Quotes About Society

A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.

Desde los inicios de la civilización, en las sociedades ha habido clases privilegiadas. Unos grupos oprimen a otros y procuran mantener estas jerarquías de poder. Los hijos de los privilegiados crecen confiando en que, sin ningún esfuerzo particular por su parte, mantendrán su posición privilegiada.

Some portion of the decision-making that influences the future of our civilization is plainly in the hands of charlatans.

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. What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope?

Carl Sagan Quotes We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. Carl Sagan

One of the greatest gifts adults can give - to their offspring and to their society - is to read to children.

Taken together, the dramatic societal shifts – often in ten generations or less – provide a compelling refutation of the claim that we are condemned, without hope of reprieve, to live out our lives in a barely disguised chimpanzee social order.

You know what happens? People go to the movies instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them !

Nature is not on the side of a girl over thirty

We are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world." -

What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.

Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other peoples' convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well-treated by culture.

There is no question that a society that sets out to control its citizens' use of drugs sets out on the slippery path to totalitarianism.

We will amuse and entertain ourselves into extinction.

Be a dear and fetch a needle and some thread." Tucking one wayward breast back into her drooping bodice, Lottie muttered, "I don't think this is quite what Laura had in mind when she said my coming out would be the talk of the ton.

I thought you just told me they used radio." They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat.

We have thousands and thousands of people living homeless on the streets of our cities at the same time that we have men and women earning millions of dollars a year running companies that make products whose continued usage will ruin our health, our environment, and our values. The irony is incredible. It's obscene.

Los gobiernos centrales siempre han constituido uno de los mayores peligros para la humanidad.

the world his parents and grandparents had known was gone forever, as dead as the moral and social fabric that had failed to hold it together.

It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.

Capitalism, too, ws forged in blood and tears; it is just that it has survived long enough to forget about much of this horror.

Most of the reforms we now regard as precious features of liberal society—universal suffrage, free universal education, freedom of the press, trade unions and so on—were won by popular struggle in the teeth of ferocious ruling-class resistance.

It is worth noting in this respect that the original proletariat was not the blue-collar male working class. It was lower-class women in ancient society. The word "proletariat" comes to us from the Latin word for "offspring," meaning those who were too poor to serve the state with anything but their wombs.

Culture was now largely a matter of how to keep people harmlessly distracted when they were not working.