Quotes About Society

the black elite here swan round in squadrons of the latest luxury SUVs, each of which is worth ten times this eccentric old thing.

The more Christian you are in this town, the more makeup you wear. I've always thought that it's because if you were to die suddenly, you'd look better for God.

In an age that has thrown off all tradition, the only rebellion possible is orthodoxy.

What we do is not as important as what we are. Our functionalistic modern society tends to reduce our being to our function. What is the first question we ask about someone? "What does he do?" But love never asks that question first. The first question for love is always "Who are you?" rather than "What do you do?" Being is prior to doing, and love's realism refuses to reverse that real order.

As society grows, it knows more and more about less and less. It knows more about the little things and less about the big things. It knows more about everything and less about Everything.

Only when there is virtue in souls can there be peace and happiness in society.

The major heresies of our day are not about God but about man.

It is often said that we live in a youth culture. It's a lie. We live in an old culture. We idolize youth because we are old. We are tired and bored. Ancient cultures respected the old because those cultures were young. They were not bored.

This is one reason why modern people are so unprepared for death: death is the one thing society can't do for you, the one thing that forces you to confront your trans-social self. We live as "the lonely crowd", but we die one at a time.

Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) has brought me in touch with hundreds more such practitioners.

Though the governments of Sweden, Hong Kong, and Germany are by no means anticapitalist, they have accepted a truth that few in the United States are willing to grapple with: unregulated capitalism cannot provide a complete solution to the housing question.

All she knew was what she read in the papers, where it seemed that people no longer lived their lives, but had life-styles instead.

According to Waggoner, the trouble is that complicated laws enrich those who make the laws while making the rest of society poorer.

It is a mistake to assume that the law should always enforce morality.

Marx saw that capitalism is a wasteful, irrational system, a system which controls us when we should be controlling it. That insight is still valid; but we can now see that the construction of a free and equal society is a more difficult task than Marx realized.

If our best-educated citizens have no idea how to answer these basic questions, we will struggle to build a democracy that can solve the problems we face, whether they are what to do about climate change, the world's poor, the problems of Australia's Indigenous people, or the prospect of a future in which we can genetically modify our offspring. An education in the humanities is as valuable today as it was in Plato's time.

While it is absurd to blame Marx for something he did not foresee and certainly would have condemned if he had foreseen it, the distanced between Marx's predicted communist society and the form taken by 'communism' in the twentieth century may in the end be traceable to Marx's misconception of the flexibility of human nature.

The world would be a much simpler place if one could bring about social change merely by making a logically consistent moral argument.

If 10 percent of the population were to take a consciously ethical outlook on life and act accordingly, the resulting change would be more significant than any change of government

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat. (CM 254)

they took this as a law of nature, a self-evident necessary truth. On the contrary, says Marx, it bears the stamp of a society 'in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him'.

For all I know, war is "natural" to human beings—it certainly seems to have been a preoccupation for many societies, in very different circumstances, over a long period of history—but I have no intention of going to war to make sure that I act in accordance with nature.

A society that decides its controversial issues by ballots does better than one that uses bullets Ã¢â'¬â€œ which, after all, is no more likely to lead to the right conclusion than voting.

It is not believed that a people capable of inventing the genre of oral painting could have spawned the viaduct killer, and in any case no ghetto resident is permitted access to any other area of the city. (A Short Guide To The City)