Quotes About Society

Watching people just look out for themselves, I think, is extremely interesting. It goes right back to something like 'The Beggar's Opera' - the underbelly of society, how it operates, and how that reflects their so-called betters.

The relentless pressures of the so-called marketplace have distorted all our culture industries.

White-on-white crime is a devastation in America like so-called black-on-black crime. It's not black or white-on-white crime. It's proximity murder.

Those who see beauty almost too intensely can easily look mad to those who are functioning within the confines of so-called normal life.

This ambivalence about the value of cooking raises an interesting question: Has our culture devalued food-work because it is unfulfilling by it's very nature or because it has traditionally been women's work?

It seems as though we can no longer imagine anyone but a professional or an institution or a product supplying our daily needs or solving our problems. This learned helplessness is, of course, much to the advantage of the corporations eager to step forward and do all this work for us. One

It seems as though we can no longer imagine anyone but a professional or an institution or a product supplying our daily needs or solving our problems. This learned helplessness is, of course, much to the advantage of the corporations eager to step forward and do all this work for us.

As a culture," Pollan writes, "we seem to have arrived at a place where whatever native wisdom we may once have possessed about eating has been replaced by confusion and anxiety.

But what is good and what is bad? That has become increasingly confusing in this age of relativity. There seem to be no mores that are considered universal. Can that be so? Look at the Ten Commandments.

In a land where all slaves are servants, all servants are slaves, and thus ends democracy.

Thomas Macaulay's History of England

Justice is relative to social meanings. A given society is just if its substantive life is lived in a certain way, in a way that is faithful to the shared understandings of the members.

Why do people respect the package rather than the man?

Women are not entirely wrong when they reject the moral rules proclaimed in society, since it is we men alone who have made them.

The customs and practices of life in society sweep us along.

If it be well weighed, to say that a man lieth, is as much to say, as that he is brave towards God and a coward towards men.

Our understanding is conducted solely by means of the word: anyone who falsifies it betrays public society. It is the only tool by which we communicate our wishes and our thoughts; it is our soul's interpreter: if we lack that, we can no longer hold together; we can no longer know each other. When words deceive us, it breaks all intercourse and loosens the bonds of our polity.

The other two are rich and noble; examples of virtue rarely make their home among people like that.

Whatever it be, whether art or nature, that has inscribed in us this condition of living by reference to others, it does us much more harm than good. We defraud ourselves out of what is actually useful to us in order to make appearances conform to common opinion. We care less about the real truth of our inner selves than about how we are known to the public.

There is nothing more unsociable than man, and nothing more sociable: unsociable by his vice, sociable by his nature.

What is it that makes all our quarrels end in death nowadays? Whereas our fathers knew degrees of vengeance we now begin at the end and straightway talk of nothing but killing. What causes that, if not cowardice?

The majority of our polities, as Aristotle says, are like the Cyclops, abandoning the guidance of the women and children to each individual man according to his mad and injudicious ideas: hardly any, except the polities of Sparta and of Crete, have entrusted the education of children to their laws.

What a prodigious conscience must that be that can be at quiet within itself whilst it harbors under the same roof, with so agreeing and so calm a society, both the crime and the judge?

Meus próprios costumes, que não chegam a distar uma polegada dos costumes correntes, mesmo assim me tornam de certo modo intratável e insociável para o meu século. Não sei se me desgosto sem razão com o mundo em que vivo, mas sei bem que não teria razão se me queixasse de ele se desgostar comigo tanto quanto eu com ele.