Quotes About Society

Postman argued that our society was sliding into a troubling relationship with technology. We were, he noted, no longer discussing the trade-offs surrounding new technologies, balancing the new efficiencies against the new problems introduced. If it's high-tech, we began to instead assume, then it's good. Case closed.

Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World," he argued in his 1993 book on the topic. "It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant.

The alternative, to not embrace all things Internet, is, as Postman would say, "invisible and therefore irrelevant.

Much in the same way that the "innovation" of highly processed foods in the mid-twentieth century led to a global health crisis, the unintended side effects of digital communication tools—a sort of social fast food—are proving to be similarly worrisome.

we were pushed into it by the high-end device companies and attention economy conglomerates who discovered there are vast fortunes to be made in a culture dominated by gadgets and apps.

It's as if our species has evolved into one that flourishes in depth and wallows in shallowness, becoming what we might call Homo sapiens deepensis.

It's safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Rooseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better.

People who relieve others of their money with guns are called robbers. It does not alter the immorality of the act when the income transfer is carried out by government.

In a free society, government reflects the soul of its people. If people want change at the top, they will have to live in different ways. Our major social problems are not the cause of our decadence. They are a reflection of it.

Today, we have more information than ever, but less wisdom; more talk, but less listening; more things in the superficial showroom (celebrities are a good example), and less in the intellectual storeroom (that would be knowledge).

La cultura è un sistema di limitazioni imposte al comportamento naturale dell'uomo: i non-acculturati, coloro che non sono in grado o rifiutano di interiorizzare i principi morali limitatori, e dunque di autoregolarsi, vengono governati con lo strumento della coercizione.

A man can be a bachelor, and still be a man—because of his mind, his character, his work. But a woman without children? She's a spinster, Stevie—and a spinster is always something less than a woman.

It is never easier to understand the mind of a bomb-wielding anarchist than when standing amid a crush of those ladies and gentlemen who have the money and the temerity to style themselves "New York Society.

And so the new century will bring a new kind of law,' was how Mr. Picton summed things up..... 'Proceedings where victims and witnesses are put on trial instead of defendants, where a murderer in identified as 'a woman' instead of an individual....If things go on like this we'll find ourselves in some shadow world, where lawyers use the ignorance of the average citizen to manipulate justice the way priests did in the Middle ages.

A noi fa piacere che uomini come Beecham esistano: essi incarnano tutto ciò che vi è di oscuro nel nostro mondo, nella nostra società. Ma le cose che hanno fatto di Beecham un mostro? Bè, quelle le tolleriamo, anzi, ne godiamo...

could never have turned his back on human society, nor society on him, and why? Because he was—perversely, perhaps, but utterly—tied to that society. He was its offspring, its sick conscience—a living reminder of all the hidden crimes we commit when we close ranks to live among each other. He craved human society, craved the chance to show people what their 'society' had done to him. And the odd thing is, society craved him, too.

It isn't really possible for men to understand how much the world doesn't want women to be complete people. The most important thing a woman can be, in our society—more important, even, than honest or decent—is identifiable.

Of course, the defenders of decent society and the disciples of degeneracy are often the same people

Imagine, he said, that you enter a large, somewhat crumbling hall that echoes with the sounds of people mumbling and talking repetitively to themselves. All around you these people fall into prostrate positions, some of them weeping. Where are you? Sara's answer was immediate: in an asylum. Perhaps, Kreizler answered, but you could also be in a church. In the one place the behavior would be considered mad; in the other, not only sane, but as respectable as any human activity can be.

We revel in men like Beecham, Moore—they are the easy repositories of all that is dark in our very social world. But the things that helped make Beecham what he was? Those, we tolerate. Those, we even enjoy…

Prior to the twentieth century, persons suffering from mental illness were thought to be "alienated," not only from the rest of society but from their own true natures. Those experts who studied mental pathologies were therefore known as alienists.

It is never easier to understand the mind of a bomb-wielding anarchist than when standing amid a crush of those ladies and gentlemen who have the money and temerity to style themselves "New York Society.

They'll want him to be mad, of course,' Laszlo mused, not hearing me. 'The doctors here, the newspapers, the judges; they'd like to think that only a madman would shoot a five-year-old girl in the head. It creates certain … difficulties, if we are forced to accept that our society can produce sane men who commit such acts.

Absolutely nothing brings out the killer instinct in the upper crust of New York Society like a charity function.