Quotes About Society

she said spontaneously that all well-to-do and rich people are inhuman. But was she human then? I had asked her, to which she gave no answer.

For people, generally, their story of the universe and the human role in the universe is their primary source of intelligibility and value. ... The deepest crises experienced by any society are those moments of change when the story becomes inadequate for meeting the survival demands of a present situation.

I stay in line if everybody is standing politely in line, but if people begin to surge toward the ticket window I am alert to be—though never among the first—not among the last.

Call them the people of the Dark Ages if you will, but do not underestimate the desire of these early medieval men and women for the rule of law.

As Hayek, Milton Friedman, and so many others pointed out, a state with power, means, and inclination to intervene so heavily in economic affairs is unlikely to stop there. In the process of all this, religion and civil society are crowded out, appreciation for their role languishes, and the groundwork is laid for more restrictions on them in the future.

Marx set forth a classic statement of inherent class antagonism on the market

I am getting more and more convinced that the war-peace question is the key to the whole libertarian business," Rothbard noted privately in 1956. I am equally convinced. If we can't get this right, who cares about the Department of Education or the minimum wage?

When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown."11 As individuals and as a society, we should be less accepting of superstition and sloppy thinking, and should strive to develop those "habits of mind" that promote a more accurate view of the world.

In our society, 80 percent of the adult population suffer back pain. Apparently, the progress of technology is based on progressively deteriorating backs. This is ironic, because, in our contemporary technological society, the reward for escaping from back-breaking manual labor should be freedom from such physical pain.

It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession

Backlock, a poet blind from his birth, could describe visual objects with accuracy; Professor Sanderson, who was also blind, gave excellent lectures on color, and taught others the theory of ideas which they had and he had not. In the social sphere these gifted ones are mostly women; they can watch a world which they never saw, and estimate forces of which they have only heard. We call it intuition.

I hate to be what is called a clever girl--there are too many of that sort now!

Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenances begin to cramp natural feeling, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too little of enough.

the social mould civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies...

I have been thinking ... that the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies…

I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!

I can't bear that they,and everybody, should think people wicked because they may have chosen to live their own way!It is really these opinions that make the best intentioned people reckless, and actually become immoral!

I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should be killed directly, before their souls come to 'em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about!

the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns.

He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan-a system of ethics above all others calculated to win popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society.

Most of the misery had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate sensations.

Four months or so of torturing ecstasy in his society - of pleasure girded about with pain. After that the blackness of unutterable night.

The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary... She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

An unedified palate is the irrepressible cloven foot of the upstart. The