Quotes About Society

every totalitarian regime forms a type of human being on whom it relies for its stability. The shaping of the New Man is the regime's explicit project, but its product is not so much a vessel for the regime's ideology as it is a person best equipped to survive in a given society. The regime, in turn, comes to depend on this newly shaped type of person for its continued survival.

But the funniest one they showed us was about the need for leisure time. I was sitting next to women who work until one in the morning every day. And here they were telling us that when a person does not get any rest, he becomes a destructive member of society because of the elevated risk of accidents. The women were laughing so hard they fell off their chairs.

Hannah] Arendt wrote about the subjugation of public space - in effect the disappearance of public space, which, by depriving a person of boundaries and agency, rendered him profoundly lonely.

America was the very definition of modernity; it was the country that Russia had failed to become.

Here the state described by Magyar met the society described by Gudkov. When the state used force and ideology as mere tools, society responded as it had over the course of previous generation to both force and ideology: by mobilizing. Russia had a mafia state ruling over a totalitarian society.

For too many people, the only difference between spending life in a job and spending life in a prison is that a prison would give them better health benefits.

Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. You

Far from being laws to protect women, antipolygamy statutes may really do more to protect men.

Language is just as rule-based in its newest slang forms, and just as sophisticated as it ever was in ancient Rome. But the rules, now as then, are written from below, not from above.

Our habits and our institutions, from language to cities, are constantly changing, and the mechanism of change turns out to be surprisingly Darwinian: it is gradual, undirected, mutational, inexorable, combinatorial, selective and in some vague sense progressive.

homini lupus', said Plautus. 'Man is a wolf to man.

The obsession with which those on the right resist Charles Darwin's insight – that the complexity of nature does not imply a designer – matches the obsession with which those on the left resist Adam Smith's insight – that the complexity of society does not imply a planner.

The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation – that is to say, in crime.' Perhaps we have left all that behind, and the state is now evolving steadily towards benign and gentle virtue. Perhaps not. Tudor

The police have come to resemble an occupying army who see the citizenry as the enemy.

With increasingly money-based interactions among strangers, people increasingly began to think of neighbours as potential trading partners rather than potential prey. Killing the shopkeeper makes no sense.

The truth is that the wild west was without much government, but it was very far from lawless, or even violent.

Europe was, in Joel Mokyr's words, 'the first society to build an economy on non-human power rather than on the backs of slaves and coolies'.

The Planned Parenthood Foundation was founded in 1916 by Margaret Sanger, who thought philanthropy would 'perpetuate constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents'. The organisation's international arm was headquartered in the offices of the British Eugenics Society as late as 1952.

They had stumbled on what Friedrich Hayek called the catallaxy: the ever-expanding possibility generated by a growing division of labour.

The restaurant business is robust and successful precisely because individual restaurants are vulnerable and short-lived. Taleb wishes that society honoured ruined entrepreneurs as richly as it honours fallen soldiers.

If God is not needed for morality, and if language is a spontaneous system, then perhaps the king, the pope and the official are not quite as vital to the functioning of an orderly society as they pretend?

Good institutions cannot usually be imposed from above: that way they are oxymorons.

This was socialism without the state. There is no doubt that it would have continued to expand and evolve.

all gods and all superstitions emerge from within human minds, and go through characteristic but unplanned transformations as history unfolds. Thus even the most top–down feature of human culture is actually a bottom–up, emergent phenomenon. O'Grady