Quotes About Society

What in fact have I achieved, however much it may seem Bits and pieces trivialities. But here they won't tolerate anything else, or anything more. If I wanted to take one step in advance of the current views and opinions of the day, that would put paid to any power I have. Do you know what we are those of us who count as pillars of society We are society's tools, neither more nor less.

Within the last thirty years, the United States under the reign of market fundamentalism has been transformed into a society that is more about forgetting than learning, more about consuming than producing, more about asserting private interests than democratic rights.

Ultimately, these acts of abuse and aggression offer evidence of a new reality emerging in the United States that enshrines a politics of disposability, in which growing numbers of people are considered to be a dispensable drain on the economy and thus an affront to the sensibilities of the rich and powerful.

How else to explain the right-wing charge that the poor, disabled, sick, and elderly are moochers and should fend for themselves? This is not simply an example of a kind of hardening of the culture, it is also part of a machinery of social and civic death that crushes any viable notion of the common good, public life, and the shared bonds and commitments that are necessary for community and democracy.

It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship.

If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States.

Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.

All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes.

American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

There is only one test of any political scheme or adventure in government. It is the quality of the human being produced by the political order and by the way of life occasioned by that order.

Sources of interest and excitement were not lacking during the season. If politics ran high, as in the years when revolution was preparing, society could gather at the capitol and listen to the classic oratory of Richard Henry Lee, or the fervid speeches of Patrick Henry, dressed in his suit of peach-blossom velvet, and defying King George, to the great alarm of the conservative land-owning gentry.

To share in this sacred meal was so deeply felt to be the essential expression of membership of the society that fragments of the broken bread were taken round to any who were absent through illness or imprisonment.

All legislation, all government, all society is founded upon the principle of mutual concession, politeness, comity, courtesy; upon these everything is based...Let him who elevates himself above humanity, above its weaknesses, its infirmities, its wants, its necessities, say, if he pleases, I will never compromise; but let no one who is not above the frailties of our common nature disdain compromises.

War unhinges society, disturbs its peaceful and regular industry, and scatters poisonous seeds of disease and immorality, which continue to germinate and diffuse their baneful influence long after it has ceased. Dazzling by its glitter, pomp and pageantry, it begets a spirit of wild adventure and romantic enterprise, and often disqualifies those who embark in it, after their return from the bloody fields of battle, from engaging in the industrious and peaceful vocations of life.

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.

What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his note-book, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest penalties!

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.

Law never made men a whit more just.

A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.

The man for whom law exists -- the man of forms, the Conservative, is a tame man.