Quotes About Society

The best social philosophies do not claim any greater objective than that the individual human beings living under such a regime shall have happy individual lives. If there are social philosophies which deny the happiness of the individual life as the final goal and aim of civilization, those philosophies are the product of a sick and unbalanced mind.

my formula for the Chinese national mind is: R4D1H3S3 There

The negative principle that no law is free law, is not much known except among lawyers.

But where is the philosophy or statesmanship which assumes that you can quiet that disturbing element in our society which has disturbed us for more than half a century, which has been the only serious danger that has threatened our institutions--I say, where is the philosophy or the statesmanship based on the assumption that we are to quit talking about it, and that the public mind is all at once to cease being agitated by it?

I cannot but express gratitude that the true view of this element of discord among us--as I believe it is--is attracting more and more attention.

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

Stabbings, shooting, rapes, homicides -- the denizens of places like the Elk brought those crimes along with them the way ordinary travelers carried luggage.

Sometimes there is more to a person's need for white picket fences than safety, just as sometimes there is more to a person's rebellion than the need to lash out against rules.

doesn't mean to say we are always going to be crazy either. Simply that we are back on that line, jostling for position with everyone else who claims to be normal.

Caleb's mind filled with an unbidden image of her in the parlor of the grand house in Fox Chapel, wearing silks and satins and graciously greeting his guests of an evening. He'd be the envy of every man north of the Mason-Dixon line. He shook off the idea. He was looking for another mistress, not a wife.

For many of these women, the root of their injury stems from a damaged relation with the father. They may have been wounded by a bad relation to their personal father, or wounded by the patriarchal society which itself functions like a poor father, culturally devaluing the worth of women.

If the death penalty is ever to be carried out in order to protect the innocent and send an unmistakable message to criminals that some crimes are so odious and chillingly frightful that execution is society's only responsible answer, special accommodations should be reserved in death chambers and electric chairs for medical serial killers.

Eventually, money will optimize itself and everything around it.

Scaling Kardashev is any civilization's primary function.

A long time ago a bunch of people reached a general consensus as to what's real and what's not and most of us have been going along with it ever since.

peace and good cheer on festive days. It was voted further that any member who moves from one place to another [at a banquet] so as to cause a disturbance shall be fined 4 sesterces. Any member, moreover, who speaks abusively of another or causes an uproar shall be fined 12 sesterces. Any member who uses abusive or insolent language to a president at a banquet shall be fined 20 sesterces. . . . From the excavations at Ostia we get a good idea of what the headquarters of a rich society

Why would affluence make him mad?" "Maybe he's mad that this is as good as it gets. Your big house. His good school. I think it's very difficult for kids these days, in a way. The country's very prosperity has become a burden, a dead end. Everything works, doesn't it? At least if you're white and middle class. So it must often seem to young people that they're not needed. In a sense, it's as if there's nothing more to do.

Now that children don't till your fields or take you in when you're incontinent, there is no sensible reason to have them, and it's amazing that with the advent of effective contraception anyone chooses to reproduce at all.

In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.

The pediatrician must have thought me one of those neurotic mothers who craved distinction for her child but who in our civilization's latter-day degeneracy could only conceive of the exceptional in terms of deficiency or affliction.

For all our squinting at the two sexes to blur them into duplicates, few hearts race when passing gaggles of giggling schoolgirls. But any woman who passes a clump of testosterone-drunk punks without picking up the pace, without avoiding the eye contact that might connote challenge or invitation, without sighing inwardly with relief by the following block, is a zoological fool. A boy is a dangerous animal.

There's something nihilistic about not having children

The way I see it, the world is divided into the watchers and the watchees, and there's more and more of the audience and less and less to see. People who actually do anything are a goddamned endangered species.

Everything works, doesn't it? At least if you're white and middle class. So it must often seem to young people that they're not needed. In a sense, it's as if there's nothing more to do.