Quotes About Society

A medida que los países se vuelven más inteligentes, se alejan de Dios.

Political ideologies, too, cannot be defined in terms of assumptions or values, but only as rival versions of the metaphor that SOCIETY IS A FAMILY. The political right likens society to a family commanded by a strict father, the political left to a family cared for by a nurturant parent.

However imperfect society may be, we should measure it against the cruelty and deprivation of the actual past, not the harmony and affluence of an imagined future.

There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They're called women.

Man has no nature; what he has is history.

Violence pervaded their entertainment as well. Tuchman describes two of the popular sports of the time: "Players with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal's claws....

A regime that trawls for drug users or other petty delinquents will net a certain number of violent people as bycatch, further thinning the ranks of the violent people who remain on the streets. Incarceration

The romantic notion that all evil is a product of society has justified the release of dangerous psychopaths who promptly murdered innocent people. And the conviction that humanity could be reshaped by massive social engineering projects led to some of the greatest atrocities in history.

Psychologists have long known that people tend to see their own lives through rose-colored glasses: they think they're less likely than the average person to become the victim of a divorce, layoff, accident, illness, or crime. But change the question from the people's lives to their society, and they transform from Pollyanna to Eeyore. Public opinion researchers call it the Optimism Gap.

The violence of a lower-class man may indeed express rage, but it is aimed not at society but at the asshole who scraped his car and dissed him in front of a crowd.

Among Western democracies, the United States leaps out of the homicide statistics. Instead of clustering with kindred peoples like Britain, the Netherlands, and Germany, it hangs out with toughs like Albania and Uruguay, close to the median rate for the entire world.

Violent crime is a solvable problem.

War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention. —Henry Maine

to re-enter the roundtable of morality. As the psychologist Peter DeScioli points out, when you face an adversary alone, your best weapon may be an ax, but when you face an adversary in front of a throng of bystanders, your best weapon may be an argument.

Steven Pinker

Hoy se reconoce casi universalmente que el marxismo fue un experimento que fracasó, al menos en sus aplicaciones mundanas. Los países que lo adoptaron se derrumbaron, lo abandonaron o languidecieron en unas dictaduras retrógradas.

If we could canvass the souls of the dead children and mothers and the victims of war and starvation and disease, or if we went back in time and gave them a choice between proceeding with their lives in a premodern or modern world, we might uncover an appreciation of modernity that is more commensurate with its objective benefits.

Beginning in the 17th century, technological advances in publishing and transportation created a Republic of Letters and a Reading Revolution in which the seeds of the Humanitarian Revolution took root (chapter 4). More people read books, including fiction that led them to inhabit the minds of other people, and satire that led them to question their society's norms.

between the time of Jesus and the 20th century, 19 million people were executed for trivial offenses.68

The moral arguments against war are irrefutable. As the musician Edwin Starr put it, "War. Hunh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

For decades, journalism's steady focus on problems and seemingly incurable pathologies was preparing the soil that allowed Trump's seeds of discontent and despair to take root. . .

The amount of violence in a society is more closely related to its inequality than to its poverty.

raped, or killed, and it's hard to develop sophisticated arts, learning

Also, a state without an effective police and judiciary had to make a little punishment go a long way.