Quotes About Society

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that if Britain is ever to sort itself out, it is going to require a lot of euthanasia.

Illiteracy was the usual condition in sixteenth-century England, to be sure. According to one estimate at least 70 percent of men and 90 percent of women of the period couldn't even sign their names. But as one moved up the social scale, literacy rates rose appreciably.

It has sometimes been said that prudery reached such a height in the nineteenth century that people took to dressing their piano legs in little skirts lest they rouse anyone to untimely passion. Thomas

An Association for Prevention of Premature Burial was established in Britain in 1899 and an American society was formed the following year.

Until 1604 the age of consent was twelve for a girl, fourteen for a boy.

As recently as the eighteenth century, England happily installed a German king, George I, even though he spoke not a word of English and reigned for thirteen years without mastering his subjects' language. Common people did not expect to speak like their masters any more than they expected to live like them.

He agreed with Laughlin that sterilization was necessary in society "to prevent our being swamped with incompetence." Then he gave his solution: "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.

Food was similarly regulated, with restrictions placed on how many courses one might eat, depending on status.

Americans today consume about twenty five percent more calories than they did in 1970. And let's face it, they weren't exactly going without in 1970.

Goodness knows what this is meant to suggest—I suppose that this is some sort of Hall of the People—but the effect is that it looks as if two dozen citizens of various ages are about to commit mass suicide.

Today's mathematics is intimately bound up with two key areas of human knowledge and activity: the natural world, and the society in which we live.

I read once that the furthest distance the average American will walk without getting into a car is six hundred feet, and I fear the modern British have become much the same, except that on the way back to the car the

Over a lifetime, we eat about sixty tons of food, which is equivalent, notes Carl Zimmer in Microcosm, to eating sixty small cars. In 1915, the average American spent half his weekly income on food. Today it's just 6 percent

We need to understand why in a society so dependent on technology, a society that benefits so richly from the results of engineering, a society that rewards engineers so well, engineering isn't perceived as a desirable profession.

In the time of Dickens, almost all ironwork was green, light blue, or dull gray.

Britain's Royal Society of Chemistry when, as part of the 2013 Cambridge Science Festival, it calculated how much it would cost to assemble all the elements necessary to build the actor Benedict Cumberbatch. (Cumberbatch was the guest director of the festival that year and was, conveniently, a typically sized human.)

I mentioned my observation that the world seems to be filling up with imbeciles. They explained to me that this is simply an affliction of age.

What if we are all getting stupid at more or less the same rate and we don't realize it because we are all declining together? You might argue that we'd see a general fall in IQ scores, but what if it's not the kind of deterioration that shows up in IQ tests? What if it were reflected in just, say, poor judgment or diminished taste? We

In 1649 the laws were tightened even further—to the extent that swearing at a parent became punishable by death.

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that if Britain is ever going to sort itself out, it is going to require a lot of euthanasia.

Where everyone stinks, no one stinks.

Sometimes the "them" strategy is just a narcotic to feed the beast in all of us.

We're using modern technology to revert to primitive kinds of human relations.

One of the great ironies of the modern age," he begins, "is that the advancements of mankind can make us more powerful and yet more vulnerable at the same time. The greater the power, the greater the vulnerability. You think, rightly so, that you are at the apex of your power, that you can do more things than ever before. But I see you at the peak of your vulnerability. "The reason is reliance. Our society has become completely reliant on technology.