Quotes About Society

A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.

Communism, my friend, is more than Marxism, just as Catholicism is more than the Roman Curia. There is a mystique as well as a politick. Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.

Everything we've been taught about the origins of civilization may be wrong," says Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, PhD, senior geologist with the Research Center for Geotechnology at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.

The Emperor tells us that civilization will only achieve perfection when the last stone of the last church falls upon the last priest.

Because society places a value on masculinity, gay men aspire to it. If you go to a gay club and the doorman says, 'You do realise this is a gay club, don't you lads?' you get all excited because you think, 'Wow, he thought I was straight!'

Roused from the sleep of countless centuries by alcoholism and political hysteria, primitive traits had reasserted themselves in the modern world. (pg. 165)

highly codified and formal foreign language known as French – a language which, according to many French-speakers, almost no one speaks correctly. In the land of a thousand tongues, monolingualism became the mark of the educated person.

It is almost impossible to get a novel printed in an English journal unless it is warranted to contain nothing at all to which anybody, however narrow, could possibly object, on any ground whatever, religious, political, social, moral or aesthetic. The romance that appeals to your average editor must say or hint at nothing at all which is not universally believed and received by everybody, everywhere in this realm of Britain.

If there is an injustice or a barbarity possible, I might have been sure the law of England would make haste to perpetrate it.

I belong to the tribe of the grasshopper, not that of the ant.

To the uninformed observer, the agonizing cramps in a marathon runner's calf muscles are heroic while the relentless explosions of a dominatrix's paddle against her client's bottoms are obscene and perverted. That the two victims might confront their ordeals for similar reasons, and take away similar benefits, has rarely been considered. Grant Antrews, Submissions

Law reflects but in no sense determines the moral worth of a society. The values of a reasonably just society will reflect themselves in a reasonably just law. The better the society, the less law there will be. In heaven there will be no law, and the lion shall lie down with the lamb. The values of an unjust society will reflect themselves in an unjust law. The worse the society, the more law there will be. In hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed.

As Palmer observes: "Plato warned in his Republic that changes in the modes and rhythms of popular music inevitably lead to changes in society at large,"[100] and this originary moment of rock and roll seems to be one of the clearest cases in musical history of a fundamentally new rhythmic, and thus affective, mode catalyzing an equally fundamental cultural transformation.

Culture matters for reasons good and bad. First, it is the place to discover advantage, opportunity, and innovation.

We tell our children they're trapped like rats on a doomed, bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet with dwindling resources, with nothing to look forward to but rising sea levels and imminent mass extinctions, then raise a disapproving eyebrow when, in response, they dress in black, cut themselves with razors, starve themselves, gorge themselves, or kill one another.

The sooner we all learn to make a decision between disapproval and censorship, the better off society will be....Censorship cannot get at the real evil, and it is an evil in itself.

Equal in law is not equal in nature.

In the society of would-be-gods, a humble man is always polite.

The effects could be sufficiently severe to threaten the fabric of civilisation.

Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century.

How do you know which parts of the world are you, in the polises?' 'Are there citizens in Konishi who eat music?' 'Is not having a body like falling all the time, without moving?

Every democracy was a kind of anarchy in slow motion: any statute, any constitution could be changed, given time; any social contract, written or unwritten, could be dishonoured.

We'll shape them through their memes," he said. "We'll kill off the bad memes, and help spread the ones we want to succeed.

No wonder most fleshers had stampeded into the polises, once they had the chance: if disease and aging weren't reason enough, there was gravity, friction, and inertia. The physical world was one vast, tangled obstacle course of pointless, arbitrary restrictions.