Quotes About Society

And yet the result has not been a greater respect for knowledge, but the growth of an irrational conviction among Americans that everyone is as smart as everyone else. This is the opposite of education, which should aim to make people, no matter how smart or accomplished they are, learners for the rest of their lives. Rather, we now live in a society where the acquisition of even a little learning is the endpoint, rather than the beginning, of education. And this is a dangerous thing.

Liberal democracy depends on knowledge and virtue, and both of these are now in short supply among the citizens of the developed world.

A society that is post-factual is pre-fascist.

This is the twenty-first century. We were supposed to be choking on overpopulation, eating Soylent Green, and joining gangs in the wasteland to protect our supplies of water and gasoline. Instead, we're put out when the Wi-Fi goes down on our flight to Orlando.

This was the same warning José Ortega y Gasset gave when he wrote Revolt of the Masses in 1930: "The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated."24 "I'm as good as you," Screwtape chortles at the end of his address, "is a useful means for the destruction of democratic societies.

No society could survive—and surely no society could be decent—if everybody in it were able to communicate everything. —Daniel J. Boorstin

The superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice.

In a state therefore of great equality and virtue, where pure and simple manners prevailed, the increase of the human species would evidently be much greater than any increase that has been hitherto known.

Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.

It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.

In Oakland, he saw two slum children sword fighting on a slag heap. In Palo Alto, a puffy fop in bursting jodhpurs shouted from the door of a luxurious stable, "My horse is soiled!" While one chilly evening in Union Square he listened to a wild-eyed young woman declaim that she had seen delicate grandmothers raped by Kiwanis zombies, that she had seen Rotarian blackguards bludgeoning Easter bunnies in a coal cellar, that she had seen Irving Berlin buying an Orange Julius in Queens.

If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.

Theories of consciousness have cultural consequences.

How many times do we lose an occasion for soul work by leaping ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension, and thus we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets.

For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.

What will Mrs. Grundy say? What will Mrs. Grundy think?

And what a city! The perfect geometric layout, the wide avenues and clean sidewalks, all the monuments bathes in celestial light. The contemps around me hav eno idea how long it will take to rebuild something like this. Do they see the beauty around them? Are they dizzy from the heights on this pinnacle their civilization is teetering upon? No--they troop along, necks crooked into their ancient phones like bent marionettes. Their right cheeks glow.

The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws. The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists.

The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act. A general association takes place, and common interest produces common security.

To say that any people are not fit for freedom, is to make poverty their choice, and to say they had rather be loaded with taxes than not.

There are two distinct classes of men in the nation, those who pay taxes, and those who receive and live upon the taxes.

taxes are not raised to carry on wars, but that wars are raised to carry on taxes

When it shall be said in any country in the world my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want; the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of its happiness: When these things can be said, there may that country boast its Constitution and its Government

Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.