Quotes About Society

Samuel] Gompers saw as few others did that in America labor must shape itself to the contours of its society rather than try to remake society. He realized that Americans workers endorsed principles that they carried with them everywhere, even to work. Donning overalls wrought no magic transformation of the multifaceted work force into a single-minded body. To succeed, any labor movement would have to take the workers as they came, accept their principles, and weave them into a whole fabric.

Yes I am a little bit crazy. But the rest of the human race is mad.

I am for gay marriage. Or same-sex marriage. I don't want to say it the wrong way. I think people are sensitive to it. I have been painted as being this right-wing zealot on choice. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

A sense of our inadequacies and failings, a recognition that we could be better people than we usually are, is one of the forces for moral growth and improvement in our society. An appropriate sense of guilt makes people try to be better. But an excessive sense of guilt, a tendency to blame ourselves for things which are clearly not our fault, robs us of our self-esteem and perhaps of our capacity to grow and to act.

In America, the advent of the modern serial killer coincided absolutely with the coming of the automobile.

To one outraged commentator, the mad "scramble of 15,000 people" to the site of such "appalling and atrocious" crimes was a sad commentary on the moral state of supposedly civilized man—"galling, incontrovertible proof that the race is still but a little removed from a stage of actual savagery."[

There's little doubt that America is the world's leading producer of serial killers, though any true measurement has to take into account the sheer size of our population. The FBI estimates that there are between thirty and fifty serial killers at large in our country at any given time. That might seem like a shockingly high number, but in a nation of more than 280,000,000 people, it's a minuscule percentage.

I am what you have made me and the mad-dog devil killer fiend leper is a reflection of your society. - Charles Manson

By contrast, Andrew Kehoe's appalling deed—an unholy blend of school massacre, terrorist bombing, and suicide attack—was seen not as a symptom of societal breakdown but as a sheer aberration, the singular act of a midwestern madman. As such, it provided the public with a brief frisson of horror before being relegated to obscurity. Decades would pass before its true relevance became clear, as a precursor of our own era's worst nightmares.

By the mid-1920s, psychoanalysis had become all the rage among urban sophisticates. After diverting themselves with humorist Robert Benchley's "All Aboard for Dementia Praecox!

The scene is an early example of a theme that preoccupied Lang throughout his career: the speed at which ordinary, law-abiding citizens can turn into a savage mob.

So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why doesn't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women.

It is generally understood that men don't aspire after the absolute right, but only to do about as well as the rest of the world.

Look at the high and the low, all the world over, and it's the same story,—the lower class used up, body, soul and spirit, for the good of the upper.

But who, sir, makes the trader? Who is most to blame? The enlightened, cultivated, intelligent man, who supports the system of which the trader is the inevitable result, or the poor trader himself? You make the public statement that calls for his trade, that debauches and depraves him, till he feels no shame in it; and in what are you better than he?

Religion!" said St. Clare, in a tone that made both ladies look at him. "Religion! Is what you hear at church religion? Is that which can bend and turn, and descend and ascend, to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion? Is that religion which is less scrupulous, less generous, less just, less considerate for man, than even my own ungodly, worldly, blinded nature? No! When I look for a religion, I must look for something above me, and not something beneath.

You ladies go to church to learn how to get along in the world, I suppose, and your piety sheds respectability on us. If I did go at all, I would go where Mammy goes; there's something to keep a fellow awake there, at least." "What! those shouting Methodists? Horrible!" said Marie. "Anything but the dead sea of your respectable churches, Marie.

Greasy or not greasy, they will govern you, when their time comes," said Augustine; "and they will be just such rulers as you make them.

That's you Christians, all over!—you'll get up a society, and get some poor missionary to spend all his days among just such heathen. But let me see one of you that would take one into your house with you, and take the labor of their conversion on yourselves! No; when it comes to that, they are dirty and disagreeable, and it's too much care, and so on.

Religion! Is what you hear at church religion? Is that which can bend and turn, and descend and ascend, to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion? Is that religion which is less scrupulous, less generous, less just, less considerate for man, than even my own ungodly, worldly, blinded nature? No! When I look for religion, I must look for something above me, and not something beneath.

So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why don't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women?

I did my MA on Elizabethan women who demanded to choose their husbands. It really annoys me, that it's basically the same thing today. Who are we going to end up with? [...] It's a race,and everyone else is on the tracks and I'm at the wrong venue, with the wrong shoes on

Nothing, but nothing, will block the awareness of anger so effectively as guilt and self-doubt. Our society cultivates guilt feelings in women such that many of us still feel guilty if we are anything less than an emotional service station to others.