Quotes About Society

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: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose.

But each in its own way was affected by the growing intolerance of immoderate inequality, initiating public provision to compensate for private inadequacy.

Over the past thirty years we have thrown all this away.

between 1983 and 2001, mistrustfulness increased markedly in the US, the UK and Ireland—three

What matters is not how affluent a country is but how unequal it is.

Whether capitalist economies thrive best under conditions of freedom is perhaps more of an open question than we like to think.

The legacy of unregulated wealth creation is bitter indeed.

If government is the problem and society does not exist, then the role of the state is reduced once again to that of facilitator.

two world wars had habituated almost everyone to the inevitability of government intervention in daily life.

Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime efforts. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another. And since the experience of the interwar years had clearly revealed the inability of capitalists to protect their own best interests, the liberal state would have to do it for them whether they liked it or not.

By the late '60s, the culture gap separating young people from their parents was perhaps greater than at any point since the early 19th century.

the old ideological Left was part of the problem, not the solution. In

The Social Question, if left unaddressed, does not just go away. It goes instead in search of more radical answers.

The avowedly politicized language of punk rock bands, exemplified in the Sex Pistols' 1976 hit 'Anarchy in the UK', caught the sour mood of the time. But the punk bands' politics were as one-dimensional as their musical range, the latter all too often restricted to three chords and a single beat and dependent upon volume for its effect.

The idea that it was the state's business to know what was good for people—while we accept it uncomplainingly in school curriculums and hospital practices—smacked of eugenics and perhaps euthanasia.

One striking consequence of the disintegration of the public sector has been an increased difficulty in comprehending what we have in common with others.

sense of shared citizenship. This sentiment was crucial to the formation of modern states and the peaceful societies they governed.

the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee used to advise against the 'fundamental fallacy' of believing that 'it is possible by the elaboration of machinery to escape the necessity of trusting one's fellow human beings'.10

What exactly is a 'gated community' and why does it matter?

Shanghai—the term denotes people who have gathered together into affluent subdivisions of suburbs and cities and fondly suppose themselves functionally independent of the rest of society.

For three decades following the war, economists, politicians, commentators and citizens all agreed that high public expenditure, administered by local or national authorities with considerable latitude to regulate economic life at many levels, was good policy.

But today, they are everywhere: a token of 'standing', a shameless acknowledgment of the desire to separate oneself from other members of society, and a formal recognition of the state's (or the city's) inability or unwillingness to impose its authority across a uniform public space.

In an age when young people are encouraged to maximize self-interest and self-advancement, the grounds for altruism or even good behavior become obscured. Short of reverting to religious authority—itself on occasion corrosive of secular institutions—what can furnish a younger generation with a sense of purpose beyond its own short-term advantage?

privatization reverses a centuries-long process whereby the state took on things that individuals could not or would not do.