Quotes About Society

Very few adults today realize that our society has been slave much longer than it has been free.

Publishers or those who influence them have evidently concluded that what American society needs to stay strong is citizens who assent to its social structure and economic system without thought.

Perhaps telling realistically what slavery was like for slaves is the easy part. After all, slavery as an institution is dead. We have progressed beyond it, so we can acknowledge its evils. Slavery's twin legacies to the present are the social and economic inferiority it conferred upon blacks and the cultural racism it instilled in whites. Both continue to haunt our society. Therefore, treating slavery's enduring legacy is necessarily controversial. Unlike slavery, racism is not over yet.

Education as socialization tells people what to think and how to act and requires them to conform. Education as socialization influences students simply to accept the rightness of our society.

Recovering the memory of the increasing oppression of African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century can deepen our understanding of the role racism has played in our society and continues to play today.

From Myakka City, Florida, to Kennewick, Washington, the nation is dotted with thousands of all-white towns that are (or were until recently) all white on purpose.

neither morality nor immorality can simply be conferred upon us by history. Merely being part of the United States, without regard to our own acts and ideas, does not make us moral or immoral beings. History is more complicated than that.

That same year, in an interview with the New Yorker, Kelley continued his dismissal of the "mad Nazi" thesis: "With the exception of Dr. Ley, there wasn't an insane Joe in the crowd. That's what makes this trial important—there are twenty-one ruthless people with counterparts all over the world, none of them sufficiently deviate to be locked up by society under normal conditions.

The shift from hunting-gathering to agriculture led to one very important development -- it laid the building blocks for civilization as we know it.

The extensive surplus of food is what allowed those areas to become densely populated in the first place. It is these two things that allowed for political systems, specialized labor,  writing, property ownership, and more- all things we can't imagine modern society without.

I wonder where in the world it would be possible to have the ideal, a middle way, a balance between individuality and responsibility to the larger community. Easily named, of course, but I cannot begin to imagine where to achieve it.

This book is about whether schools and communities choose to squelch or nurture the flame of intelligence in their young people, and what happens when they choose to deny or embrace this national resource.

There it was, written down for her to follow: how to take that precocious mind and learn to be like everyone else.

Prisons are built to break men, and when men are broken society has consummated its revenge

Samuel Johnson once remarked that it was surprising to find how much more kindness than justice society contained.

My idea of good company...is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.' 'You are mistaken,' said he gently, 'that is not good company, that is the best.

Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody.

A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.

Elizabeth had never been more at a loss to make her feelings appear what they were not. It was necessary to laugh, when she would rather have cried.

It is not every man's fate to marry the woman who loves him best

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of someone or other of their daughters.

But there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them.

You were disgusted with the women who were always speaking and looking, and thinking for your approbation alone. I roused, and interested you, because I was so unlike them.

My idea of good company, Mr. Eliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.