Quotes About Society

What is good for the country is good for General Motors and vice versa.

To whom does design address itself: to the greatest number, to the specialist of an enlightened matter, to a privileged social class? Design addresses itself to the need.

We sense that 'normal' isn't coming back, that we are being born into a new normal: a new kind of society, a new relationship to the earth, a new experience of being human.

There are puppet-masters, but they are systems and ideologies, not people. As

We received it on a cultural level when the Age of Aquarius morphed into the age of Ronald Reagan,

The hippies saw it and lived it for a few shining moments, but the old stories were too strong. Instead of the hippies pulling us all into a new world, we dragged them back into ours. The

And given how much of the evil and ugliness of the present world can be traced to money, can you imagine what the world will be like when money has been transformed?

The kind of taxes.. that we have today are nearly the opposite of what we want to create in our world. We can take from the commons, that which no one should own, without paying for it. Yet the one thing we can be said to own, our own productive labor, is subject to taxation in the form of income tax. Meanwhile, we are forced to pay a tax on the circulation of goods, a sales tax, while there is no tax on the accumulation of wealth not used for exchange.

That social organism is embryonic. That firmly to believe is to impede development. That only temporarily to accept is to facilitate.

The Civilized… murder their children by producing too many of them without being able to provide for their well-being. Morality or theories of false virtue stimulate them to manufacture cannon fodder, anthills of conscripts who are forced to sell themselves out of poverty. This improvident paternity is a false virtue, the selfishness of pleasure.

The method of doubt must be applied to civilization; we must doubt its necessity, its excellence, and its permanence.

The peoples of civilization see their wretchedness increase in direct proportion to the advance of industry.

Social progress and changes of historical period take place in proportion to the advance of women toward liberty, and social decline occurs as a result of the diminution of the liberty of women.

Under civilization poverty is born of superabundance itself.

Wisdom, virtue, morality, all these have fallen out of fashion: everybody worships at the shrine of commerce.

It may be that our society is only passing through a period of ugly transition, but the present evil has its root deep down in the social organization, and springs from a diseased public opinion.

Just as this social creation, the state, cannot coherently be limited by reference to rights that are its own invention, and society is fundamentally organized by entities whose reality is society's own construct, so it is with the value of physical objects and human labor, the division of the sexes and indeed the identity of the individual person, subsisting over time as the distinct and ultimate subject of discourse and attribution.

Those who favor a "grand plan" over experimentation fail to understand the role that failed experiments play in creating progress in society. Failures quickly and efficiently signal what doesn't work, minimizing waste and redirecting scarce resources to what does work. A market economy is an experimental discovery process, in which business failures are inevitable and any attempt to eliminate them only ensures even greater failures.

Allowing people the freedom to pursue their own interests (within the limits of just conduct) is the best and only sustainable way to achieve societal progress. For individuals to develop and have a chance at happiness, they must be free to make their own choices and mistakes, rather than be forced to accept choices made for them by others.

Principled Entrepreneurship™—creating superior value for our customers while consuming fewer resources and always acting lawfully and with integrity. Good profit comes from making a contribution in society—not from corporate welfare or other ways of taking advantage of people.

The possibility of men living together in peace and to their mutual advantage, without having to agree on common concrete aims, and bound only by abstract rules of conduct, was perhaps the greatest discovery mankind ever made.

By "good profit," I don't mean high margins or high return on capital, or lots of profit by just any means. What I consider to be good profit comes from Principled Entrepreneurship™—creating superior value for our customers while consuming fewer resources and always acting lawfully and with integrity. Good profit comes from making a contribution in society—not from corporate welfare or other ways of taking advantage of people.

Life for the overwhelming majority of people who haven't been blessed to live in a free society has been, as Hobbes put it, "poor, nasty, brutish, and short."8

The role of business in society is to help people improve their lives by providing products and services they value more highly than their alternatives, and to do so while consuming fewer resources.