Quotes About Society

The slogan for contemporary capitalism--fear and disorder are the catalysts for each new leap forward

Because one of the greatest misconceptions in the climate debate is that our society is refusing to change, protecting a status quo called "business-as-usual." The truth is that there is no business-as-usual. The energy sector is changing dramatically all the time—but the vast majority of those changes are taking us in precisely the wrong direction, toward energy sources with even higher planet-warming emissions than their conventional versions.

It wins every time we accept that we have only bad choices available to us: austerity or extraction, poisoning or poverty.

In the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us."28

During extraordinary historical moments—both world wars, the aftermath of the Great Depression, or the peak of the civil rights era—the usual categories dividing "activists" and "regular people" became meaningless because the project of changing society was so deeply woven into the project of life. Activists were, quite simply, everyone.

society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization.

We all know, or at least sense, that the world is upside down: we act as if there is no end to what is actually finite—fossil fuels and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions. And we act as if there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually bountiful—the financial resources to build the kind of society we need. The task of our time is to turn this around: to challenge this false scarcity.

We need to build a society around the understanding that well-being for all matters more than economic growth. Only then can we truly move away from climate0changing pollution and climate injustice.

Under the neoliberal worldview, governments exist in order to create the optimal conditions for private interests to maximize their profits and wealth, based on the theory that the profits and economic growth that follow will benefit everyone in the trickle-down from the top - eventually.

Today I fear that we are in fact waking up to a surveillance society that is already all around us. —Richard Thomas, U.K. information commissioner, November 2006

Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us."28

Too often, when politicians introduce climate policies divorced from a broader agenda of economic justice, the policies they introduce are actively unjust.

What's extraordinary about Donald Trump's presidency is that now we are all inside the Trump branded world, whether we want to be or not.

By this point in history—after the 2008 collapse of Wall Street and in the midst of layers of ecological crises—free market fundamentalists should, by all rights, be exiled to a similarly irrelevant status, left to fondle their copies of Milton Friedman's Free to Choose and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in obscurity.

We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. —MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. "Beyond Vietnam," 1967

O]urs is a culture of the perpetual present, one that deliberately severs itself from the past that created us as well as the future we are shaping with our actions.

Building a livable world isn't rocket science; it's far more complex than that. - Ed Ayres

Araminta had generally considered the laws of etiquette as the rules of the chase, and divided them into categories: those which everyone broke, all the time; those which one could not break without being frowned at; and those which caused one to be quietly and permanently left out of every future invitation to the field.

I don't know why Americans won't just talk about the weather like reasonable people

No matter what a woman's appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize - as her personal problem - observations she makes about the beauty myth in society.

The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking beautiful. If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.

Culture stereotypes women to fit the myth by flattening the feminine into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty; women are allowed a mind or a body but not both.

The economics of industrialized countries would collapse if women didn't do the work they do for free: According to economist Marilyn Waring, throughout the West it generates between 25 and 40 percent of the gross national product.

Healthy and diseased, as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control.