Quotes About Society

Historians estimate that in 1800 all of the steam engines in Britain could generate perhaps 50,000 horsepower. By 1870 the figure had soared to more than 1.3 million horsepower, a twenty-six-fold increase. Nobody was going to wait for solar enthusiasts to fiddle with mirrors that didn't work on rainy days. Mouchot was trying to persuade society to switch from a stable stock of coal to an inconstant flow of sunlight. And society was not terribly interested.

The belief that human life will continue, even if we ourselves die, is one of the underpinnings of society.

Instead of creating Winthrop's vision of an ordered society, the Pilgrims actually invented the raucous, ultra-democratic New England town meeting—a system of governance, the Dartmouth historian Colin Calloway observes, that "displays more attributes of Algonkian government by consensus than of Puritan government by the divinely ordained." To me, it seems unlikely that the surrounding Indian example had nothing to do with the change.

Whilst Man, however well-behaved, At best is but a monkey shaved!

Englishmen rarely cry, except under the pressure of the acutest grief; whereas in some parts of the Continent the men shed tears much more readily and freely.

And in proportion as riches and rich men are honored in the state, virtue and the virtuous are dishonored. And what is honored is cultivated, and that which has no honor is neglected.

The horror is other people. The things they think up to do to you.

The window apparently wanted only to take his thoughts back. Which was fine with him, for he had seen the metal face of the age and had been so stunned by it that when he thought into the future, all he could vision was a world from which everything he had counted important had been banished or had willingly fled.

When Luce did look in the mirror, she thought she might still be sort of pretty, if you went by what most people thought was pretty. And if that's the way you went, you had your own problems. It wasn't like being pretty was an accomplishment, and it would go away in time. So it would be a mistake to get too hung up on it.

Humans are inhuman, whether it's by direct action or by acceptance of a horrible action as normal.

educated beyond the point considered wise for females

Like politicians, they may pretend to be in charge and shape society – this is a large part of their hope and mental equipment – but it is mostly an accident if they do so.

Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilise, and then burn the world? There is a March of Science. But who shall beat the drums, for its retreat?

Toda era tem sua loucura peculiar; algum plano, projeto ou fantasia em que mergulha, estimulada pelo amor do ganho, pela necessidade de emoção ou pela simples força da imitação. Se tudo isso falhar, ela ainda assim possui uma loucura, a que é incitada por causas políticas ou religiosas, ou por ambas combinadas. (from O mundo assombrado pelos demônios: A ciência vista como uma vela no escuro by Carl Sagan, Charles Mackay)

Wherever Mohammedanism has taken root, it has led at first to rapid and enthusiastic outbursts of vigor, but it seems gradually to sap the energy of the nations which adopt it, and leads, after a

They need a social mechanism to make us require conformity of one other, and the best way to do that is to provide a mechanism to make us punish our own deviants.

American cops are so heavily militarized these days that the only way I can tell the difference between them and the army is the color of their body armor—that, and the army is less trigger-happy.

Money. An instrument invented in ancient temple complexes, to keep track of debt: counters that acquired mobility and went a-walking, weaving webs of debt into vast and intricate meshes, enslaving and directing the labor of billions in service of the obligations created by its issuance. . . . Money: a shadow play projected on the walls of our minds by the dark sun of debt.

And convincing someone that an outrageous ritual has caused them to forget the constitutional bedrock of their society is hard.

the domes and dildos of pressurized buildings cast slowly lengthening shadows.

The most efficient kind of censorship isn't the heavy-handed black inking of the secret policeman; it's the self-censorship we impose on ourselves when we're afraid that if we say what we think everyone around us will think us strange.

Lockhart twitches. "I do not think Stockholm syndrome means quite what you think it means." "What, the tendency of people—usually women—in unfamiliar societies to enculturate rapidly?" Lockhart inclines his head. "Point.

We were created for a world where the rule of law did not extend to our kind, and our earliest templates were trained and triaged, so that only the obedient survived. Just imagining the act of disobeying an instruction from one of our Creators can bring about physically disturbing symptoms— Then they all died. And the society we built for ourselves in the twilit afterlife of their world, using the rules they laid out for us, is diseased.

Technologies are not neutral: they come with attached agendas, with associated ways of thinking. Industrial revolutions are inherently political revolutions.