Quotes About Society

America is a country where an opportunity society and a class society coexist within the same borders.

Anything other than free enterprise always means a society of compulsion and lower living standards, and any form of socialism strictly enforced means dictatorship and the total state. That this statement is still widely disputed only illustrates the degree to which malignant fantasy can capture the imagination of intellectuals.

The history of the race is but that of the individual "writ large".

But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked. "Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad." "How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here.

A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it.

War is easier than peace. The government elects to punish an enemy it perceives as weak because it is easier to send an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf than to attempt the harder task of making American society not so wretchedly defaced by its hungry children, its crowded prisons, and its corporate thieves....

unwed mothers nursing unbaptised infants on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange

The more we allow such commodity art to define and control our gifts, the less gifted we will become, as individuals and as a society. The

Under the rules of a society that cannot distinguish between profit and profiteering, between money defined as necessity and money defined as luxury, murder is occasionally obligatory and always permissible.

As many as six out of ten American adults have never read a book of any kind, and the bulletins from the nation's educational frontiers read like the casualty reports from a lost war.

Social rank has always been one of the pricier commodities sold in the great American department store, and the ceaseless revision of what constitutes society gives rise to the great American comedy that has been playing continuous performances since the beginning of the Republic. As one generation of parvenu rich acquires the means to buy the patents of nobility, it looks down upon the next generation of arrivistes as clubfooted upstarts.

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to spiritual sterility.

The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.

The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture.

Con i mezzi di comunicazione di massa su grandi distanze, l'isolamento della popolazione si è rivelato un mezzo di controllo molto efficace.

But instead of freeing labor, the royal mega-machine boasted of imprisoning and enslaving it.

Perhaps the best definition for the inhabitants of an early city is that they are a permanently captive farm population.

Pedro Armillas has pointed out that the crisis that seems to have developed in Meso-American society around 900 A.D. resulted in a change from a theocratic pattern to a secular-militaristic one, "in which religion was still a powerful force social control, but the priesthood was in a subordinate position of temporal power, and there was a correlative change in the settlement pattern.

What was atrocious was the fact that, like every other building in the new towns, they were dumped almost at random; the leakage of escaping gas scented the so-called gas-house districts, and not surprisingly these districts frequently became among the most degraded sections of the city. Towering above the town, polluting its air, the gas tanks symbolized the dominance of 'practical' interests over life-needs.

If I dare to foresee a promising future other than that which the technocrats (the power elite) have been confidently extrapolating, it is because I have found by personal experience that it is far easier to detach oneself from the system and to make a selective use of its facilities than the promoters of the Affluent Society would have their docile subjects believe.

Through the army, in fact, the standard model of the megamachine was transmitted from culture to culture.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is the governor of your state. How can I, as a comedian, create a reality that encompasses that?

But what about the children, Lewis? I can hear some of you asking. What about the children? It's more disturbing to hear adults talking about having seen a tit as shocking and disturbing and indecent than it is for children to see one.