Quotes About Society

Political philosophy is the study of the deepest, most intractable, and most enduring problems of political life.

The problems we confront today, to the extent that they remain political problems, are precisely the same as those confronted in fifth-century Athens, fifteenth-century Florence, or seventeenth-century England.

Law is a reflection of society, justice is a reflection of an idealization of that society.

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.

But as history clearly shows, most people, whether because of nature or nurture, generally put their own interests ahead of others'. This doesn't make them bad people; it just makes them human.

In the United States especially, politics and economics don't mix well. Politicians have all sorts of reasons to pass all sorts of laws that, as well-meaning as they may be, fail to account for the way real people respond to real-world incentives.

History meant nothing, because the only continuity was human stupidity.

If all we seek is an escape, what does that say about the world we live in. We are desperate with our dreams. What - oh, what - does that say?

witness two scenes. In one, an angry, bitter man beats another man to death in an alley in the Gadrobi District. In the other, a man of vast wealth conspires with equally wealthy compatriots to raise yet again the price of grain, making the cost of simple bread so prohibitive that families starve, are led into lives of crime, and die young. Are both acts of violence?

War is not a natural state. It is an imposition, and a damned unhealthy one. With its rules, we willingly yield our humanity.

Crowd control.' 'Excuse me?' 'That's all civilization is, T'riss. A means by which we manage the proliferation of our kind. It increases in complexity the more of us there are. Laws keep us muzzled and punishment delivers the necessary message when those laws are broken. Civilizations in decline are notable when certain of their members escape justice, and do so with impunity.

Some women just skip having babies or adopt because they don't want to get fat or they haven't put in the time to find a partner. It's great to adopt, but a lot of adoptions are motivated by vanity and laziness.

Plus-sized women have been told for so long to cover up. Whether it's with a one-piece, a tankini, a bikini with a skirt, high-waisted things, we're always told to hide these things that society calls flaws.

Our social mores no longer conform to a world where nice girls wear skirts that don't cling.

I don't buy into you're on the slag heap when you're 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 or whatever.

The education system of Hong Kong has often been slammed for marginalising a lot of people.

The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living: they never flatter us to our faces, nor slander us behind our backs, nor intrude upon our privacy, nor quit their shelves until we take them down.

As a society, when you have your mortality slapped in your face, it changes you.

Peoples will be as before, the sheep sent to the slaughterhouses or to the meadows as it pleases the shepherds.

Oscar Wilde said the rich and the poor are equal - they can both sleep under the bridge. Right? Do they have a right? You're damn right they have a right!

The more I read about feeding times, sleep times and waking-up times, the more inadequate and miserable I felt.

Some people say that rough sleeping has always existed and always will - that there is nothing that can be done to stop it. That is simply not true.

I met a woman working 30 hours a week, trying to make ends meet, three children. And she slept the night before I met her in her car because she's homeless. We can do better. We can build a nation of shared prosperity.

If you want to slice into America, it's pretty red, white, and blue in terms of how it goes about things, but there's a gray area there, and I've always been interested in where things are complicated.