Quotes About Society

You all sound like you think sixty-five is old because the world tells you sixty-five is old," she admonished. "As a few years go by, you'll realize sixty-five is pretty young.

Rapid change makes people very unhappy." The result is what she calls the paradox of frustrated achievers and happy peasants.

In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint.

Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent.

Much can and must be done by governments, but they cannot of themselves change lives.

True freedom requires the rule of law and justice, and a judicial system in which the rights of some are not secured by the denial of rights to others.

We from every religion feel comfortable in Britain because there is a host. The Church of England is a good host, it has been a major force in shaping England into such a tolerant society.

To defend a country you need an army, but to defend a civilization you need education.

We do not always appreciate the role the Queen has played in one of the most significant changes in the past 60 years: the transformation of Britain into a multi-ethnic, multi-faith society. No one does interfaith better than the Royal family, and it starts with the Queen herself.

In thinking about religion and society in the 21st century, we should broaden the conversation about faith from doctrinal debates to the larger question of how it might inspire us to strengthen the bonds of belonging that redeem us from our solitude, helping us to construct together a gracious and generous social order.

Whole communities are growing up without fathers or male role models. Bringing up a family in the best of circumstances is not easy. To try to do it by placing the entire burden on women - 91% of single-parent families in Britain are headed by the mother, according to census data - is practically absurd and morally indefensible.

Britain, relative to the U.S., is a highly secular society. Philanthropy alone cannot fill the gap left by government cutbacks. And the sources of altruism go deep into our evolutionary past.

Stabilizing the euro is one thing, healing the culture that surrounds it is another. A world in which material values are everything and spiritual values nothing is neither a stable state nor a good society. The time has come for us to recover the Judeo-Christian ethic of human dignity in the image of God.

Recall that even the liberal-minded John Locke in the seventeenth century argued against granting civil rights to atheists: 'Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold on an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.'6 This is not to endorse these sentiments, merely to note that they exist.

It was a great sage of Islam, ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), who saw that as a society becomes affluent it becomes more individualistic. It loses what he called its asabiyah, its social cohesion. It then becomes prey to the 'desert dwellers', those who shun the luxuries of the city and are prepared for self-sacrifice in war.

The crucial differentiation between humans and all other animals is that we make meanings, and the name we give to collective systems of meanings is culture.

the Internet has a disinhibition effect: you can be ruder to someone electronically than you would be in a face-to-face encounter, since the exchange has been depersonalised. Read any Comments section on the Web, and you will see what this means: the replacement of reason by anger, and argument by vilification. Civility is dying, and when it dies, civilisation itself is in danger.

The greatest challenge of any society is how to contain the universal, inevitable phenomenon of envy, the desire to have what belongs to someone else. Envy lies at the heart of violence.

One of the most profound contributions Torah made to the civilisation of the West is this: that the destiny of nations lies not in the externalities of wealth or power, fate or circumstance, but in moral responsibility: the responsibility for creating and sustaining a society that honours the image of God within each of its citizens, rich and poor, powerful or powerless alike.

There are failings to which intensely religious people are sometimes prone, namely, indifference to the injustices of society, a willingness to overlook corruption within their own ranks, and a tendency to believe that attachment to God relieves one of the duty to be upright, civil, and gracious in one's dealings with human beings.

A free society is a moral achievement. That is the central insight of the Torah. It depends on the existence of a shared moral code, a code we are taught by our parents, a code we internalise in the course of growing up, a code for whose maintenance we are collectively responsible. Today, throughout much of the West, morality has been largely outsourced to governments and regulatory bodies. The

As historian Will Durant wrote: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."1

Parashat Behar sets out a revolutionary template for a society of justice, freedom, and human dignity. At its core is the idea of the Jubilee, whose words ("Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof") are engraved on one of the great symbols of freedom, the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.

Narrative teaches us the complexity of the moral life and the light-and-shade to be found in any human personality. Without this, self-righteousness can destroy the very perceptions and nuances, the tolerance and generosity of spirit on which society depends.