Quotes About Society

Our society doesn't promote self-acceptance and it never will. First of all, self-acceptance doesn't sell products. Capitalism would fall if we liked ourselves the way we are now.

The sum and substance of female education in America, as in England, is training women to consider marriage as the sole object in life, and to pretend that they do not think so.

Laws and customs may be creative of vice; and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction: but laws and customs cannot be creative of virtue: they may encourage and help to preserve it; but they cannot originate it.

There is no inherent reason or necessity that all women should voluntarily choose to devote their lives to one animal function and its consequences. Numbers of women are wives and mothers only because there is no other career open to them,---no other occupation for their feelings or activities.

We are running the risk of becoming a society whittled down to mediocrity, honed to conformity, and valued in statistical averages. We are becoming computerized, monopolized, bureaucratized; we are becoming hero worshipers at the Temple of Sham.

If adjustment is necessary, it should be made primarily with regard to the position the homosexual occupies in present-day society, and society should more often be treated than the homosexual.

One has to be aware that human beings are involved in all these cases.

We twentieth-century Christians have chosen the way of compromise. We withdraw our Christian consciousness from the fields of public, commercial, and social life. When we enter these fields we are compelled to accept, for purposes of discussion, the secular frame of reference.

A class cannot exist in society without in some degree manifesting a consciousness of itself as a group with common problems, interests and prospects - although this manifestation may for long periods be weak, confused, and subject to manipulation by other classes.

A Libertarian society of unfettered individualism spreads its benefits to virtually everyone - not just those who have the resources to seize political power.

Government is force, pure and simple. There's no way to sugar-coat that. And because government is force, it will attract the worst elements of society - people who want to use government to avoid having to earn their living and to avoid having to persuade others to accept their ideas voluntarily.

The income tax is the biggest single intrusion suffered by the American people. It forces every worker to be a bookkeeper, to open his records to the government, to explain his expenses, to fear conviction for a harmless accounting error. Compliance wastes billions of dollars. It penalizes savings and creates an enormous drag on the U.S. economy. It is incompatible with a free society, and we aren't libertarians if we tolerate it.

As Frederic Bastiat put it, "The State is the great fictitious entity by which everyone expects to live at the expense of everyone else."[8]

If governments didn't coercively monopolize the market for protection, there'd undoubtedly be more forms of protection offered on a voluntary basis to those who feel threatened by organized crime.

A big philosophical breakthrough for me was the realization that my own freedom was not only possible, but far more important than the establishment of a free society.

A free and prosperous society has no fear of anyone entering it. But a welfare state is scared to death of every poor person who tries to get in and every rich person who tries to get out.

The reproduction of the working class involves not only work in the factory but also work in the home and in the community of homes. [...] Accumulation means accumulation of the reserve army as well as the active army, of those who worked at reproducing the class as well as those who produced other commodities (besides labor-power). The "factory" where the working class worked was the society as a whole, a social factory. The working class had to be redefined to include nonfactory workers.

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.

We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment...

And what law, anywhere, has ever affected everyone exactly the same? There are always exceptional cases which are unfair to the individual. But society tolerates them because a perfect law is impossible and life without law is unthinkable.

Such ambitions for their children as most people entertained were reserved for their sons, because it was assumed that the "girls will get married and won't need to know much anyway.

It is unthinkable that a rich and enlightened society should permit its unfortunate members to starve in the midst of plenty; but once the justifications are admitted the difficulties still stand undiminished.

All cows were like other cows, all tigers like all other tigers - What on earth happened to human beings?

All through history it's the nations that have given most to generals and the least to the people that have been the first to fall