Quotes About Society

It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they're not like the wrong Americans, who are not really Americans.

And yet, something has changed for the better. We have rediscovered that capitalism is not the answer, but the question.

If a single misleading sentence is to sum up the relations of artist and society in this era, we might say that the French Revolution inspired him by its example, the Industrial Revolution by its horror, and the bourgeois society, which emerged from both, transformed his very existence and modes of creation.

On the whole, however, it was accepted that money not only talked, but governed. All the industrialist had to get to be accepted among the governors of society was enough money.

It is an irony of history that the first and greatest success of scientists in persuading governments of the indispensability of modern scientific theory to society was in the war against fascism. It is an even greater and more tragic irony that it was anti-fascist scientists who convinced the American government of the feasibility and necessity of manufacturing nuclear arms, which were then constructed by an international team of largely anti-fascist scientists.

Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills,responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.

Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.

One of the marks of a truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action - the ability to pass directly from thought to action.

However much we talk of the inexorable laws governing the life of individuals and of societies, we remain at the bottom convinced that in human affairs everything in more or less fortuitous. We do not even believe in the inevitability of our own death. Hence the difficulty of deciphering the present, of detecting the seeds of things to come as they germinate before our eyes. We are not attuned to seeing the inevitable.

Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunites for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

Saturdays and Sundays, America in the year 2009 does not in some ways differ significantly from the country that existed almost 50 years ago. This is truly sad.

Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know.

Indeed, it may be suggested that 'traditions' and pragmatic conventions or routines are inversely related.

If a historian does not understand the bounds of the social space within which the events he is studying occurred, all he is doing is to paint a picture of his own society in fancy dress.

Schumpeter may well have seen singles as rational. but in a survey of Americans conducted in 1957, more than half the respondents said that unmarried people were "sick", "immoral", or "neurotic," while about a third viewed them "neutrally".

Robust social infrastructure doesn't just protect our democracy; it contributes to economic growth.

There won't be any revolution in America…The people are all too clean. They spend all their time changing shirts and washing themselves. You can't feel fierce and revolutionary in a bathroom.

In our country, there is so much that's wrong with the way we deliver care to the aging, the very young, and the infirm. But you can't beat something with nothing. It is not enough to decry what's broken. You have to describe the alternative and make it possible for people to believe in it. To care.

Alexis de Tocqueville warned that as the economy and government of America got bigger, citizens could become smaller: less practiced in the forms of everyday power, more dependent on vast distant social machines, more isolated and atomized—and therefore more susceptible to despotism.

What Paul is saying is that the gospel strengthens us through the Spirit to see things in our society that others do not. We are called, as the people of God, to wake up. To see what others don't and call it out. The church in America is not awake to the reality of what is happening in communities across this nation, and we are missing out on our calling to shine the light into these places of darkness for Christ's glory.

Most people, if you live in a big city, you see some form of schizophrenia every day, and it's always in the form of someone homeless. 'Look at that guy - he's crazy. He looks dangerous.' Well, he's on the streets because of mental illness. He probably had a job and a home.

Mental illness is the last frontier. The gay thing is part of everyday life now on a show like 'Modern Family ' but mental illness is still full of stigma. Maybe it is time for that to change.

Some problems cannot be cured through legislation. But they must be attended to nonetheless. And here's the problem: The less the culture attends to these things, the more the government will attend to them and the less freedom there will be.