Quotes About Society

We're living at this funny time, where we're all urged to express ourselves as unique individuals, but on the other hand, we share a limited set of tools for doing that. It's easy to feel like nothing more than the sum of your consumer choices.

Using political tools to change social conditions won't work.

If we open our history books, we shall see that the laws, for all that they are or should be contracts amongst free men, have rarely been anything but the tools of the passions of a few men or the offspring of a fleeting and haphazard necessity.

Politicians want people to be nice neighbours, but the tools at their disposal are just the tools of modern liberal society, which are nothing.

In the future, I think it's pretty plausible that collective intelligence tools and skills will be important in order to be a part of global dialog, global business, and global creativity. People who know how to negotiate collective intelligence networks are going to be in a good position to contribute to global society.

New technologies, however remarkable they might seem, are fundamentally just tools made by people for people.

Our pluralist society must provide its citizens with the tools to understand religions, their symbols and their practices.

Some say economics has all kinds of good tools and techniques, but it has an absence of interesting problems. I look around the world, and I see all kinds of interesting, important problems we ought to solve with the tools we have.

Show me what society that ever existed that did not use the tools that they had available. Ask any person from East Germany... you will never hear somebody say, 'The Stasi never bothered me because I didn't have anything to hide.' That's not a thing that people say.

We, as adults, have not given children the tools to grow up healthy in our society.

Do we believe that there is equal economic opportunity out there in the real world, right now, for each and every one of these groups? If we believed in the tooth fairy, if we believed in the Easter Bunny, we might well believe that.

It is the old battle, between those who use a toothbrush and those who don't.

The direction of the country isn't controlled by one person on top making decisions. It's a mass movement of people making a lot of individual decisions that add up to something broader.

Education and health are among our top priorities.

Sex is a must topic. Even every Bollywood movies has such highlighted content.

I appreciate the fans who come out here, and they support us, but it's football. We're not saving lives. We're not police officers. We're not doctors. We're football players, first and foremost. If you want to stop watching the game because a guy feels strongly about a very serious topic that's going on in our society, then that's your choice.

Our society has a mentality that elderly people pass on their wealth to their son or immediate relatives, and I think we all do it. It's a part of nature and is an exaggerated topic.

Russia, at the start of the 21st century, at least in its larger cities, very much resembled the United States of the early 1990s: being gay was no longer criminal or shameful, but it was still not a topic for polite conversation or public discussion.

Art and money are closely related. Try sitting down with a group of artists and ask them what's on their mind. Very quickly the topic shifts to money. And it can be very hard to get them off that subject.

In 1975, which was the height of the women's movement, I thought I'd write a book on women's history. But in searching for a topic, I realized that there were few places in history where men and women interacted. Finally, it hit me: 'Oh, look at the family. That's the one place.'

Of course, sometimes when you write personally, you are also writing about society, obliquely reflecting topical issues, but not in a way that people would expect you to or in the way that someone trying to make a point would.

I'm not suggesting that social scientists stop teaching and investigating classic topics like monopoly power, racial profiling and health inequality. But everyone knows that monopoly power is bad for markets, that people are racially biased and that illness is unequally distributed by social class.

One of the things that struck me about the 1870s, which we still haven't nearly addressed, is what to do about the male-female divide. One of the forbidden topics is when men own up to the omnivorousness of their sexual interest and how to square that with being in love with an individual woman.

In the United States, one of the main topics of academic political science is the study of attitudes and policy and their correlation. The study of attitudes is reasonably easy in the United States: heavily-polled society, pretty serious and accurate polls, and policy you can see, and you can compare them.