Quotes About Society

Well, you not the first by a long shot. An integrated army is integrated misery. You all go fight, come back, they treat you like dogs. Change that. They treat dogs better.

We live in a world where justice equals vengeance. Where private profit drives public policy.

As in the case of many misanthropes, his disdain for people led him into a profession designed to serve them.

Booker cut her off. "Scientifically there's no such thing as race, Bride, so racism without race is a choice. Taught, of course, by those who need it, but still a choice. Folks who practice it would be nothing without it.

if she wishes to be American—to be known as such and to actually belong—she must become a thing unimaginable in her home country: she must become white.

focused, therefore, on how something as grotesque as the demonization of an entire race could take root inside the most delicate member of society: a child; the most vulnerable member: a female.

Virginia law, in 1831, is instructive and representative.

Homelessness and crime have been recharacterized and redeployed so that "public space" is increasingly seen as a protected preserve open only to the law-abiding and the

We glean what is public primarily, but not exclusively, from media.

Every nigger I know wants to be cool. There's nothing wrong with controlling yourself, but can't can't nobody control other people.

Navigating a white male world was not threatening. It wasn't even interesting. I was more interesting than they were.

And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.

Yet here, not twenty miles away from a quiet, orderly community, there were women like none he knew or ever heard tell of.

there is something the press can do in language that a society cannot do. You've done it before. Move us closer to participatory democracy; help us distinguish between a pseudo-experience and a living one, between an encounter and an engagement, between theme and life. Help us all try to figure out what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.

You stupid, man. Real stupid. Ain't no law for no colored man except the one sends him to the chair," said Guitar.

When the land kills of its own volition we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live

Every other institution in society is built on the family. If the family disintegrates, those institutions that depend on strong families will disintegrate as well. Once that happens, there is no law you can pass that will make up for the devastation. There is no program you can institute that will fix what happens to people when a home is shattered. There is no politician you can elect who can bring harmony and social order when the family is decimated.

Olmsted's initial faith in reasoned discourse had also waned. In the course of his travels, the South's "leading men" had struck him as implacable: convinced of the superiority of their caste-bound society, intent on expanding it, and utterly contemptuous of the North. "They are a mischievous class—

Thinking 'economistically', as we have done now for thirty years, is not intrinsic to humans.

the military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.

triple evils of modernity: Nazism, Communism and 'Americanism'.

However: the predictable consequence of the nanny state, even the post-ideological nanny state, was that for anyone who had grown up knowing nothing different it was the duty of the state to make good on its promise of an ever better society—and thus the fault of the state when things did not turn out well.

The absence of trust is clearly inimical to a well-run society. The great Jane Jacobs noted as much with respect to the very practical business of urban life and the maintenance of cleanliness and civility on city streets. If we don't trust each other, our towns will look horrible and be nasty places to live. Moreover, she observed, you cannot institutionalize trust. Once corroded, it is virtually impossible to restore.

In the eyes of Hayek and his contemporaries, the European tragedy had thus been brought about by the shortcomings of the Left: first through its inability to achieve its objectives and then thanks to its failure to withstand the challenge from the Right. Each of them, albeit in different ways, arrived at the same conclusion: the best—indeed the only—way to defend liberalism and an open society was to keep the state out of economic life.