Quotes About Society

If the eccentric is sufficiently integrated to succeed in some field, to gain wealth or power, he is admired and respected and his oddity is overlooked. But if the eccentric fails, he is pitied or ridiculed and shunned as something strange.

The modern world, he thought resentfully, prepares you very poorly for the tests it puts you to.

A planet full of people meant nothing against the dictates of economic necessity!

Society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience.

The destruction of our technological society in a fit of nuclear peevishness would become disastrous even if there were many millions of immediate survivors. The environment toward which they were fitted would be gone, and Darwin's demon would wipe them out remorselessly and without a backward glance.

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'

When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'

Shuffling her manly feet, shaking her head, she listed off—at the top of her voice, for the whole street to hear—the names of women who were happy with their husbands.

While some distance from the wide sea, smoke rises from factories and Karl Marx does his usual work.

Buildings will collapse, power plants will stop generating electricity. Generals will drop atomic bombs on their own populations. Mad revolutionaries will run in the streets, crying fantastic slogans. I have often thought it would begin in New York. This metropolis has all the symptoms of a mind gone berserk.

The idea of a revolution through the people was gradually replaced by that of a conspiracy to be planned and carried out by a small and determined minority from the intelligentsia.

Giving women education, work, the ability to control their own income, inherit and own property, benefits the society. If a woman is empowered, her children and her family will be better off. If families prosper, the village prospers, and eventually so does the whole country.

And I felt, I think for the first time, a rage against men. Not because they could say, "I'm going," and go. Not because they could go to college and become lawyers or preachers while women could only be drudge or ornament but nothing between. Not because they could be parents at no cost to their bodies. But because when they love a woman they may be with her, and all society will protect their possession of her.

To have a home, a family, a property or a public function, to have a definite means of livelihood and to be a useful cog in the social machine, all these things seem necessary, even indispensable, to the vast majority of men, including intellectuals, and including even those who think of themselves as wholly liberated. And yet such things are only a different form of slavery that comes of contact with others, especially regulated and continued contact.

Citizens expect solutions from science for all sorts of social problems: unemployment, depleted oil reserves, pollution, cancer … the path that leads to the answers to these questions is not as direct as a programmatic vision of research would have us believe …

People do not live nowadays. They get about 10% out of life.

Er bestaat geen noodzakelijk verband tussen individuele vrijheid en democratie.

I più celebrati utopisti dei tempi moderni... offrono un quadro pressochè statico degli attributi essenziali dell'uomo e, di conseguenza, una descrizione altrettanto statica della società perfetta ritenuta raggiungibile. Con ciò essi ignorano il carattere degli uomini in quanto esseri che si autotrasformano, che sono capaci di libere scelte - entro i limiti imposti dalla natura e dalla storia - fra scopi contrastanti e reciprocamente incompatibili.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing completely straight was ever made

I used to be a discipline problem, which caused me embarrassment until I realized that being a discipline problem in a racist society is sometimes an honor.

Fear stalks the land. (As usual; so what else is new?)

Since the capital system cannot set limits to itself, also, it cannot differentiate between the growth of a child and the growth of a cancer.