Quotes About Society

Because language and society are so closely linked, it is possible, in some cases, to encourage social change by directing attention towards linguistic reflections of aspects of society that one would like to see altered.

in a struggle between two groups of people, the group with stronger norms promoting cooperation and the most people following such norms has a greater chance of winning.

Bowling Alone

great empires die not by murder, but by suicide.

Cultural traits, however, are a more general category than memes, because they also include quantitative (smoothly-varying) characteristics that cannot be easily represented as discrete alternatives: for example, the inclination to trust strangers. (More on that below.)

The powers that be don't necessarily view you as a citizen, a voter, or a person. You're a consumer. You're someone who buys products, then consumes them. After you eat it, use it up, or wear it out, you buy more.

We're all free and equal to die like dogs

What's the point of a revolution without general copulation copulation copulation

But the fact that highly secular nations and states fare so well compared to religious nations and states, and the fact that many nations have seen violent crime and other social pathologies decrease over time as secularity has simultaneously increased, does prove that morality clearly doesn't hinge upon the existence of God, or require belief in God.

Phil Zuckerman, "Is Faith Good for Us?" Free Inquiry 26, 5 (2006): 35–38; Gregory S. Paul, "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies," Journal of Religion and Society 7, 1 (2005):

Wrinkled women lifting their faces, chasing their youth. Fat men sucking in bellies. Poor folks putting on airs. Sinners acting like saints. All of us keeping pace with our companions, stepping lively in this dance of deceit.

Society before the war showed signs of becoming what French sociey before the Revolution had been – curious, gay, tolerant, reckless and reasonably cynical. After the war I suppose it will be none of these things … The war has ruined our little patch of civility as thoroughly as a revolution could have done.

It was doubtful that their technology, and its intelligent use, would ever match their ability to create social stupidities.

this is the essence of science fiction, the conceptual dislocation within the society is generated in the author's mind, transferred to paper, and from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in the reader's mind, the shock of dysrecognition.

There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. One of the biggest transformations we have seen in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. We must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.

An android," he said, "doesn't care what happens to another android. That's one of the indications we look for. "Then," Miss Luft said, "you must be an android.

Guilt—if there was any guilt—spread out and diffused itself over everybody and everything…. Perhaps at some point in time, at some spot in the world, a moment of responsibility existed.

It will end, Childan thought. Someday. The very idea of place. Not governed and governing, but people.

We live in a society where detachment is almost essential.

You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.

the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.

they won't help a hurt man up from the gutter due to the obligation it imposes.

Worse still, he had failed to pass the minimum mental faculties test, which made him in popular parlance a chickenhead.

They're both plutocracies, rule by the rich. If they had won, all they'd have thought about was making more money, the upper class. Abendsen, he's wrong; there would be no social reform, no welfare public works plans - the Anglo-Saxon plutocrats wouldn't have permitted it.