Quotes About Society

If it weren't for the Chicagos and Detroits and Toledos, the terrible things would spread out across the whole country and make trouble for everybody else. Such places were collectors of badness in the way hospitals were collectors of the sick and damaged.

When we die our argument dies with us. The argument we never articulated well enough, that we were failed by our parents, and the schools, and the state. The cause of death is the missing safety net.

If you're not a beautiful monster, then you're a villager," he said

Human rights commissions, as they are evolving, are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society... It is in fact totalitarianism. I find this is very scary stuff.

Rupert Sheldrake puts it, "The evangelists of science and technology have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the missionaries of Christianity.

All reality is political, but not all politics is human. GRAHAM HARMON

The media need superheroes in science just as in every sphere of life, but there is really a continuous range of abilities with no clear dividing line.

There is a paradox at the core of penology, and from it derives the thousand ills and afflictions of the prison system. It is that not only the worst of the young are sent to prison, but the best—that is, the proudest, the bravest, the most daring, the most enterprising and the most undefeated of the poor. There starts the horror. —Norman Mailer's introduction to In the Belly of the Beast by Jack Henry Abbott No one knows what it's like to be the bad man.

Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.

human evolution has been determined mainly by social competition.29

Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we've always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us.

We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics - trying to play a serious part in the world - to a culture that's really entertainment-based.

What charitable 1 percenters can't do is assume responsibility - America's national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts.

I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better - and maybe not all that much better after all.

Still more confounding to the regime, rural conflict was turning out to be not class based but mostly generational and gender based; the regime indirectly admitted as much by complaining that what it called the middle and even poor peasants were "under the sway" of the kulaks.144

I do not know where Romeo comes from or even his real name. He was once on the street, as he puts it-meaning he dealt drugs-but managed to find Jesus without the inconvenience of first going to prison.

To Tom, the march of technology was equivalent to the march of civilization.

She and her late husband, Leander Cross, a prominent surgeon of the darker nation, were, in my childhood, perhaps the leading host of the Gold Coast party circuit, a circuit my parents traveled often, because it was, in those days, what one did: glittering dinner at one house on the Friday, champagne brunch at another on the Sunday, caterers, cooks, even temporary butlers at the ready as the best of black Washington charged about in mad imitation of white people's foolishness.

When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.

for every thousand people hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the roots.

The main reason Americans buy guns is to tell themselves the story of the failure of government.

As America has rejected God's presence and God's law, America has declined in greatness.

Joseph Spencer sent Madison a copy of John Leland's "Objections to the Constitution," which began: "There is no Bill Rights, whenever a Number of men enter into a State of Society, a Number of individual Rights must be given up to Society, but there should always be a memorial of those not surrendered . . . . "6 Madison would meet with Leland and win him over to the federalist cause.

It is a natural right which the people have reserved to themselves, confirmed by the Bill of Rights, to keep arms for their own defence; and as Mr. Blackstone observes, it is to be made use of when the sanctions of society and law are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.