Quotes About Society

right. The goal of any healthy society was to keep people safe to express sometimes unpopular views.

These are young people, Madame Gamache. They're gifted, and many are fragile, having been marginalized most of their lives for being creative. We live in a society that doesn't value being different. When they come here, to art college, it's probably the first time in their lives they feel they belong. Safe. Not just valued, but precious.

Like the rest of the Québécois? Like Beauvoir himself? Did they curse the Church? Câlice! Tabernac! Hostie! The Québécois had turned religious words into dirty words.

If drugs are out of control, it isn't long before we lose our grip on all crime.

His skin was pocked and ruddy, his nose large and misshapen, red and veined as though he'd snorted, and retained, Burgundy. His teeth protruded, yellowed and confused, heading this way and that in his mouth. His eyes were small and slightly crossed. A lazy eye, thought Gamache. What used to be known as an evil eye, in darker times when men like this found themselves at best cast out of polite society and at worst tied to a stake.

The deaths of those young women changed Canadian society. It brought about much stricter gun legislation (though it could be tougher still) and forced a long, hard, often painful examination of equal rights. Of human rights.

Are we really growing more civilised? More tolerant? Less violent? If things had changed, you wouldn't be here.

The goal of any healthy society was to keep people safe to express sometimes unpopular views. But there was a limit to that expression, a line.

Terrible things were discussed by confident people in public places.

I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.

In Phnom Penh, it seems that the more money you have, the more stairs you have to climb to your home. Ma

Of what use is it to please the herd? They are simply coarse animals -- for all that is admirable in man is the artificial product of special breeding.

What a marvel bureaucracy is, which can smother Such quite elementary feelings, and tag A man with a number, and set him to wag His legs and his arms at the word of command Or the blow of a whistle! He's certainly damned, Fit only for mince-meat, if a little gold lace And an upturned moustache can set him to face Bullets, and bayonets, and death, and diseases, Because some one he calls his Emperor, pleases.

What lackeys men are, who might be such fine fellows! To be killing each other, unmercifully, At an order, as though one said, "Bring up the tea."

The point here is that there is as much disinformation and as little insight concerning the nature of killing coming from the media as from any other aspect of our society.

Peter Marin condemns the "inadequacy" of our psychological terminology in describing the magnitude and reality of the "pain of human conscience." As a society, he says, we seem unable to deal with moral pain or guilt.

The law cannot equalize mankind in spite of nature.

If people did not compliment one another there would be little society.

In the technological world...it is no longer a question of dominating nature or society in order to be more free or more happy, but of mastery for mastery's sake, of domination for the sake of domination. Why? For no end, precisely, or rather: because it is quite simply impossible to do otherwise, given the nature of societies entirely governed by competition, by the absolute imperative to 'advance or perish'.

Les questions auxquelles elles apportent des réponses ont disparu du champ de nos préoccupations ordinaires de sorte qu'elles n'ont pratiquement plus droit de cité, en tout cas plus sous leur forme originelle, dans l'espace public.

A crime which is the crime of many none avenge.

If men had to bear babies, there'd never be more than one child in a family.

Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our 'salvation' if we thought it through.

The bus is late. Cars drive by. Rich people n cars never look at people on the street, at all. Poor ones always do ... in fact it sometimes seems they're just driving around, looking at people on the street. I've done that. Poor people wait a lot. Welfare, unemployment lines, laundromats, phone booths, emergency rooms, jails, etc.