Quotes About Society

Is deviation from the locally approved norms always and everywhere to be taken as disease?

gender is one of the biggest lies of our civilization

women who miraculously spend their working day wearing bondage-tight skirts and vertiginous, destabilizing heels which make their feet look bound the erogenous zones of crushed muscles and cramped bones, encased in upmarket strippers' heels and if she has to cripple herself to signal her education, talent, intellect, skills and leadership potential then so be it

being trans wasn't about playacting an identity on a whim, it's about becoming your true self in spite of society's pressures to be otherwise, most people on the trans spectrum felt different from childhood

Or was it a question of how the laws were actually interpreted and enforced at the time they committed their crimes, and that they were not applied to them? What is law? Is it what is on the books, or what is actually enacted and obeyed in a society? Or is law what must be enacted and obeyed, whether or not it is on the books, if things are to go right?

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level.

Respectability, regularity, and routine - the whole cast-iron discipline of a modern industrial society - have atrophied the artistic impulse, and imprisoned love so that it can no longer be generous and free and creative, but must be either stuffy or furtive.

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

Very many people spend money in ways quite different from those that their natural tastes would enjoin, merely because the respect of their neighbors depends upon their possession of a good car and their ability to give good dinners. As a matter of fact, any man who can obviously afford a car but genuinely prefers travel or a good library will in the end be much more respected than if he behaved exactly like everyone else.

My own belief is that in most ages and in most places obscure psychological forces led men to adopt systems involving quite unnecessary cruelty, and that this is still the case among the most civilized races at the present day.

Machines have altered our way of life, but not our instincts. Consequently, there is maladjustment.

To discover a system for the avoidance of war is a vital need for our civ ilisation; but no such system has a chance while men are so unhappy that mutual extermination seems to them less dreadful than continued endurance of the light of day

Man is not a solitary animal, and so long as social Life survives, self-realization cannot be the supreme principle of ethics.

Envy is the basis of democracy.

Those who have a scientific outlook on human behaviour, moreover, find it impossible to label any action as 'sin'; they realise that what we do has its origin in our heredity, our education, and our environment, and that it is by control of these causes, rather than by denunciation, that conduct injurious to society is to be prevented.

One of the most powerful of all our passions is the desire to be admired and respected. As things stand, admiration and respect are given to the man who seems to be rich. This is the chief reason why people wish to be rich. The actual goods purchased by their money play quite a secondary part.

Having knowledge of an unethical act and allowing it to continue can spread a contagion that can affect multiple beings in society

Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government.

I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.

In the first place, there is no point whatever in being able to spell anything. Shakespeare and Milton could not spell; Marie Corelli and Alfred Austen could. Spelling is thought desirable partly for snobbish reasons, as an easy way of distinguishing the "educated" from the "uneducated"; partly, like correct clothes, as a part of herd domination; partly because the devotee of natural law feels pain in the spectacle of any sphere in which individual liberty remains.

The problem of finding a collection of "wise" men and leaving the government to them is thus an insoluble one. That is the ultimate reason for democracy.

In a wise community a wise man would not seem foolish!