Quotes About Society

The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.

A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows that from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas of freedom. A free society fertilizes the soil in which non-conformity and dissent and individualism can grow.

Most of us, in our civilized society, rely too heavily on reasoning capacity to make things happen. We've been raised to believe that logic will prevail. Logic, in and of itself, will rarely influence people. Most often logic doesn't work.

People have to be motivated to contribute to the society, to produce. At the same time, they have to be protected if they are unable to take care of themselves. If the first is more important you're a Republican the second Democrat.

Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.

The means of communication, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers to the producers and, through the latter to the whole social system. The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood...Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior.

Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.

By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For totalitarian is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.

The strains and stresses suffered by the individual in society are grounded in the normal functioning of that society (and of the individual!) rather than in its disturbances and diseases.

Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory.

The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and allelse, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things: bread and circuses!

Technology serves to institute new, more effective, and more pleasant forms of social control and social cohesion. The totalitarian tendency of these controls seems to assert itself in still another sense—by spreading to the less developed and even to the pre-industrial areas of the world, and by creating similarities in the development of capitalism and communism.

In a society in which idolatry runs rampant, a church that is not iconoclastic is a travesty. If it is not against the idols it is with them.

Before he can remake his society, his society must make him.

Increasing power of a growing administrative organization is accompanied by decreasing power of the rest of the society to resist its further growth and control.

in the course of social evolution, usage precedes law; and that when usage has been well established it becomes law by receiving authoritative endorsement and defined form.

All Socialism Involves Slavery.

And your police are like our police in the Realm?' Blue said. 'They flog you if you do something wrong and cut off your hand if you're caught stealing?' No, they don't do that, Henry said uncertainly. Why not? It's pretty silly not to, isn't it?' Blue said.

We cannibals must help these Christians.

But this whole world is a preposterous one, with many preposterous people in it.

They have provided a system which for terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian's Pandects and the By-laws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with other People's Business.

Who ain't a slave? Tell me that.

A high degree of refinement, however, does not seem to subdue our wicked propensities so much after all; and were civilization itself to be estimated by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged.

Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.