Quotes About Society

But republics and democracies exist only by virtue of the engagement of their citizens in the management of public affairs. If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants.

Edmund Burke in his critique of the French Revolution. Any society, he wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, which destroys the fabric of its state, must soon be "disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality".

Our problem is to work out a social organization which shall be as efficient as possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way of life." —JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

What is the measurable cost of depriving isolated citizens of access to metropolitan resources? How much are we willing to pay for a good society?

War, in short, concentrated the mind. It had proven possible to convert a whole country into a war machine around a war economy; why then, people asked, could something similar not be accomplished in pursuit of peace? There was no convincing answer.

The social question is back on the agenda.

The more varigated and complicated a society, the greater the chance that those at the top will be ignorant of the realities at the bottom. Efficiency should not be adduced to justify gross inequality.

Our disability is discursive: we simply do not know how to talk about these things any more. For the last thirty years, when asking ourselves whether we support a policy, a proposal or an initiative, we have restricted ourselves to issues of profit and loss - economic questions in the narrowest sense. But this is not an instinctive human condition: it is an acquired taste.

Keynes himself had taken the view that capitalism would not survive if its workings were reduced to merely furnishing the wealthy with the means to get wealthier. It was

Broken eggs make good omelettes. But you cannot build a better society on broken men.

People who live in private spaces contribute actively to the dilution and corrosion of the public space. In other words, they exacerbate the circumstances which drove them to retreat in the first place.

And once we cease to value the public over the private, surely we shall come in time to have difficulty seeing just why we should value law (the public good par excellence) over force.

If we don't respect public goods; if we permit or encourage the privatization of public space, resources and services; if we enthusiastically support the propensity of a younger generation to look exclusively to their own needs: then we should not be surprised to find a steady falling-away from civic engagement in public decision-making.

If 1989 was about re-discovering liberty, what limits are we now willing to place upon it? Even in the most 'freedom-loving' societies, freedom comes with constraints. But if we accept some limitations—and we always do—why not others? Why

otherwise—to deny distinctions of class or wealth or influence—is just a way to promote one set of interests above another.

Take humiliation: what if we treated it as an economic cost, a charge to society? What if we decided to 'quantify' the harm done when people are shamed by their fellow citizens as a condition of receiving the mere necessities of life?

The uncharming qualities of capitalism are its middle ground.

they were increasingly perceived as restrictions upon the self-expression and freedom of the individual.

We face today two practical dilemmas. The first can be succinctly described as the return of the 'social question'.

The second dilemma we face concerns the social consequences of technological change.

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest:

in an Apparently Godless Era.

Margaret Thatcher's notorious bon mot: "there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals and families".

If social democracy has a future, it will be as a social democracy of fear.