Quotes About Society

My views and feelings (are) in favor of the abolition of war--and I hope it is practicable, by improving the mind and morals of society, to lessen the disposition to war; but of its abolition I despair.

Say nothing of my religion. It is known to God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life if it has been honest and dutiful to society the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and governments to gain ground.

History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves ; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.

This is a Christian world, you know. We only kill things that are useful or things we don't like.

For the sake of law enforcement, Thumps told himself, it was probably a good thing that most of the criminals in the world were men.

There is no simple harmony between what is good for social or personal stability, for civic commitment and attachment, and what is good for genuine freedom of the mind.

No one in a productive society wants you to know there ways of looking at the world other than their ways, and among the effects drugs may have is that of switching a mind from the normal track. Reading the works of certain writers has a corresponding effect. When receptive individuals explore the writings of someone such as Lovecraft, they are majestically solaced to find articulations of existence countering those to which the heads around them have become habituated.

I think the worst way a writer can self-betray is by not being true to his or her experience of being alive. It's my belief, for what it's worth, that a lot of writers consign to the page what they think will meet with the approval, especially in the moral realm, of what their society has preached to them since they were children, almost all of which is utter bull####.

To become formally integrated into a society, one must offer it a blood sacrifice.

Perhaps our judgement of the purple woman was unfair. No doubt her theories concerning the "approach of the Teatro" made us all uneasy. But was this reason enough to cast her out from that artistic underworld which was the only society available to her? Like many societies, of course, ours was founded on fearful superstition, and this is always reason enough for any kind of behavior. She had been permanently stigmatized by too closely associating herself with something unclean in its essence.

at any given time there are more cannibals than philosophical pessimists.

The farther you progress toward a vision of our species without limiting conditions on your consciousness, the farther you drift away from what makes you a person among persons in the human community.

One by one all the regular staff stopped appearing for work, and their desks came to be occupied by new persons who always looked like fugitives from the great tribe of derelicts living in the Golden City, a shadow population that moved day and night through that yellowish haze.[...] Of course this manner of fiscal growth could not continue much longer and other measures would need to be taken if the company was truly to become a dominant force in the marketplace of this world or any other.

The conclusions to which temperament lead an individual, whether or not they are conclusions refractory to those of world society, are simply not subject to analysis.

many societies, of course, ours was founded on fearful superstition, and this is always reason enough for any kind of behavior. She

You have two choices: Start thinking the way God and your society want you to think or be forsaken by all.

The flush toilet, more than any single invention, has 'civilized' us in a way that religion and law could never accomplish.

Too often, those who denigrate the liberal arts are in reality advocating for nothing less than turning colleges into trade schools. Art history majors always take the cheap shots here, even though many people don't realize that a lot of art history majors go on to some pretty lucrative careers. In any case, I don't want to live in a civilization where there are no art history majors or, for that matter, film studies, philosophy, or sociology majors.

of expectation, that the ordinary pressures, worries, and temptations of life in an open society are serial catastrophes for which the only remedy is the abandonment of their own freedoms.

All modern social, political, and sociological ills can be traced to social media.

While expertise isn't dead, however, it's in trouble. Something is going terribly wrong. The United States is now a country obsessed with the worship of its own ignorance.