Quotes About Society

Madison and other supporters of the Consitution--the Federalists as they called themselves--hoped that an expanded national sphere of operation would prevent the clashing interests of the society from combining to create tyrannical majorities in the new national government.

Popular disregard, even disdain, for demonstrable truth is the most dangerous thing that can happen to a democracy.

As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.

Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself moral.

Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

Americans tend to play different roles, hoping that somehow they'll stumble on the right one.

Whether he knows it or not, the middle-income American is taxed as though he were living in a socialist society.

There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.

T]here is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices, and what anyone does with a willing partner is of no social or cosmic significance.

Do not regulate the private lives of people because, if you do, they will become angry and antisocial, and they will get what they want from criminals who work in perfect freedom because they know how to pay off the police.

Envy is the central fact of American life.

As long as any group within the society deliberately maintains its identity it is, or should be, a fair target for satire—both for its own good and for the society's.

the Russian governors are terrified of ideas. If only they knew what our governors know—that in a massive egalitarian society no idea which runs counter to the prevailing superstitions can successfully penetrate the official carapace.

Apathy is just a lack of energy, which to me, is just the literal definition of decadence. So the energy gives out in a society - that is decadence.

Tutti sono bisessuali, disse l'uomo dai capelli grigi. La società, il condizionamento precoce, la buona o la cattiva sorte - dipende da come ci è stato detto di considerarla - determinano il risultato. Nulla è 'giusto'. Solo la negazione dell'istinto è sbagliata.

Most young men, particularly attractive ones, have sexual relations with their own kind. I suppose this is news to those who believe in the two teams: straight, which is good and unalterable; queer, which is bad and unalterable unless it proves to be only a Preference, which must then, somehow, be reversed, if necessary by force.

The American passion for categorizing has now managed to create two non-existent categories—gay and straight.

Ever since 1941, when Roosevelt got us out of the Depression by pumping federal money into rearming, war or the threat of war has been the principal engine to our society. Now the war is over. Or is it? Can we afford to give up our—well, cozy unremitting war?

sees virtue, freedom in a less perfect union.

and the people. Hamilton was indeed a singular character. Of acute understanding, disinterested, honest and honorable in all private transactions, amiable in society, and honorable in all and duly valuing virtue in private life, yet so bewitched & perverted by the British example, as to be under thoro' conviction that corruption was essential to the government of a nation.

As we rounded a small pavilion, we nearly stepped into a pair of figures — who leapt apart. One was William de la Touche Clancey. The other was a well-made boy of perhaps sixteen, carefully got up to resemble a swell; only the red blunt hands betrayed the fact that he was a workie. So! Clancey gave his accusing goose-like hiss. The boy looked embarrassed, as well he should. There are some things that the poor ought not to do even for money.

I realized then that I didn't have to have women all the time, and that guilt is the weapon used by a muddled society to stop people having a good time. 'All the world loves a lover.' What crap! Even in the sexually liberated 'seventies young people still had to get pissed or high to do what they really wanted to do in the first place.

This sect preaches that there is little true Islam in this world and that the only option open to the individual is to denounce contemporary Muslim society as "ignorant" or nonbelieving and to take refuge, either in a special righteous community (like Calvin's City of God) or, more commonly, within oneself, to find purity of belief and action against the corrupting influences of society.