Quotes About Society

vehicles were as likely to move about on legs as wheels, so no one really cared about bumps in pavement. Modern utilities ran underground. Even had those things not been the case, the tax base wasn't there to support all those arborists and pavers. So the trees—all of them deciduous imports from the East Coast or Europe—had been doing as they pleased for decades. And what

This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?" Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?

a culture medium for a medium culture.

Persons of quality had devoted yester evening and much of the night to liquidating their holdings in the South Sea Company and gathering in clubs and coffeehouses to misinform one another.

scattering of schizophrenic first worlders who have long ago burned their brains to ash in the radiant heat of their own imaginings.

You know, now, the decision I made. Which was to suffer for the greater good. Because society will go astray if there are not those who, like me, imagine many outcomes. Let those scenarios run rampant in their minds. Anticipate the worst that could happen. Take steps to prevent it. If the price of that—the price of having a head full of dark imaginings—is personal suffering, then so be it.

Now we're back in a situation where the people who have the power and the money can get what they want by dictating what the mass of people ought to believe.

But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it.

Neal Stephenson

never really understood their attitudes about sex. Why did they get so hung up on that one issue, when there were others like murder, war, poverty, and pestilence?

But America's like this big old clanking, smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight. Leaves behind a trail of garbage a mile wide. Always needs more fuel.

bimbo boxes with license plates from all the Burbclaves.

All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us. Now, religion used to be essentially viral—a piece of information that replicated inside the human mind, jumping from one person to the next.

And he'd realized computers could be a tool to unite society.

What are we going to do about it is the question." "We, as a civilization? About global climate change?" "I know, right? Too vague! Too much diffusion of responsibility. Too much politics.

The horror of the Hitler Experience was not that he perpetrated it on the human race, but that the human race allowed him to. The astonishment is not only that a Hitler came along, but also that so many others went along.

You have created sexual embarrassment, repression, and shame—which has led to sexual inhibition, dysfunction, and violence. You will, as a society, always be inhibited about that over which you are embarrassed; always be dysfunctional with behaviors which have been repressed, and always act out violently in protest of being made to feel shame about that over which you know in your heart you should never have felt shame at all.

Your nation is the richest, most powerful on the Earth, and it has one of the highest infant mortality rates. Why? Because poor people cannot afford quality pre-natal and post-natal care—and your society is profit driven.

Originally, governments had very limited functions. Their purpose was simply to "preserve and protect." Then someone added "provide." When governments began to be the people's provider as well as the people's protector, governments started creating society, rather than preserving it.

Aren't all laws simply man's attempt to codify moral concepts? Is not "legislation" simply our combined agreement as to what is "right" and "wrong"? Yes. And certain civil laws—rules and regulations—are required in your primitive society. (You understand that in nonprimitive societies such laws are unnecessary. All beings regulate themselves.)

The horror of the Hitler Experience was not that he perpetrated it on the human race, but that the human race allowed him to.

In what you have called your nonbarbarian societies, children (and wives, and husbands, for that matter) are thought of as property, as personal possessions, and child-bearers must therefore become child-raisers, because they must take care of what they "own.

In your society, you often do not see the contradictions of your own moral constructions. The contradiction between doing things that you know full well are going to shorten your life, but doing them slowly, and doing things that will shorten your life quickly is one of the most glaring in the human experience.

What differentiates societies, and beings within societies, is what they define as pleasurable. If a society is structured largely around pleasures of the body, it is operating at a different level from a society structured around pleasures of the soul.