Quotes About Society

She firmly believes feminism to be anti-woman because it pressures women to become more like men. Everyone

Whether the church in America is really "free," I doubt.

Wilberforce understood the idea that the law itself is a "teacher" and will lead people toward what it prescribes and away from what it prohibits. But he knew that a debased culture cannot be stemmed through legislation alone. Indeed, if one wishes to make certain laws, one must change the culture first, else those laws will never be passed. In

When eighteenth-century British society had retreated from the historical Christianity it had earlier embraced, the Christian character of the nation—which had given Britain, among other things, a proud tradition of almshouses to help the poor, dating all the way back to the tenth century—had all but disappeared.

Like the proverbial dead fish that rots first from the head, British society began to decay from the top; so our description of the situation must begin with the aristocracy.

To help them was tantamount to shaking one's fist at God. Raising their sights from the vulgar spectacle of things like public hangings could rock the boat of civil society and mustn't be attempted.

Don Quixote was for Bonhoeffer an important picture of the human condition.

They discovered that each of them had relied on the others for proper letters of introduction. In a day when society observed infinitely stricter rules than today, a lack of proper letters of introduction could be disastrous, as theirs now was.

One attended one's church, and one stood and one kneeled and one sat at the proper times and did what was required of one, but to scratch beneath this highly lacquered surface was to venture well beyond the pale in that society and invite stares and whispers and certain banishment.

Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor without faith. —Alexis de Tocqueville W

As nations become corrupt and vicious," he says, "they have more need of masters." The root of the word "vicious" is "vice"—the word simply means "full of vice." So Franklin, without feeling the need to explain himself much, is bluntly saying that "freedom requires virtue." And that less virtue inevitably begets less freedom. In

respect for truth and for other human beings of different opinions formed the foundation of a civil society in which one might disagree graciously and might reason together civilly and productively.

There hardly ever seem to be "encounters" in this great country, in which the one can always avoid the other. But where there is no encounter, where liberty is the only unifying factor, one naturally knows nothing of the community which is created through encounter. The whole life together is completely different as a result. Community in our sense, whether cultural or ecclesiastical, cannot develop there. Is

He understood that the law could not force people to do what was right. In fact, the laws of America didn't try to do this. They provided freedom, and what the citizens did with that freedom was something else altogether. "Thus," Tocqueville writes, "while the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit, what is rash or unjust." He

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles. According

What he had to say was really rather elementary: basic Christianity such as was professed in the Bible and in the doctrines of the Church of England, and to which almost everyone claimed to subscribe, was practically nonexistent in British society.

Tocqueville put it as bluntly as Franklin or Adams had, writing: "Liberty cannot be established without morality.

Montesquieu, who wrote that "bad examples can be worse than crimes." He continued: "More states have perished because of a violation of their mores than because of a violation of their Laws." What

No sooner is a playhouse opened in any part of the Kingdom than it at once becomes surrounded by a halo of brothels.

But so successful would Wilberforce and these other Christians be at bringing a concern for the poor and a social conscience into the society at large that by the next century, during the Victorian era, this attitude would become culturally mainstream.

when his father was an adolescent in Hull, his "talents for general society with his rare skill in singing rendered him everywhere an acceptable guest, and his time was wasted in a round of visits to the neighbouring gentry.

Wilberforce's decision to remain in politics made the transfer of Christian ideas into the previously "secular" realm of society possible for generations of Christians to follow.

Of the many societal problems Wilberforce might have thought needed his attention, slavery would have been the least visible of all, and by a wide margin.

The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built?