Quotes About Society

Debo decir que siento cierta debilidad por los grupos étnicos margnianados de la actualidad. Parece como si los antropólogos siempre estuviesen acechándolos, como si su unidad familiar media comprendiera tres hijos y un antropólogo que se sienta con ellos y les pregunta qué están desayunando.

Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. — H. G. Wells

Racial ideology was the inevitable product of the persistence of differences of rank, class and peoples in a society that had accepted the concept of equality.

Going against the customs of the Court and high society that consider it normal to make the lower classes wait indefinitely, Hazrat Mahal has never been able to accept this disregard for others, this manner of monopolising their time....this tendency to make them waste their lives, just out of indifference. She knows very well that for those who have nothing, offering their time is proof of their devotion.

That's the problem with civilization. Folks think someone else got to make up their rituals for 'em.

Puritanism—the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. —H. L. Mencken (1949)

For us, Cambodia was an election amid minor eruptions of political violence from a decrepit Khmer Rouge, just dangerous enough to add an edge to the otherwise bacchanalian proceedings. We thought Somalia would be similarly exultant, but instead we're inserted directly into combat. This is a hot war. It's hard to make peace in a society of nomadic warriors who like to fight, and twenty thousand UN and U.S. soldiers are failing.

In Flusserian terms, it doesn't really matter what we tweet (content); it just matters that we keep tweeting (apparatus). For Flusser, the content of any medium is always the series of apparatuses that produced it.

Some decry the law as an imposition of religion. But all law imposes religion in that law is necessarily religious, for all law is an expression of morality.

That a society controls, to a greater or lesser extent, the behavior of its members is a universal but the methods, the particulars of that control, vary from one culture to another.

Normal social behavior requires that we be able to recognize identities in spite of change. Unless we can do so, there can be no human society as we know it.

We may not agree on what a good society is, but... we will never have one until we realize that the public we complain about is us.

A volte è meglio non essere quello che siamo davvero. Non ci fa bene. E alla gente non piace. Bisogna cambiare. Bisogna sforzarsi, e fare respiri profondi, e forse un giorno prendere pillole e imparare trucchi per far finta di essere più come le altre persone. Quelle normali. Ma forse Vanessa aveva ragione, e anche quelle persone, tutte quante, erano guaste a modo loro. Forse passiamo tutti quanti troppo tempo a fingere che non lo siamo.

Law & order embrace on hate's border.

What shall light us to murder & defile if by some chance the Laws of the State happen to get turned off?

How far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself.

I wish the Peace Corps and its volunteers continued success and perseverance. We are grateful for their contributions to society and dedication to providing assistance where it is needed. May the Peace Corps continue its legacy of service, both at home and abroad.

Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.

The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.

Brainwashing, psychotropic drugs, lobotomy, and other more subtle form of psychosurgery; the technocratic control apparatus of the United States has at its fingertips new techniques if which fully exploited could make Orwell's 1984 seem like a benevolent utopia.

In addition to caring for our future, we must care for those around us. A decent society shows compassion for the young, the elderly, the vulnerable, and the poor.

We're creating... an ownership society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they live and say, welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of property.

America is a great force for freedom and prosperity. Yet our greatness is not measured in power or luxuries, but by who we are and how we treat one another. So we strive to be a compassionate, decent, hopeful society.

If a woman could take care of herself, would she still need a man? Would she even want one? And if she didn't want a man, what kind of woman would she be? Would she even be a woman? Because it seemed if you were a woman, the only thing you were really supposed to want was a man.