Quotes About Society

The climate of moral, cultural, and intellectual relativism – a relativism that began as a mere fashionable plaything for intellectuals – has been successfully communicated to those least able to resist its devastating practical effects.

Life is conceived as a vast supermarket through which one moves with one's shopping trolley, fetching down ways of life from shelves marked "Existential choices.

I suspect, though I cannot prove, that in part this is the consequence of living in a world, including a mental world, so thoroughly saturated by the products of the media of mass communication. In such a world, what is done or happens in private is not done or has not happened at all, at least not in the fullest possible sense.

The first requirement of civilisation is that men should be willing to repress their basest instincts and appetites: failure to do which makes them, on account of their intelligence, far worse than mere beasts.

It is the prerogative of the unthinkingly prosperous to sneer at the bourgeois virtues.

Linguistic and educational relativism helps to transform a class into a caste – a caste, almost, of Untouchables.

When young people want to praise themselves, they describe themselves as 'nonjudgmental.' For them, the highest form of morality is amorality.

That civilised life cannot be lived without taboos—that some of them may indeed be justified, and that therefore taboo is not in itself an evil to be vanquished—is a thought too subtle for the aesthetes of nihilism.

If humankind, as T. S. Eliot put it, cannot bear very much reality, it seems that it can bear any amount of unreality.

One of the reasons that the area would never be renovated, however, was the council's insistence that each house had three large plastic trash-bins on wheels, each a bright color: green for the bottles left over from last night's drunken orgy, red for stolen goods now surplus to requirements, purple for dead bodies and used syringes, all in fact that a modern British urban household needs to disembarrass itself of.

The oikophobe and the multiculturalist are not really interested in other cultures, except as instruments with which to beat their fellow citizens.

When you are harried, browbeaten, cajoled, bullied, pursued, threatened, bribed and surveyed by the state and its agencies, you have little inclination left over for obedience: least of all obedience to what one judge called the unenforceable. You have already paid your dues to society. Society can now look after itself. In the small sphere left to you, you will do exactly what you please, without regard to anyone else.

To paraphrase Burke, all that is necessary for barbarism to triumph is for civilised men to do nothing: but in fact for the past few decades, civilised men have done worse than nothing—they have actively thrown in their lot with the barbarians.

And we even recognise the apparent paradox that some limitations to our freedoms have the consequence of making us freer overall.

learned that there is no more heartless saying than that the people get the government they deserve

We have sunk to a depth in which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

In a democratic age, only the behaviour of the authorities is subject to public criticism; that of the people themselves, never. This is a modern version of Rousseau's doctrine: if it weren't for the authorities, the people would be good.

Well into her career, painters like Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema or Léon Frédéric were still churning out the most dreadful pictures of childhood. Such artists strained after emotions, not that they felt, but that they felt they ought to feel.

A healthy modern society must know how to remain the same as well as change, to conserve as well as to reform. Europe has changed without knowing how to conserve: that is its tragedy.

few are so conformist as rebellious youth.

The reign of Elizabeth I had conferred this right, as a way of dealing with the epidemic of begging that followed the dissolution of the monasteries.

A curious reversal in the locus of moral concern has taken place: people feel responsible for everything except for what they do.

The college 'should teach the arts of human intercourse; the art of understanding other people's lives and minds, and the little arts of talk, of dress, of cookery that are allied with them.' Not being a systematic thinker, to put it kindly, Mrs. Woolf here fails to realise that she is proposing to enclose women in precisely the little domestic world from which she also claims to be rescuing them.

compassion being measured by the amount of other people's money you are prepared to pay for the supposed resolution of a social problem.