Quotes About Society

A consumer-driven, advertising-dominated culture militates daily against ongoing attachments. It is constantly inviting us to switch to a different brand, try something new, go for a better deal elsewhere. It should not come as a surprise that this begins to affect human relationships as well. A society saturated by market values would be one in which relationships were temporary, loyalties provisional and commitments easily discarded.

A decent society will be one in which enemies do not allow their rancour or animosity to prevent them from coming to one another's assistance when they need help.

Without law, society becomes chaos. But without narrative, law itself loses contact with the realities of human life. It becomes impersonal and at times inhuman.

Moses' words still challenge us today. God has given us freedom; it is for us to use it to create a just, generous, gracious society. God does not do it for us but He teaches us how it is done.

One way or another, the alphabet created a possibility that never existed before, namely of a society of mass, even universal, literacy. With only twenty-two symbols, it could be taught, in a relatively short time, to everyone. We see evidence of this at many places in Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah says "All your children shall be taught of the Lord and great shall be the peace of your children" (Isaiah 54:13), implying universal education.

Holiness belongs to all of us when we turn our lives into the service of God, and society into a home for the Divine Presence.

Only in a just society can justice flourish. Only in a free society can individual liberty be sustained.

The people he is addressing are the children of those he led out of Egypt. They are more used to freedom than their parents, who were slaves. But they have not yet entered the land, or created a society, or been forced to work for a living. For forty years they have had their needs supplied by God. So he speaks to them in very simple terms. Follow God and be blessed, or follow your own inclinations and be cursed. This is the way one might speak to a child. As

That is why the market and the state, the fields of economics and politics are arenas of competition, while morality is the arena of cooperation. A society with only competition and very limited cooperation will be abrasive and ruthless, with glittering prizes for the winners and no consolation for the losers.

I find it exceptionally moving that the Bible should cast in these heroic roles two figures at the extreme margins of Israelite society: women, childless widows, outsiders. Tamar and Ruth, powerless except for their moral courage, wrote their names into Jewish history as role models who gave birth to royalty – to remind us, in case we ever forget, that true royalty lies in love and faithfulness, and that greatness often exists where we expect it least.

Power destroys the powerless and powerful alike, oppressing the one while corrupting the other. If we are to build a society with a human face, we must always choose the way of Exodus, with its message of hope and human dignity.

Religion has lost many of the functions it once had. To explain the world, we have science. To control it, we have technology. To negotiate power, we have democratic politics. To achieve prosperity, we have a market economy. If we are ill, we go to a doctor, not a priest. If we feel guilty, we can go to a psychotherapist; we have no need of a confessor.

The Torah, in other words, offers a striking way out of the dilemmas of multiculturalism. It suggests that the citizens of a nation see themselves as co-creators of society seen as the home we build together.

Civility is dying, and when it dies, civilisation itself is in danger.

The consumer society, directed at making us happy, achieves the opposite. It encourages us to spend money we do not have, to buy things we do not need, for the sake of a happiness that will not last.

Every individual would count. Therefore every individual had to feel part of the whole, respected and given the means of a dignified life. Injustice, gross inequality, or a failure of concern for the weak and marginal would endanger society at its very roots. There was no margin for error or discontent. Without indomitable courage based on the knowledge that God was with them, the people would fall prey to larger powers.

The degree of unity aspired to in the total society is incompatible with human freedom and the right to disagree. Politics should be the mediation, not the suppression, of conflict.

Yet Darwin knew that altruism was admired in every human society of which he was aware. Even animals take risks for the sake of the group. The one that emits a cry to warn of the presence of a predator helps the group escape while making its own detection more likely. In the language of today: how could selfish genes come together and produce selfless people?

Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, craving and identity.

There's never been a culture that wasn't obsessed with food. The sort of sad thing is that our obsession is no longer with food, but with the price of food.

It appears that no one is so unfortunate that he or she is exempt from spending cuts, while at the same time no one is so fortunate as to be ineligible for a tax cut

It is a wicked world and they have taught you very little.

There was all the world and his wife.

Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.