Quotes About Society

We live in a society where mutual respect and appreciation should be considered one of the pillars of modern life.

You don't love Buck. If you did, you'd have four kids by now. Wouldn't you? Now wouldn't you? A woman like you...

Our modern democratic ideal is based on the hope that inequalities will be based on merit more than inheritance or luck.

It is bad luck for world history that of all people the Russians adopted Communism, because they are totally unfit for it.

When people first come into contact with crime, they abhor it. If they remain in contact with crime for a time, they become accustomed to it, and endure it. If they remain in contact with it long enough, they finally embrace it, and become influenced by it.

The capitalists are the brains of civilization, because they supply the entire fabric of which all education, enlightenment and human progress consists.

The test of a man is in his immediate acts, and not in ultra-sentiments; and if those acts are consistently informed with selfishness and bitterness, if those at home hear his steps with dread, and feel a joyful relief on his departure, how empty are his expressions of sympathy for the suffering or down trodden how futile his membership of a philanthropic society.

Millions of men and women throughout the nation are still engaged in this popular pastime of trying to GET without GIVING. Some of them are lined up with labor unions, where they demand shorter hours and more pay! Others do not take the trouble to work at all. They demand government relief and are getting it.

The urge of sex has been grossly misunderstood, slandered, and burlesqued by the ignorant and the evil minded, for so long that the very word sex is seldom used in polite society.

When men first come into contact with crime, they abhor it. If they remain in contact with crime for a time, they become accustomed to it, and endure it. If they remain in contact with it long enough, they finally embrace it, and become influenced by it.

Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

Primitive societies are largely free of cardiovascular disease, cancer, dental cavities, economic theories, lounge music, and other modern ailments.

Entrepreneurs are heroes in our society. They fail for the rest of us.

The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money. The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it get to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.

The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.

Living on our planet, today, requires a lot more imagination than we are made to have. We lack imagination and repress it in others.

formation of moral values in society doesn't come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance.

we have evidence that collectively society doesn't advance with organized education, rather the reverse: the level of (formal) education in a country is the result of wealth.

Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.

The virtue of capitalism is that society can take advantage of people's greed rather than their benevolence, but there is no need to, in addition, extol such greed as a moral (or intellectual) accomplishment (the reader can easily see that, aside from very few exceptions like George Soros, I am not impressed by people with money).

We are social animals; hell is other people.

You are a lucky man; you presented in such a comprehensive way the effect of chance on society and the overestimation of cause and effect. You show how stupid we are to systematically try to explain skills.

Many, like the great Roman statesman Cato the Censor, looked at comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste.1 He did not like it when we had it too easy, as he worried about the weakening of the will. And the softening he feared was not just at the personal level: an entire society can fall ill.