Quotes About Society

No wan cares to hear what Hogan calls "Th' short an' simple scandals iv th' poor."

Th' dead ar-re always pop'lar. I knowed a society wanst to vote a monyment to a man an' refuse to help his fam'ly, all in wan night.

You see how deviously the institution of marriage threads itself through a woman's life? If she does not marry she is perpetually a child—until she is suddenly an old woman, that is.

I think America becomes more disgruntled by going to the movies and having an endlessly good time at them.

Almost the entire world relies on other people's opinions to tell them what to think.

Here, those kids are called nerds and geeks and dorks. This may be the only country where people make fun of the smart kids. Now that's stupid. I only hope that the engineer who built the bridge I drive across or the nurse who administers our vaccines or the teacher who teaches my kids was a total nerd.

A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom; a republic is a raft which will never sink, but then your feet are always in the water.

Unlike a computer or a brain, Wiener observed, the channels of communication in society were formed, not from wires or neural nets, but from the exchange of information between individuals using language and nonverbal communication, from learning and group communication in families and larger social organizations, and from the exchange of knowledge and experience among people of different cultures. Drawing

Of all of these anti-homeostatic factors in society, the control of the means of communication is the most effective and most important.

The most oppressed man finds a being to oppress, his wife: she is the proletarian of the proletarian.

Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

The more immoral we become in big ways, the more puritanical we become in little ways.

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

The prohibition law, written for weaklings and derelicts, has divided the nation, like Gaul, into three parts - wets, drys, and hypocrites.

Mind, I am not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and madness.

Adultery is not a crime, it's an amusement.

the purpose of the socialists is to suppress liberty of association precisely in order to force people to associate together in true liberty.)

The law is guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish.

This line of reasoning brings us to a challenging question: If people are as incapable, as immoral, and as ignorant as the politicians indicate, then why is the right of these same people to vote defended with such passionate insistence?

How is it that the strange idea of making the law produce what it does not contain—prosperity, in a positive sense, wealth, science, religion—should ever have gained ground in the political world?

You compare the nation to a parched piece of land and the tax to a life-giving rain. So be it. But you should also ask yourself where this rain comes from, and whether it is not precisely the tax that draws the moisture from the soil and dries it up. You should also ask yourself further whether the soil receives more of this precious water from the rain than it loses by the evaporation?

I cannot possibly understand how fraternity can be legally enforced without liberty being legally destroyed...

No society can exist if respect for the law does not to some extent prevail; but the surest way to have laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality are in contradiction, the citizen finds himself in the cruel dilemma of either losing his moral sense or of losing his respect for the law, two evils of which one is as great as the other and between which it is difficult to choose.

By what right does the law force me to conform to the social plans of Mr. Mimerel, Mr. de Melun, Mr. Thiers, or Mr. Louis Blanc? If the law has a moral right to do this, why does it not, then, force these gentlemen to submit to my plans? Is it logical to suppose that nature has not given me sufficient imagination to dream up a utopia also? Should the law choose one fantasy among many, and put the organized force of government at its service only?