Quotes About Society

Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken but as commonly assumed, that we may be adequately represented by money. The giving of money has thus become our characteristic virtue. But to give is not to do. The money is given in lieu of action, thought, care, time.

The crisis of community has its source in the corruption of character.

The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.

The problem is not just the exploitation of women by men. A greater problem is that women and men alike are consenting to an economy that exploits women and men and everything else.

It's sad that we live in a society that has the refrain 'thank God it's Friday, that means you despise 5/7ths of your life.

We have bought unconditionally the economists' line that competition and innovation would solve all problems, and that we would finally accomplish a technological end-run around biological reality and the human condition.

The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.

Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.

As Catholic Christians, we may have come to a point today where we feel like foreigners in our own country—" strangers in a strange land," in the beautiful English of the King James Bible (Ex 2: 22). But the deeper problem in America isn't that we believers are "foreigners." It's that our children and grandchildren aren't.

To Kill a Mockingbird would become like Catch-22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, On the Road, Soul on Ice, and The Feminine Mystique—books that seized the imagination of the post–World War II generation

Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.

You can have the most advanced and efflorescent cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933.

For the purposes of a pluralist society, the Bible is not about fact. It is about values. If we were a bit more tolerant about allowing the teaching of biblical values as ethics, we'd find far less pressure for the teaching of biblical fables as science.

You can have the most advanced and efflorescent cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933...Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.

Who else but that oracle of American liberalism, the New York Times, could run the puzzled headline: "Crime Keeps On Falling, but Prisons Keep On Filling." But? How about this wild theory: If you lock up the criminals, crime declines.

We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics - in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations - is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it. Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history.

It encourages and celebrates character, independence, energy, hard work as the foundations of a free society and a thriving economy—precisely the virtues Obama discounts and devalues in his accounting of the wealth of nations.

Do not misunderstand. There is a nuclear problem, especially in the form of nuclear proliferation. There are environmental problems. And every society has economic problems. But there is a difference between a problem and panic.

polygamists. But I'm not the one who put them

America is the land mine between barbarism and civilization.

The sight of these two vying for custody of that pathetic brood makes you wonder how a society that requires licenses for drivers manages without requiring them for parents.

The Russian Revolution and its imitators (Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese, Cambodian) tried to atomize society so thoroughly--to war against the mediating structures that stand between the individual and the state--that the most basic bonds of family, faith, fellowship and conscience came to near dissolution.

Why in the age of feminism do we still use the phrase "women and children"?

Modern liberalism's perfectionist ambitions - reflected in its progenitor (and current euphemism), progressivism - seeks to harness the power of government, the mystique of science and the rule of experts to shape both society and citizen and bring them both, willing or not, to a higher state of being.