Quotes About Society

In 1948, psychologists asked more than 10,000 adolescents whether they considered themselves to be a very important person. At that point, 12 percent said yes. The same question was asked in 2003, and this time it wasn't 12 percent who considered themselves very important, it was 80 percent.

The shock of public hostility served as a stimulant. It made them acutely conscious of how society functioned.

In the educated class even social life is a series of aptitude tests; we all must perpetually perform in accordance with the shifting norms of propriety, ever advancing signals of cultivation.

Then, from the most structured and supervised childhood in human history, you get spit out after graduation into the least structured young adulthood in human history.

without social trust, the political system devolves into a brutal shoving match

Modern society has created a giant apparatus for the cultivation of the hard skills, while failing to develop the moral and emotional faculties down below. Children are coached on how to jump through a thousand scholastic hoops. Yet by far the most important decisions they will make are about whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what to despise, and how to control impulses. On these matters, they are almost entirely on their own.

Apparently, we have become such a hyper-individualized culture that it is impossible to develop an argument based on how individual cases fit into the fabric of the common good.

Fpr ome aftermppm a week leading up to the formal, the entire senior school body would pile into our massive gymnasium and learn dances that we would NEVER DANCE AGAIN, except at our own children's formals, perhaps. Nevertheless, we threw ourselves into the task as if we were living in a Jane Austen novel and this was the only way we would ever fit into society. (from How to Be Happy: A Memoir of Love, Sex and Teenage Confusion)

With the advent of recorded music in 1878, the nature of the places in which music was heard changed.

The passing down of big inheritances is also moving the upper class to the left, since heirs tend to be more liberal than their parents in what might be called "Rockefeller syndrome.

The political system is broken, the economy is broken and so is society. That is why people are so depressed about the state of our country.

I think we need to just be very clear about what we're trying to do in Afghanistan. Frankly, we're not trying to create the perfect democracy. We're never going to create some ideal society. We are simply there for our own national security.

new forms of contraception, new methods of child rearing, and new forms of education and public welfare have provoked a fundamental renegotiation of gender roles.

Fernandez-Armesto, F. (2007). The world: A history. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.

as Joel Mokyr has argued, technological innovation is unlikely to happen quickly where those who work lack wealth, education, and prestige, and those who are wealthy, educated, and have prestige know nothing about productive work.

most of human history (chronologically speaking) has taken place in communities quite innocent of state power.

For two days, Welch outlined the danger at hand. Communist Party membership in the United States had expanded eightfold in the past two decades. (That was unlikely.) The Reds had a secret plan to devalue the dollar to cause economic collapse and societal chaos. The communists were sneaky bastards, he noted. They tended not to use force. They subverted their targets, creeping into political parties, churches, schools, labor unions, other institutions, and governments and

Global digital parasitism is the new Trotskyism.

Was the iPhone a malevolent protean organism, the stem-cell phone, mocking him who had cameras with real physical shutters whose sound you couldn't turn off? Promising to replace every other device on earth with its shape-shifting self – garage door openers, solar timers, television remotes, car keys, guitar tuners, GPS modules, light meters, spirit levels, you name it?

Unless a society is expecting its own future choices to be better than its present ones, it will strive to make its present policies and institutions as immutable as possible.

It would be astonishing if the details of a primitive, static society's collapse had any relevance to hidden dangers that may be facing our open, dynamic and scientific society, let alone what we should do about them.

The family—how much of a nation's happiness and prosperity depends on that institution as a nursery, a school, a society, a sanctuary, a little church, and an emblem of the great family—"the whole family," part of which is in heaven, and part still on earth! There

For the French, talent excuses much, genius excuses all, and prudishness is inexcusable.

Wars between classes might just replace one set of pigs with another, but they had some underlying point to them. Wars between nations, as far as Russell could see, had absolutely none. The