Quotes About Society

Eventually she came to believe that her condition was one that couldn't be treated medically; she was doomed to demand more decency and consideration from her fellow humans than they demanded of themselves.

Well, apparently, I'm trying to fix the entire human race, one flaming asshole at a time.

Erin thought, ludicrously, of how disappointed her mother would be. When one's only daughter is hacked to death wearing a sequined bra top and a G-string--well, there's really no way to explain it to one's friends at the orchid club.

An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth - scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books - might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex.

What if, despite all our pretense and disguise, it was necessary to appear in public with the person we loved most of all? Imagine this a prerequisite for social discourse on Earth.

Thomas Jefferson taught that a democracy was impractical unless the people were educated.

I remind myself that madmen really exist. Sometimes they achieve the highest levels of political power in modern industrial nations.

The Yale anthropologist Weston La Barre goes far as to argue that `a surprisingly good case could be made that much of culture is hallucination` and that `the whole intent and function of ritual appears to be... a group wish to hallucinate reality`.

President Dwight Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence);

Society corrupts the best of us. It is a little unfair, I think, to criticize a person for not sharing the enlightenment of a later epoch, but it is also profoundly saddening that such prejudices were so extremely pervasive. The question raises nagging uncertainties about which of the conventional truths of our own age will be considered unforgivable bigotry by the next.

Would not a rational society spend more on understanding and preventing, than on preparing for, the next war?

The progress and perfection of mathematics are linked closely with the prosperity of the state.

The level of public education in science and technology is an important sign of the national scientific accomplishment. It is a matter of overall importance in economic development, scientific advance, and the progress of society.

Science requires us to be freed of gross superstition and gross injustice both. Often, superstition and injustice are imposed by the same ecclesiastical and secular authorities, working hand in glove. It is no surprise that political revolutions, scepticism about religion, and the rise of science might go together.

He had a natural appetite for the wonders of the Universe. He wanted to know about science. It's just that all the science had gotten filtered out before it reached him. Our cultural motifs, our educational system, our communications media had failed this man. What the society permitted to trickle through was mainly pretense and confusion. It had never taught him how to distinguish real science from the cheap imitation. He knew nothing about how science works.

The percent likelihood of a society becoming physically violent if it is physically affectionate toward its infants and tolerant of premarital sexual behavior is 2 percent. The probability of this relationship occurring by chance is 125,000 to one. I am not aware of any other developmental variable that has such a high degree of predictive validity. [James W. Prescott] p 274

individuals so employed need almost never accept responsibility for their actions. They are protected and anonymous. Military secrecy makes the military the most difficult sector of any society for the citizens to monitor. If we do not know what they do, it is very hard for us to stop them.

ELLIE IGNORED random access and advanced sequentially through the television stations. Lifestyles of the Mass Murderers and You Bet Your Ass were on adjacent channels. It was clear at a glance that the promise of the medium remained unfulfilled.

However, in part for reasons of organizational convenience, modern societies are structured as if all humans had the same sleep requirements; and in many parts of the world there is a satisfying sense of moral rectitude in rising early. The amount of sleep required for buffer dumping would then depend on how much we have both thought and experienced since the last sleep period.

El secreto, con pocas excepciones, es profundamente incompatible con la democracia y la ciencia.

La idea general de una aplicación democrática del escepticismo es que todo el mundo debería tener las herramientas esenciales para valorar eficaz y constructivamente las afirmaciones de conocimiento

Dedicarle tiempo a la física es un lujo —le comentó a Ellie—. Mucha gente podría hacer lo mismo si contara con iguales oportunidades, pero si tenemos que recorrer las calles en busca de comida, no nos quedará tiempo para la física. Mi obligación, por lo tanto, es mejorar las condiciones para los jóvenes científicos de mi país.