Quotes About Society

In all the known history of Mankind, advances have been made primarily in physical technology; in the capacity of handling the inanimate world about Man. Control of self and society has been left to to chance or to the vague gropings of intuitive ethical systems based on inspiration and emotion. As a result no culture of greater stability than about fifty-five percent has ever existed, and these only as the result of great human misery.

It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be ...

The Solarians have given up something mankind has had for a million years; something worth more than atomic power, cities, agriculture, tools, fire, everything; because it's something that made everything possible (...) The tribe, sir. Cooperation between individuals.

With the destruction of our social fabric, science will be broken into a million pieces. Individuals will know much of exceedingly tiny facets of what there is to know.

When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

There is a longing for a supposedly simple and virtuous past that is almost universal among the people of a complex and vicious society.

I wouldn't want [the people of Baleyworld] to live that long as a general thing. The pace of historical and intellectual advance would then become too slow. Those at the top would stay in power too long. Baleyworld would sink into conversation and decay - as your world has done.

You're surrounded by people in the waking period, and you feel their eyes and their hopes on you. You can't stand up under it. In the sleep period, you're free.

There's no record in the history of the Galaxy of any society being so foolish as to use nuclear explosions as a weapon of war.

To [the government] it didn't matter what happened to the American people as long as america in the abstract was kept strong.

It is a difficult choice sometimes whether to feel revolted at the male sex or merely to dismiss them as contemptible.

Habrá otras crisis en el porvenir, cuando el poder del dinero se haya convertido en una fuerza muerta como es ahora la religión.

It was a sign of decaying culture, of course, that dams had been built against the further development of ideas.

Science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

And after the Fall will come inevitable barbarism

la característica de una clase privilegiada es siempre la misma: la posesión del ocio, como única gran recompensa de su condición.

But you are telling me, Susan, that the 'Society for Humanity' is right; and that Mankind has lost its own say in its future.' 'It never had any, really. It was always at the mercy of economic and sociological forces it did not understand--at the whims of climate, and the fortunes of war.

Golan, spuse Pelorat, am impresia ca progresul civilizatiei nu reprezinta nimic altceva decat un exercitiu de limitare a intimitatii.

But now, Earthmen are all so coddled, so enwombed in their imprisoning caves of steel, that they are caught forever.

George Weston, after all was only a man—poor thing—and his wife made full use of every device which a clumsier and more scrupulous sex has learned, with reason and futility, to fear.

Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

And then again, in a society given over, as that of the First Empire was, to the physical sciences and inanimate technology, there was a vague but mighty sociological push away from the study of the mind. It was less respectable because less immediately useful; and it was poorly financed since it was less profitable.

We of Solaria alone learned how life was to be lived. We did not herd and flock like animals, as they did on Earth, as they did on other worlds, as they did even on the other Spacer worlds. We lived each alone, with robots to help us, viewing each other electronically as often as we wished, but coming within natural sight of one another only rarely.

What man does for his own desires and comforts affects the complex total-of-life, the ecology, and his short-term gains can bring long-term disadvantages. The Machines taught us to set up a human society which would minimize that, but the near-disaster of the early Twenty-first Century has left mankind suspicious of innovations.