocial and idealistic and romantic and uber-spiritual visions of kingdom and get back to what Jesus meant. By kingdom, Jesus means: God's Dream Society on earth, spreading out from the land of Israel to encompass the whole world.

Culture socializes us into what is considered proper behavior. For Christians, this is true in our churches as well as in society at large.

There is no kingdom that is not about a just society, as there is no kingdom without redemption under Christ. Yet I'm convinced that both of these approaches to kingdom fall substantially short of what kingdom meant to Jesus, so we need once again to be patient enough to ponder what the Bible teaches.

I hope you agree with me that the hope for the world is the local church, and that the heart of God's plan is found in creating a whole new society in a local church. If

Such practices were the way to "get along," the way to belong, the way to move up in society, and the way to be "in" for that culture and time. It required daily exercise in resistance not to go along.

As John Howard Yoder has said, "If in society we believe in the rights of employees, then the church should be the first employer to deal with workers fairly. If in the wider society we call for the overcoming of racism or sexism or materialism, then the church should be the place where that possibility first becomes real.

We're not freaks, Tally. We're normal. We may not be gorgeous, but at least we're not hyped-up Barbie dolls.

By 19oo, anybody could end up "a `Nobody,"' plodding down the "many paths leading to the Land of `Nowhere."' Failure had become what it remains in the new millennium: the most damning incarnation of the connection between achievement and personal identity. "I feel like a failure." The expression comes so naturally that we forget it is a figure of speech: the language of business applied to the soul.

When virtual reality gets cheaper than dating, society is doomed.

I calculated the total time that humans have waited for web pages to load. It cancels out all the productivity gains of the information age. Sometimes I think the web is a big plot to keep people like me away from normal society.

We're a planet of nearly six billion ninnies living in a civilization that was designed by a few thousand amazingly smart deviants.

Although utilitarianism has appeal, especially in a secular society, it also has shortcomings. The most common charge against utilitarianism is that it cannot protect the rights of minorities, and sometimes it can even justify obvious injustices when the greater good is served.

First, in terms of the observations of the cultural anthropologists who developed relativism, the degree of moral diversity is overstated and the high degree of moral consensus is understated.

Technology does have an impact on behavior, but culture comes first.

apparitions of stick people torment me, of skeletal phantoms walking in rain deathly dead stick arms upraised to the gods. i knew one such apparition once, cheated of life by a diseased society intent upon deprivation of body and soul, identity as we would have it. i am haunted at times by what could have been.

glazed eyes staring stupid looking at nothing and seeing everything born of and into ignorance what society dictates we consume cattle gathering around learning devices called television

no one sees, no one hears cries of despair not very dreamlike; a sense that we're all robots controlled by psychotic state of mind these days. Orwell wasn't far off, just a few years.

oh great, more Really Important People sitting down beside me with their damned mobile phones to screech in LOUD voices condos resale values, great new stock options, frequent flyer miles, who is fucking whom… actually, i think the rest of us are being screwed by these social leeches but god they look good don't they

we sweat through our doldrums somehow, sheer insane boredom; society can no longer focus and my poems keep drying up and blowing away.

I woke last night from a nightmare in which I saw a malignant society of pathological liars racked with insecurities, consumed by guilt, screaming for violence and I noticed I was sweating most profusely as I thanked the heavens above that it was only a dream before turning on the light to get a cigarette.

what society dictates we consume cattle gathering around learning devices called television mouths opening wider while addictive morsels of consumerism are violently jammed into us and we lose more bits and pieces of our collective identity daily

anyway i saw it coming from the rooftops. they said the second coming was heading our way tomorrow's world today force fed to us in a tobacco-colored spoon keep us entertained – content - oppressed. we prayed, friend, and they brought it down.

we sweat through our doldrums somehow, sheer insane boredom. society can no longer focus – my poems keep drying up and blowing away.

we lose more and more bits and pieces of our collective identity daily; the beaten generation indeed, self-inflicted wounds, and our elected officials keep watch over us intent on keeping us content and complacent, so we willingly sell ourselves out for more tax breaks and we continue to consume and destroy ourselves while watching each other with suspicion.