Quotes About Society

In the decades ahead, a life well-lived will often have to be one that does not involve a job traditionally defined. A universal basic income will be an essential part of the transition to a world unlike any in the history of our species.

The goal of an end to poverty is so noble that governments have successfully used the end to justify the means. The means have been high taxation of the productive members of society and arrays of bureaucracies that increasingly regulate the lives of us all. 1

For a society of immigrants such as ours, the core knowledge is our shared identity that makes us Americans together rather than hyphenated Americans.

solutions are beyond the reach of the electoral process and legislative process.

natural selection has almost become irrelevant in human evolution. There's been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we've built with the same body and brain."6

When the government intervenes to help, whether in the European welfare state or in America's more diluted version, it not only diminishes our responsibility for the desired outcome, it enfeebles the institutions through which people live satisfying lives.

A free society is most threatened not by uses of government that are obviously bad, but by uses of government that seem obviously good.

Changing the new upper class by force majeure won't work and isn't a good idea in any case. The new upper class will change only if its members decide that it is in the interest of themselves and of their families to change. And possibly also because they decide it is in the interest of the country they love.

Money is a public good; as such, it lends itself to private exploitation.

America's always been a great place to be crazy. It just used to be harder to make a living that way.

While Obama merely bowed clumsily in the direction of Idiot America, John McCain set up housekeeping there.

The People's' historic duty was to become a nameless herd and submit to the absolute control of a small pack of wily and vicious intellectuals.

Full participation in government and society has been a basic right of the country symbolizing the full citizenship and equal protection of all.

If liberty of speech is to be untrammeled from the grosser forms of constraint, the uniformity of opinion will be secured by a moral terrorism to which the respectability of society will give its thorough approval.

Beyond the formative effects of reading on the individuals composing society, the fact that they have read the same books gives them experiences and ideas in common. These constitute a kind of shorthand of ideas which helps make communication quicker and more efficient. That is what we mean when we say figuratively of another person, We speak the same language.

Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.

the change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human

the dark side of individualism is a centering on the self, which both flattens and narrows our lives, makes them poorer in meaning, and less concerned with others or society.

The zombie is the absolute void present within capitalist everyday life.

He recognized that, first, the rich are always desirous of governing for their own benefit, and second that the people can always turn against them and become a mob, taking things into its own hands. As always, the mean between extremes is to be sought.

When the church aligns itself politically, it gives priority to the compromises and temporal successes of the political world rather than its Christian confession of eternal truth. And when the church gives up its rightful place as the conscience of the culture, the consequences for society can be horrific.

What holds our society together is not force or even laws but moral suasion. Presidents rule not by fiat, but by the sufferance of free men. Without the collective goodwill of 200 million Americans, glibly called "public confidence," government is impotent, anarchy—or worse—inescapable.

We live in a society in which all transcendent values have been removed and thus there is no moral standard by which anyone can say right is right and wrong is wrong. What we live in is, in the memorable image of Richard Neuhaus, a naked public square.

The naked public square cannot remain naked, the direction is toward the state-as-church, toward totalitarianism."6