Quotes About Society

Integration propaganda and the educated Let us note right away a final aspect of Integration Propaganda: the more comfortable, cultivated, and informed the milieu to which it is address, the better it works. Intellectuals are more sensitive than peasants to integration propaganda. In fact, they share the stereotypes of a society even when they are political opponents of the society.

To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot permit time for thought or reflection. A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of the event; be is carried along in the current, and can at no time take a respite to judge and appreciate; he can never stop to reflect. There is never any awareness--of himself, of his condition, of his society--for the man who lives by current events.

No technique is possible when men are free.

Man is caught like a fly in a bottle. His attempts at culture, freedom, and creative endeavor have become mere entries in technique's filing cabinet.

La prévoyance commence lorsque nous acceptons que nous sommes maintenant arrivés à créés une civilisation du risque.

A sacral society is one in which everything, including whatever is not sacred, is judged from the standpoint of the sacred. The profane is not the sacred, but it can exist only in a society which orders everything with reference to the sacred. The fact that man treats a given element as sacred does not mean that the rest is not sacred for the world is a whole. What it means is that the rest is located with reference to the ever present sacred.

A conflict between primary and secondary opinions will arise. One will dominate the other. Propaganda can exist only in societies in which second hand opinion definitely dominates primary opinion and the latter is reduced and driven into a minority position; then, when the individual finds himself between the two conflicting types of opinion, he will normally grasp the general, public opinion.

The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passions of the soul, just as the beam of the psychoanalytic scales, when we calculate the tilt of its threat to entire communities, provides us with an indication of the deadening of the passions in society.

If at the present day it has found a warm welcome among certain circles in Europe, it is because all those who hope to derive from humanitarianism a moral code of human kindness for the acceptance of an atheistic society are already implicitly Buddhists.

Armed with all the powers, enjoying all the wealth they owe to science, our societies are still trying to practice and to teach systems of values already destroyed at the roots by that very science. Man knows at last that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe, whence which he has emerged by chance. His duty, like his fate, is written nowhere.

The future of mankind is going to be decided within the next two generations, and there are two absolute requisites: We must aim at a stable-state society [with limited population growth] and the destruction of nuclear stockpiles. … Otherwise I don't see how we can survive much later than 2050.

Lo asombroso cuando se considera el modo de vida de esta clase dirigente es que una de sus categorías esenciales, la de los sacerdotes, vive en la austeridad y la pobreza [...]. La riqueza no se busca por la riqueza misma [...].

It is good for society to have this introspection.

Speaking out about ritual abuse brings more information and potential understanding about this issue to a society steeped in denial. There are many similar or related horrors in the world that are also denied.

Ultimately, our obsession with celebrities isn't about them; it's about us and our needs. Many of us look at these people—who have glamour, beauty, wealth, and youth—and familiarize ourselves with them until they begin to feel like real people in our lives. We discuss them at work, in the park, and over dinner. We develop feelings for them. We love them, or hate them, or pity them, or profess not to care but secretly do.

I'd be a bum on the street with a tin cup if the markets were efficient.

You mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won't let near the bread?

I had just begun to notice that people who knew the correct way to do things such as hold a teacup, put food on a fork and bring it to their mouth without making a mess on the front of their dress—they were the people responsible for the most misery, the people least likely to end up insane or paupers.

they were talking about themselves, and they seemed to take for granted that everything they said mattered. They were artists. I had heard of people in this position. I had never seen an example in the place where I came from. I noticed that mostly they were men. It seemed to be a position that allowed for irresponsibility, so perhaps it was much better suited to men.

Considering that no man is an Island, and no man is above the Law. Then, breaking the law is a penalty all citizen should endure."

Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.

There is no horizontal stratification of society in this country like the rocks in the earth, that hold one class down below forevermore, and let another come to the surface to stay there forever. Our stratification is like the ocean, where every individual drop is free to move, and where from the sternest depths of the mighty deep any drop may come up to glitter on the highest wave that rolls.

T]he minds of men are mirrors to one another' (T 365), Hume remarked, and just as mirrors are not in control of the reflections they give, so also our feelings, and beliefs, cannot help but be impinged upon by the feelings and beliefs of those around us.

A grim pattern is visible in history: When religion is the ruling force in a society, it produces horror. The stronger the supernatural beliefs, the worse the inhumanity. A culture dominated by intense faith invariably is cruel to people who don't share the faith--and sometimes to many who do.