Quotes About Society

As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN

if we don't have experience with solitude—and this is often the case today—we start to equate loneliness and solitude.

We are shaped by our tools.

Our new media are well suited for accomplishing the rudimentary. And because this is what technology serves up, we reduce our expectations of each other.

We had talk enough, but no conversation. —SAMUEL JOHNSON, THE RAMBLER (1752)

They are learning a way of feeling connected in which they have permission to think only of themselves.

We are so accustomed to being always connected that being alone seems like a problem technology should solve. And

Anxieties migrate, proliferate.

Winston Churchill said, "We shape our buildings and then they shape us."23 We make our technologies, and they, in turn, shape us. So, of every technology we must ask, Does it serve our human purposes?—a question that causes us to reconsider what these purposes are. Technologies, in every generation, present opportunities to reflect on our values and direction.

Winston Churchill said, "We shape our buildings and then they shape us."23 We make our technologies, and they, in turn, shape us.

We may end up with a life deferred by the business of its own collection.

Now, relational artifacts pose these questions directly.

In this dismissal of origins we see the new pragmatism.

The self does not develop independently from its social surroundings.

We now expect more from technology and less from each other.

Computers brought philosophy into everyday life.

A classical view of people as "rational animals" gave way to a new idea, people as "emotional machines.

Shakespeare might have said, we are "consumed with that with which we are nourished by.

The My Real Babies frightened her,

Americans were once inner-directed. Now they had become other-directed, seeking identity in external validation.

every society shapes the therapies it can use.

being silenced by our technologies—in a way, "cured of talking." These silences—often in the presence of our children—have led to a crisis of empathy that has diminished us at home, at work, and in public life. I've said that the remedy, most simply, is a talking cure. This book is my case for conversation.

The kind of child our society resembles just now is one whose intelligence far exceeds his maturity. Every teacher and every parent knows what a formula for disaster that can be.