Quotes About Society

If almost everyone is in favor of feeding the hungry, the politician may find it in his interest to do so. But, under those circumstances, the politician is unnecessary: some kind soul will give the hungry man a meal anyway. If the great majority is against the hungry man, some kind soul among the minority still may feed him—the politician will not.

Property is a central economic institution of any society, and private property is the central institution of a free society.

We live in a complicated and interdependent society; each of us is constantly affected by events thousands of miles away occurring to people he has never heard of. How, in such a society, can we meaningfully talk about each person being free to go his own way? The answer to this question lies in the concept of property rights.

Democratic Development is a process of political struggle in which democrats work gains the upper hand in the society over non-democrats which directs aid at core political processes and institutions especially elections, political parties and politically oriented civil groups.

I was a normal guy who got sent to Iraq and became crazy, so they sent me back to America to become sane, and now it's America that's driving me crazy.

It's a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you – I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out.

The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.

All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression.

To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.

I simply must say, as crass as we are conditioned by a troubled society to regard the word, I am a firm believer in the comparative merits of the word 'fuck.

Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction's job is to dramatize what makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still are human beings, now. Or can be…I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't good art.

Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me.

The modern woman's a mess of contradictions that they lay on themselves that drives them nuts.

if you think the corporations are evil and it's the government's job to make them moral, you're deflecting your own responsibility to civics. You're making the government your big brother and the corporation the evil bully your big brother's supposed to keep off you at recess.

I think, today's irony ends up saying: How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.

Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies.

Our leaders, our government is us, all of us, so if they're venal and weak it's because we are.

We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makes of the pie...Corporations make the pie. They make it and we eat it.

It seems significant that we don't want things to be quiet, ever, anymore.

I'm a typical American, half of me is dying to give myself away and the other half is continually rebelling.

People hate people, not freedom.