Quotes About Society

Likewise, rather than focusing by default on how to increase economic activity, ask how the content and structure of that activity might be shaping society, politics and power. And just how big can the economy become, given Earth's ecological capacity?

The Wealth of Nations.

tax employees, and you'll head for a jobless economy, as many countries are discovering today. It is happening in part thanks to the twentieth century's legacy of perverse tax policies, which charge firms for hiring humans (through payroll taxes), subsidise them for buying robots (through tax-deductible capital investments), and levy next to nothing on the use of land and non-renewable resources.

As economist Tim Jackson deftly put it, we are 'persuaded to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to make impressions that won't last on people we don't care about'.

Over the course of two centuries—from the 1770s to the 1970s, as economic man's depiction morphed from a nuanced portrait to a crude cartoon—what had started as a model of man had turned into a model for man.

The pernicious effects of the self-interest theory have been most disturbing,' concludes Frank. 'By encouraging us to expect the worst in others, it brings out the worst in us: dreading the role of the chump, we are often loath to heed our nobler instincts.

I highly recommend cleanliness. It pleases women and annoys men, which are two excellent ways to get on in society.

There are so many sad people nowadays that sadness looks normal.

Gonzaga were aware of, though seemingly undisturbed by, the rise of a strong merchant class financially outreaching the aristocracy, the hordes of Protestants in the north; and the renewed ambition and drive of the king of France.

Inquest juries frequently linked suicide to cheap literature. When a twelve-year-old servant boy hanged himself in Brighton in 1892, the jury delivered a verdict of 'suicide during temporary insanity, induced by reading trashy novels'. When a twenty-one-year-old farm labourer in Warwickshire shot himself in the head in 1894, the coroner suggested that the fifty penny dreadfuls found in his room had had 'an unhinging and mesmeric effect' upon his mind.

Women are supposed to be very calm generally, but women feel just as men feel.

He thought of the Finishing School for Barbies where long-legged, high-breasted, stomachless girls went to get shaved clean, get their toenails painted pink, their nipples removed, and all body opening sewn shut, except for their mouths, which curved in perpetual smiles and led nowhere.

Government worried that the parishes could not cope with such demands, and there was a widely held notion that the able-bodied were indolently living on handouts.

A man's home is his castle, but a woman's body has never been wholly her own. Historically, it's belonged to her nation, her community, her father, her family, her husband—in 1973, when Roe was decided, marital rape was legal in every state.

It's one thing for a rape victim to speak up, or a woman with a wanted pregnancy that has turned into a medical catastrophe. But why can't a woman just say, This wasn't the right time for me? Or two children (or one, or none) are enough? Why must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? It's as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman's life from first period to menopause

Contrary to the popular stereotype of abortion-seeking women as promiscuous teenagers or child-hating professionals, around 6 in 10 women who have abortions are already mothers.

I never realized until lately that women were supposed to be the inferior sex.

There are some circles in America where it seems to be more socially acceptable to carry a hand-gun than a packet of cigarettes.

It's a man's world, and you men can have it.

It's a man's world, and you men can have it.

During the sixteenth, seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries, when people avoided water and believed that a clean linen shirt extracted dirt, there was little or no demand for toilet soap. The rich women who used it, mostly on face and hands, thought of it as more a cosmetic or perfume than a cleanser.

When the middle and upper classes feared water, roughly from the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century, they washed as little as peasants or the urban poor.

Because the middle classes and the nouveaux riches welcomed gas, water closets and piped-in water, the upper classes drew back. Many a denizen of a sprawling, stony-cold country estate looked on "mod cons" as slightly uncouth, over-eager and—worst of all—middle-class.

By the 1880s, however, something happened that no one could have predicted. The United States-rising, pushing and still raw in many ways—had become the Western country that most embraced the gospel of hygiene.