Quotes About Society

Only a church free of any outside domination can be the conscience of society and, as Washington pastor Myron Augsburger has written, "hold government morally accountable before God to live up to its own claims."21

When morality is reduced to personal preferences and when no one can be held morally accountable, society quickly falls into disorder.

Christians who understand biblical truth and have the courage to live it out can indeed redeem a culture, or even create one. This is the challenge facing all of us in the new millennium.

In a pluralistic society it is not only wrong but unwise for Christians to shake their Bibles and arrogantly assert that "God says . . ." That is the quickest way for Christians, a distinct minority in civil affairs, to lose their case altogether.

Who is to decide what are the 'right' values?" wrote a professor of education. "Does ultimate moral authority lie with institutions such as church and state to codify and impose? Or, in a free society, are these matters of private conscience, with final choice belonging to the individual?"2

Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations.

A healthy democracy requires a decent society it requires that we are honorable, generous, tolerant and respectful.

The things that are wrong with the country today are the sum total of all the things that are wrong with us as individuals.

In a basic agricultural society, it's easy enough to swap five chickens for a new dress or to pay a schoolteacher with a goat and three sacks of rice. Barter works less well in a more advanced economy. The logistical challenges of using chickens to buy books on Amazon.com would be formidable.

We've built a society that values civil liberties even at the expense of social order.

The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.

Women - why aren't you running the world yet? Frankly I'm disappointed in you. Men are still far too dominant for their own good, and consequently we've made a testosterone-sodden pig's ear of just about everything: politics, the economy, religion, the environment ... you name it, it's in a gigantic man-wrought mess.

Who do hats think they are? They contribute nothing to society, and don't even display basic manners. Has a hat ever held a door open for you? No. It hasn't.

jittery, neurotic parents don't need any more false scares to piss their pants over. They're already raising their twatty little offspring like mollycoddled prisoners: banned from playing outdoors in case a paedophile ring burrows through the pavement and eats them, locked indoors with nothing but anti-bacterial plasma screens for company, ferried to and from school in spluttering rollcaged tanks. . . Christ, half these kids would view choking to death as a release.

Society? Can we trust us? Doubt it. We're probably not even real, as was revealed in the popular documentary The Matrix. That bloke next door? Made of pixels. Your co-workers? Pixels. You? One pixel. One measly pixel. You haven't even got shoes, for Christ's sake.

These days the average primary-school child can sit through thirteen consecutive hours of 3D bestial porn on a WAP-enabled Internet bong without so much as blinking.

If a Victorian gentleman arrived in present-day London, he'd think we'd been invaded by glowing rectangles.

Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the headless monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded.

I remember when one dressed the part for the West End, and strolled with yellow gloves and a walking-stick. But that world has gone, and another takes its place, eyes see differently, emotions react to other themes. Men weep at jazz, and violence has become sexual. Time marches on.

The only difference between Detroit and the Third World in terms of corruption is Detroit don't have no goats in the streets.

In Detroit, we all talked the race game. It is a way of life.

But these things are not supposed to be news. These things are supposed to be normal. And when normal things become the news, the abnormal becomes the norm. And when that happens, you might as well put a fork in it. What galleries and museums have to do

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.

Women are all vulnerable, and each of us is only as secure as those women that society puts on the "bottom," not as powerful as the token top.