Quotes About Society

It is a mark of great spiritual laziness to take the world we inherit as a given. It is constantly in flux, and it is our own projective mind that creates it. A true visionary sees society itself as a shared projection, a kind of hologram we are all cocreating with no permanent basis, one that can always be reimagined based on the shifting views of human nature that we hold.

As Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche puts it, you can tell what the most important building is within a society by which is the tallest. Within ancient Europe, cathedrals often reached the most soaring heights, as did mosques in the ancient Middle East. Now, in our Western metropolises, we all bow before cathedrals of financial commerce. Our sacred values are implied by our ritualistic choices, whether we agree to them or not. We

There is no surer sign of a society in decline than one that builds prisons faster than schools, as happens in many American states. In

It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society. —KRISHNAMURTI

A confused society, a deeply endangered society, is a group of people all lost in nightmarish commute. The systems, institutions, and culture of such a society discourage people from feeling the trust and belonging that come with being at home in your world. A

An enlightened society is one where the culture encourages time for self-awareness, belonging, and connection. An enlightened society would actually foster cultural and social relationships to help commuters find their way home. It

We're a society of entertainment junkies, hooked from birth, individually and collectively, fed the sugar-high dazzle of entertainment through an intravenous cable tube. And the cruelest joke of any bad habit is that when you're hooked, you don't really even enjoy the fix anymore.

None of the seven is really good, for the excellent reason that Australian children never are.

We live in a vastly complex society which has been able to provide us with a multitude of material things, and this is good, but people are beginning to suspect we have paid a high spiritual price for our plenty.

That's how we stay young these days: murder and suicide.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths".

Is it not very clear that progress, that is to say, the onward march of all things, good as well as evil, has brought our civilization to the brink of an abyss into which it may possibly fall, giving place to utter barbarism? And the reason for this…is it not to be found in the law that dominates all others here below, the need for change in some form or other? We must change. (Monday 23 April 1849)

There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.

The world is no longer man's theatre. Man has been made into a helpless spectator. The two evil forces he has created- science and the state- have combined into one monstrous body. We're at the mercy of our monster...

The North American church at present is conspicuous for replacing the Jesus way with the American way.

The experts in our society who offer to help us have a kind of general-staff mentality from which massive, top-down solutions are issued to solve our problems. Then when the solutions don't work, we get mired in the nothing-can-be-done swamp. We are first incited into being grandiose and then intimidated into being infantile. But there is another way, the plain way of quiet Christian humility.

No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.

Time and again our best and brightest have alerted society to looming problems, but our persistent pattern has been to ignore the warnings and suffer the consequences. The pathetic refrain of recent years --'Nobody saw this coming'--is always a self-serving lie.

In an age in which economists take for granted that people equate well-being with consumption, increasing numbers of people seem willing to trade certain freedoms and material comforts for a sense of immutable order and the rapture of faith.

For de little stealin' dey gits you in jail soon or late. For de big stealin' dey makes you emperor and puts you in de Hall o' Fame when you croaks. If dey's one thing I learns in ten years on de Pullman cars listenin' to de white quality talk, it's dat same fact.

Yank: Sure! Lock me up! Put me in a cage! Dat's de on'y answer yuh know. G'wan, lock me up!Policeman: What you been doin'?Yank: Enough to gimme life for! I was born, see? Sure, dat's de charge. Write it in de blotter. I was born, get me!

Human culture: a kind of incessant ringing in the ears.

Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most - that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least.

The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose - especially their lives.