Quotes About Society

In this way of thinking, government is not a divine fiat to reign, a synonym for "society," or an avatar of the national, religious, or racial soul.

Populism is an old man's movement.

In this way of thinking, the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it's a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don't have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response.

Thoreau was a victim of the Optimism Gap (the "I'm OK, They're Not" illusion), which for happiness is more like a canyon. People in every country underestimate the proportion of their compatriots who say they are happy, by an average of 42 percentage points.19

Given these payoffs, endorsing a belief that hasn't passed muster with scientific and fact checking isn't so irrational after all, at least not by the criterion of the immediate affects on the believer. The affects on the society and planet are another matter.

Bertrand Russell wrote, "Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day." For intellectuals today, many of those convictions are about psychology and social relations. I will refer to those convictions as the Blank Slate: the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves.

That's right: when it comes to correct English, there's no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum.

Certainly the taste for cruelty clashes with the values of a cooperative society: it must be harder to work with your neighbors if you think they might enjoy seeing you disemboweled.

A sense of solidarity among fifteen-to-thirty-year-olds would be a menace to civilized society even in the best of times.

A society is an organic system that develops spontaneously, governed by myriad interactions and adjustments that no human mind can pretend to understand. Just because we cannot capture its workings in verbal propositions does not mean it should be scrapped and reinvented according to the fashionable theories of the day. Such ham-fisted tinkering will only lead to unintended consequences, culminating in violent chaos.

Though the United States and other Western nations are often accused of being misogynistic patriarchies, the rest of the world is immensely worse.

Darwin's words, "If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

Kahan concludes that we are all actors in a Tragedy of the Belief Commons: what's rational for every individual to believe (based on esteem) can be irrational for the society as a whole to act upon (based on reality).17

The San of the Kalahari, once called "the original affluent society," turn out to work at least eight hours a day, six to seven days a week, on food alone.

So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one's chances of being a victim of violence fivefold.

After noting Snow's "utter lack of intellectual distinction and . . . embarrassing vulgarity of style," Leavis scoffed at a value system in which "'standard of living' is the ultimate criterion, its raising an ultimate aim.

The recoognition of a right to life,liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the mandate of government to secure the rights are too tepid for a morally viable society.

Eisner, together with the historian Randolph Roth, notes that crime often shoots up in decades in which people question their society and government, including the American Civil War, the 1960s, and post-Soviet Russia.

As Thomas Macaulay reflected in 1830, "We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent reason. . . . On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?"4

They write as if the consumption of elite art is the ultimate moral good.

We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters.

A third dubious belief about violence is that lower-class people engage in it because they are financially needy (for example, stealing food to feed their children) or because they are expressing rage against society. 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.

Also, a large swath of our intellectual culture is loath to admit that there could be anything good about civilization, modernity, and Western society.

government is not a divine fiat to reign, a synonym for "society," or an avatar of the national, religious, or racial soul. It is a human invention, tacitly agreed to in a social contract, designed to enhance the welfare of citizens by coordinating their behavior and discouraging selfish acts that may be tempting to every individual but leave everyone worse off.