Quotes About Society

I am looking for suggestions on what we can do about extremists within our own society. They cannot be ignored.

What is especially important is addressing the question of how religion can be enforced through political means and what can be done to create a political environment that, on the one hand, acknowledges the role of religion in society, while on the other hand does not impose one religion on the populace at the expense of all others.

He [William Jennings Bryan] recognized that what Darwin proposed on the biological level, when applied on the societal level, might legitimize an ideology that supports the survival of the fittest, with all of its dire complications. Byran was able to envision the kind of society that Social Darwinism would create- the kind of exploitation that comes from unbridled capitalism, for instance- and chose to war against it.

I wouldn't be caught dead marring a woman old enough to be my wife.

One of the major problems leading to the breakdown of society is that we have far too many opinions dictating life choices and not enough truth mandating them.

Many in our society want the benefits of freedom without its responsibilities and boundaries. They want "God bless America," but not one nation under God.

classic single 'Down In The Tube Station at Midnight

It seems that the more privileged in a society you are, the more convoluted, devious and determined your efforts became in the evasion of putting a penny back into it.

We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.

The historian's task is not to disrupt for the sake of it, but it is to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly. A well organized society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves.

Lieux de memoire . . . 'exist because there are no longer any milieux de memoire , settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience.' And what are lieux de memoire ? [They] are . . . vestiges . . . the rituals of a ritual-less society.

Lawyers are… the High Priests of America.

There are no angels in America.

The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.

The first duty of society is justice. ALEXANDER HAMILTON (1757–1804)

As lawyers, our first responsibility is, of course, to see that the legal profession provides adequate representation for all people in our society. I would suggest there is no subject which is more important to the legal profession, that is more important to this nation, than & the realization of the ideal of equal justice under law for all. RICHARD NIXON, IN HIS SPEECH TO THE NATIONAL LEGAL AID AND DEFENDER ASSOCIATION (OCTOBER 1962) [E]very

It's a depressingly masculine world we live in, Dolores.

socialism has only two fundamental problems: lunch and dinner.

Our luck was still good. Sometimes a junkie and a whore can still make out in the Land of the Free.

We aren't in an information age, we are in an entertainment age.

We are already the most overinformed, underreflective people in the history of civilization," argue Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey

one of the governing impulses in any society is, and must be, a terror of indistinctness.

Thus the ideal marriage at the end of a Jane Austen novel is not simply a conventional happy ending . . . It offers itself as an emblem of the ideal union of property and propriety -- a model to be emulated, a paradigm for a more general combination of the two on which the future of her society depends.

Jane Austen's profound concern with good manners was thus not simply a reflection of a cloistered gentility: it was a form of politics -- an involvement with a widespread attempt to save the nation by correcting, monitoring, and elevating its morals.