Quotes About Society

This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

Shame and guilt are noble emotions essential in the maintenance of civilized society, and vital for the development of some of the most refined and elegant qualities of human potential - generosity, service, self-sacrifice, unselfishness and duty.

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.

A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself.

Newspapers are the world's mirrors.

It is always considered a piece of impertinence in England if a man of less than two or three thousand a year has any opinions at all upon important subjects.

The pressure of public opinion is like the pressure of the atmosphere; you can't see it - but all the same, it is sixteen pounds to the square inch.

When liberty destroys order, the hunger for order will destroy liberty.

Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards and weaklings; and our honour false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons.

Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life.

The striking point about our model family is not simply the compete-compete, consume-consume style of life it urges us to follow. The striking point, in the face of all the propaganda, is how few Americans actually live this way.

Landscape painting is the obvious resource of misanthropy.

Artificial manners vanish the moment the natural passions are touched.

Philanthropies and charities have a certain air of quackery.

A politician divides mankind into two classes: tools and enemies.

Ultimately politics in a democracy reflects values much more than it shapes them.

Politics, and the fate of mankind, are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness.

Politics is but the common pulse beat.

We make our own criminals, and their crimes are congruent with the national culture we all share. It has been said that a people get the kind of political leadership they deserve. I think they also get the kinds of crime and criminals they themselves bring into being.

Poor men's reasons are not heard.

The rich would have to eat money, but luckily the poor provide food.

It is easy enough to say that poverty is no crime. No, if it were, men wouldn't be ashamed of it. It's a blunder, though, and is punished as such.

The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount.