Quotes About Society

Rebellion sounded like a lot of fun, but in Calcutta there was nothing to rebel against. Where would it get you?

For girls of our class, only a convent-school education would do. This meant that until we reached the age of marital consent, we could be certified (of course) as virgins, but also as never having occupied unchaperoned confined space of any kind with a boy of our own age who was not a close relative.

Our criminal class grew out of good religious native soil.

A good person can make another person good it means that goodness will elicit goodness in the society other persons will also be good.

We don't need a flat tax, but a flattening tax, to truly level the playing field.

But what keeps throwing us back is so much backbiting and gossiping and lying going on; even among the counterculture everybody either wants to be worshipped or be king of the hill. I'm seriously beginning to question whether I've met an honest person in my life.

As with the Mahabharata, the Valmiki Ramayana is a smriti text. It has a human origin and composer, it is not a shruti text. Smriti texts are society and context specific.

For any society, two concerns are paramount—economic growth and improvement in the well-being of the poor. Growth is needed to finance redistribution. This redistribution typically takes two forms—productive investment, for example, the financing of infrastructure, expenditures on health and education, and simple transfers of income.

For too long in this society, we have celebrated unrestrained individualism over common community. For too long as a nation, we have been lulled by the anthem of self-interest. For a decade, led by Ronald Reagan, self-aggrandizement has been the full-throated cry of this society: 'I've got mine, so why don't you get yours' and 'What's in it for me?'

What a woman most admires in a man is distinction among men. What a man most admires in a woman is devotion to himself.

The only distinction that democracies reward is a high degree of conformity.

Bourgeois is a bourgeois word.

Opium? No! Cocaine? No! The Great American Brain Killer Is Dance Music!' – Portland Oregonian, 1932 T

We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.

Our 'Hooligans' go from bad to worse. They are an ugly growth on the body politic, and the worse circumstance is that they multiply, and that School Boards and prisons, police magistrates and philanthropists, do not seem to ameliorate them. Other great cities may throw off elements more perilous to the State. Nevertheless the 'Hooligan' is a hideous excrescence on our civilization. The Times [London], October 30, 1890

Two years outside the country, and not much had changed. Still, more people watched the Super Bowl than voted; budgets for defense outweighed education, medicine, and everything else combined....

I do not believe we can repair the basic fabric of society until people who are willing to work have work. Work organizes life. It gives structure and discipline to life.

The era of big government is over.

I cannot understand how the education of this United States of America has been fooled time and time again. Either make it separate but equal or integrate, therefore it will be equal. And it has been separate and unequal.

In terms of fast food and deep understanding of the culture of fast food, I'm your man.

Although I don't have a prescription for what others should do, I know I have been very fortunate and feel a responsibility to give back to society in a very significant way.

A first-generation fortune is the most likely to be given away, but once a fortune is inherited it's less likely that a very high percentage will go back to society.

I loved when Bush came out and said, "We are losing the war against drugs." You know what that implies? There's a war being fought, and the people ondrugs are winning it.

If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses. And what can this tell you about American culture? Well, look at the drugs we use. Except for pharmaceutical poison, there are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in.