Quotes About Society

Neither Italian fascism nor German National-"Socialism" has anything in common with such a [Soviet socialistic] society. Primarily, this is because the private ownership of the factories and works, of the land, the banks, transport, etc., has remained intact, and, therefore, capitalism remains in full force in Germany and in Italy.

Macroeconomic policy can never be devoid of politics: it involves fundamental trade-offs and affects different groups differently.

Expecting a carjacker or rapist or drug pusher to care that his possession or use of a gun is unlawful is like expecting a terrorist to care that his car bomb is taking up two parking spaces.

Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and the sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.

Pretty soon both the air and the roads would be so full that no one could move in comfort and everyone would have to go back to the railways for quick travel. Progress, that was.

maybe that was what grown-up life was really about. Doing what everyone else thought you should do.

A people's legitimacy is derived from its artifacts. Even a relationship isn't a relationship unless it's left behind its trash.

Freedom of religion in America is all fine and good until you start believing in nothing, and then it is a crime to be punished.' " "Is

The connected get more connected while the disconnected get more disconnected.

Don't think I'm not haunted knowing that I might be missing out on things that I'd much prefer not to be missing out on. I am haunted , Betsy. You think I alienate myself from society? Of course I alienate myself from society. It's the only way I know of not being constantly reminded of all the ways I'm alienated from society.

Of course I alienate myself from society. It's the only way I know of not being constantly reminded of all the ways I'm alienated from society. That doesn't mean I have anything against other people. Envy them?

The extremists had declared jihad against anyone and anything that challenged their vision of a pure Islamic society, and these artifacts - treatises about logic, astrology, and medicine, paeans to music, poems idealizing romantic love - represented five hundred years of human joy. They celebrated the sensual and the secular, and they bore the explicit message that humanity, as well as God, was capable of creating beauty. They were monumentally subversive.

By infinitely multiplying this necessity to conform, at the expense of developing the individual, unique 'self,' society succeeds in making a man 'good.' By frustrating his potential in numberless ways from the time he is born till the time he dies, civilization instills in him a pattern which is so rigid that he is often unable to express his true self at all.

You," she said, "are the ugliest man I ever saw." Sadly, the man answered, "Perhaps so, but I can't help that." "No," the woman allowed, "but you might stay at home.

The proverbs of a nation furnish the index to its spirit and the results of its civilization.

Speech has, indeed, its origin in social conformity.

There will always be a boogie man. Politicians need one.

He shrugged off his finely tailored coat and handed it to a footman. Joanna shot a sharp look at several ladies who had the effrontery to sigh while staring at him. They looked like ravenous bitches. As in dogs, of course, never would she even think the impolite meaning of that term. Perhaps there was something to Royce's fox hunting allusion after all.

This was his third attempt to escape Yugoslavia, for which he was rewarded by two years of treatment in the insane asylum. The official political reasoning was simple: if you wanted to leave a healthy society like socialist Yugoslavia to live in the decadent West, you were insane.

When fatness was an exception, it was part of the canon of beauty. Now that leanness is an exception, its symptoms are canonized.

That guy had a job before you environmentalists took it away. Now he has nothing to do but ride his bike, his only treasure, then go home at night to terrorize his children and beat his wife. Spousal abuse is directly linked to environmental regulation. It can be stamped out only by stamping out nature—not human nature, the other one. That alone will provide jobs and stop the breakdown of the American family.

He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.

Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.

Destructive beliefs don't hurt the Divine, but they can hurt us, our society, and our world. We have the right to insist that the beliefs we adopt, even about Divinity, be healthy and productive and serve us well.