Quotes About Society

If Moroccans are dying in Indo-China, if it rains too much or not enough, if there is no work, if one's wife is sick and penicillin is expensive, or if the French are still in Morocco, it is all the fault of America. She could change everything if she chose, but she does nothing because she does not love the Moslems.

Polly belonged wholly to her time. Alert to its defects and dangers, she nevertheless had reached what she herself called an adjustment, and she was very firm in her belief that without the attainment of a state of conscious harmony with the society in which he functioned, no individual could hope to accomplish much of anything

Today, many American Christians seem to mix up church and state. They believe the community of genuine believers in America is the people of God— both in heaven and on earth. But the nation of America isn't the people of God; we don't live in a theocracy. The sooner Christians realize this, the sooner the church can make a deeper impact as salt and light in society.

The neighbors... hadn't, thankfully, done the usual by saying that Losley was a pleasant neighbor who'd kept herself to herself. (Always delivered in a tone of voice that suggested that, since keeping oneself to oneself was the single greatest thing one English person could do for another, the suspect ought to be excused whatever psychopathic shit they'd visited on other people.)

In the Bible, nearly each time the virtue of courage appears (about twenty-five times), it is often in conjunction with the words strong or strength. The two are intertwined throughout the Bible and throughout society, so much so that the word courage in sign language is two clenched fists.

Theodore Roosevelt saw in the Christian men of his day, who "were very nice, very refined, who shook their heads over political corruption and discussed it in drawing rooms and parlors, but who were wholly unable to grapple with real men in real life.

1) Having an incomplete image of Jesus that focuses on his sweet side and ignores his forceful side; (2) Giving in to the immense pressure society puts on women to hide their true selves behind a façade of niceness; (3) Encountering harmful childhood experiences, such as lacking inspiring words or role models

The relevant framework is not one of morality but of survival. At every level, from brute camouflage to poetic vision, the linguistic capacity to conceal, misinform, leave ambiguous, hypothesize, invent is indispensable to the equilibrium of human consciousness and to the development of man in society....—George Steiner, After Babel

Nowadays it is no longer a question of who is right, but who is at least not criminal

Increasingly, what people with AIDS share are not personal or psychological attributes. They do not share culture or language or a certain racial identity. They do not share sexual preference or an absolute income bracket. What they share, rather, is a social position—the bottom rung of the ladder in inegalitarian societies.

If you don't work intentionally with the criminal to help him come to love and accept himself, he will re-enter society with the same anger and vindictiveness.

Television, I'm afraid, has isolated us more than race, class, or ethnicity.

The object in America is to avoid contact, to treat all as foes unless they're known to be friends. Here you have a million crabs living in a million crevices.

There, too, you are one among millions. But there at least you know your neighbors. Here, one cannot say that. The object in America is to avoid contact, to treat all as foes unless they're known to be friends.

Free action is to live in the present society as though it were a natural society.

What swells the costs in enterprises carried on in the interlocking centralized systems of society, whether commercial, official, or non-profit institutional, are all the factors of organization, procedure, and motivation that are not directly determined to the function and to the desire to perform it....

In England, at least, corruption only became unfashionable (and in fact only started to be called "corruption") when there started to be other, faster ways to get rich.

Could civil liberties really be a cause, rather than just an effect? I think so. I think a society in which people can do and say what they want will also tend to be one in which the most efficient so- lutions win, rather than those sponsored by the most influential people. Authoritarian countries become corrupt; corrupt countries become poor; and poor countries are weak.

If you suppress variations in income, whether by stealing private fortunes, as feudal rulers used to do, or by taxing them away, as some modern governments have done, the result always seems to be the same. Society as a whole ends up poorer.

I think a society in which people can do and say what they want will also tend to be one in which the most efficient solutions win, rather than those sponsored by the most influential people.

If I had a choice of living in a society where I was materially much better off than I am now, but was among the poorest, or in one where I was the richest, but much worse off than I am now, I'd take the first option. If I had children, it would arguably be immoral not to. It's absolute poverty you want to avoid, not relative poverty.

I'd like to propose an alternative idea: that in a modern society, increasing variation in income is a sign of health. Technology seems to increase the variation in productivity at faster than linear rates. If we don't see corresponding variation in income, there are three possible explanations: (a) that technical innovation has stopped, (b) that the people who would create the most wealth aren't doing it, or (c) that they aren't getting paid for it.

Lack of empathy is associated with intelligence, to the point that there is even something of a fashion for it in some places. But

Money is a side effect of specialization. In a specialized society, most of the things you need, you can't make for yourself. If you want a potato or a pencil or a place to live, you have to get it from someone else. How do you get the person who grows the potatoes to give you some? By giving him something he wants in return. But you can't get very far by trading things directly with the people who need them.