Quotes About Society

Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke, You gotta understand, It's just our bringin' up-ke, That gets us out of hand. Our mothers all are junkies, Our fathers all are drunks. Golly Moses, natcherly we're punks!

Better still, improvements build on one another. A richer world can better afford to protect the environment, police its gangs, strengthen its social safety nets, and teach and heal its citizens. A better-educated and connected world cares more about the environment, indulges fewer autocrats, and starts fewer wars.

Locke recognized that people in power would be tempted to "exempt themselves from the obedience to the Laws they make, and suit the Law, both in its making and its execution, to their own private Wish, and thereby come to have a distinct Interest from the rest of the Community, contrary to the end of Society and Government."99

But proving that incarceration deters people (as opposed to incapacitating them) is easier said than done, because the statistics at any time are inherently stacked against it.

Culture is an autonomous entity that carries out a desire to perpetuate itself by setting up expectations and assigning roles, which can vary arbitrarily from society to society.

certain facts are objectively true just because people act as if they are true. [...] a social fact depends entirely on the willingness of people to treat it as a fact.

Also, since people tend to get less violent as they get older, keeping men in prison beyond a certain point does little to reduce crime.

And countries that combine free markets with more taxation, social spending, and regulation than the United States (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Western Europe) turn out to be not grim dystopias but rather pleasant places to live, and they trounce the United States in every measure of human flourishing, including crime, life expectancy, infant mortality, education, and happiness.

Human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.

inequality is generally a better predictor of violence than unemployment.

El ideal del progreso tampoco debería confundirse con el movimiento del siglo XX para rediseñar la sociedad al antojo de los tecnócratas y los planificadores, que el politólogo James Scott denomina «alto modernismo autoritario».

Which policies will in fact bring about things that almost everyone wants, like lasting peace or economic growth? Which will reduce poverty, or violent crime, or illiteracy? A rational society should seek the answers by consulting the world rather than assuming the omniscience of a bloc of opinionators who have coalesced around a creed.

The moral sense sanctifies a set of norms and taboos that govern the interactions among people in a culture, sometimes in ways that decrease violence, though often (when the norms are tribal, authoritarian, or puritanical) in ways that increase it.

Una sociedad sin erudición histórica es como una persona sin memoria: engañada, confundida y fácilmente explotada.

If Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer were alive today, we'd say they had ADD or a conduct disorder. They [boys] are who they are, and we need to love them for who they are. Let's not try to rewire them.

Our social and economic systems are so devoid of humanity and love.

Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.

Older women can afford to agree that femininity is a charade, a matter of colored hair, ecru lace and whalebones, the kind of slap and tat that transvestites are in love with, and no more.

America knows nothing of food, love, or art.

If some unemployed punk in New Jersey, can get a cassette to make love to Elle McPherson for $19.95, this virtual reality stuff is going to make crack look like Sanka.

I'm definitely curious. I love pop culture. I'm glued to it. I can watch garbage TV, but then I can also watch great theater.

By abolishing private property one deprives the human love of aggression.

I love people; it's mankind I can't stand.

Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it.