Quotes About Society

and change within the British polity, I will stress the significance of the political culture. Before we proceed to an analysi

The theme of previous editions of The British Polity has

feature of British society, yet it is difficult to define. In the United Kingdom, the term is employed in different senses. As the historian David Cannadine has argued, it can be used to denote social attitudes ("us" versus "them"), groupings in society based on occupation (upper, middle, and working), and hierarchy (in effect, status but not necessarily inherited, but rather earned or acquired, status).10 These distinctions are useful in making sense of how

values. To know the media through which values and beliefs that coalesce to form the political culture are transmitte

he theme of previous editions of The British Polity has been that of continuity

themselves were deemed inadequate to meet Britain's fundamental

He cut through the Twenty-First Century gallery, past the big plastic statues of Pluto and Mickey, animal-headed gods of lost America.

They seemed simple people, and he imagined that their society had no machines at all, but as they brought him through the town gates he saw delicate airborne ships of wood and glass rising like dragonflies from tall stone mooring-towers. Silvery discs, like misty mirrors, swivelled and pivoted on their undersides, and the air beneath them rippled like a heat-haze.

You have to take the long view, Tom. It isn't only Traction Cities which poison the air and tear up the earth. All cities do that, static or mobile. It's human beings that are the problem. Everything that they do pollutes and destroys.

he cut through the 21st Century Gallery, past the big plastic statues of Pluto and Mickey, animal headed gods of lost America

But boys will be boys, even the ones who are only girls dressed up: That's one of the rules of the world.

The most complex analyses grow beautifully simple as they become public objects.

Whether or not a monarch or a mass leader has great executive ability or power, modern politics suggests that his primary function may well be psychological; he acts as a center around which otherwise disturbed lives can be organized.

The American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents.

belonged to the respectable class of society, but must have been poor; for he depended for support on a trade which he learned in accordance with rabbinical custom; it was the trade of tent-making, very common in Cilicia, and not profitable except in large cities.

Comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life.

Malcolm Muggeridge captured this parting of the ways in a gloomy piece for Encounter: 'Each time I return to England from abroad,' he observed, 'the country seems a little more run-down than when I went away; its streets a little shabbier, its railway carriages and restaurants a little dingier; the editorial pretensions of its newspapers a little emptier, and the vainglorious rhetoric of its politicians a little more fatuous.'29

Durkheim goes on to argue that the cult of the individual has been misconstrued as the cult of the self-interested ego. Durkheim maintains that a collection of purely egotistical individuals could not form a society at all, that indeed, there has to be the recognition of others' interests, expressed in 'moral individualism' by the importance of equality and rights.

The greatest danger to both society and the individual, we learn from Socrates, is the suspension of critical thought.

Our history is every human history; a black and gory business, with more scoundrels than wise men at the lead, and more louts than both put together to cheer and follow.

The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930)

They are afraid. They would, today, keep secret a thousand things that, yesterday, they would have told one another freely. Freedom. Where is it now? We are driving it into limbo—their kind. To limbo.

it is only the unthinking mind that finds anything unthinkable. To use the word is just to show your membership card in the society of morons.

The world hasn't changed that much; men still rule.