Quotes About Society

Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments.

bears remembering that the purpose of a free press, like the purpose of free speech, is to nurture the mind, communicate ideas, challenge ideologies, share notions, inspire creativity, and advocate and reinforce America's founding principles—that is, to contribute to a vigorous, productive, healthy, and happy individual and to a well-functioning civil society and republic.

Still, it is argued that millions of people benefit from such programs. Of course, trillions of dollars in government expenditures over many years most assuredly benefit the recipients of subsidies or other related payments. But this does not change the arithmetic. The eventual collapse of a colossal government venture will indiscriminately engulf an entire society and economy, including its millions of beneficiaries and benefactors, resulting in widespread disorder and misery.

In other words, once the poison of jealousy, contempt, and even hatred enters the bloodstream of the body politic, a dark and foreboding bleakness will begin to cover the society, from which nothing good will come.

Moreover, most mass movements are angry and gloomy movements, hostile toward well-adjusted, happy, and successful individuals. Again, this is evident

Statist, liberty is not a blessing but the enemy. It is not possible to achieve Utopia if individuals are free to go their own way.

Of course, the primary difference between the counterrevolution and the American Revolution is that the former seeks to destroy American society and impose autocratic rule, and the latter sought to protect American society and institute representative government.

Thwarting the steadily growing tyranny of an illimitable federal government by re-establishing constitutional government is of paramount importance if future generations are to live and prosper in a free and open society.

Money speaks louder than the public, problems overwhelm it, fatigue sets in, attention falters, cynicism swells. A

There is also no doubt that major market-oriented reforms and overhauls are required immediately to address unsustainable federal health-care entitlements and avoid the devastating economic and societal consequences awaiting younger people and future generations from decades of extravagance, political manipulation, and rampant bureaucratic intervention in the private health-care system.

The late author Theodore White wrote that "the Immigration Act of 1965 changed all previous patterns, and in so doing, probably changed the future of America. . . . [I]t was noble, revolutionary—and probably the most thoughtless of the many acts of the Great Society."6 As a result, in subsequent years immigrants have been poorer, less educated, and less skilled than those who preceded them—a pattern that continues today.7

In modern America, the unraveling of the civil society had been subtly persistent but is now intensifying. Evidence of rising utopian statism—the allure of political demagogues and self-appointed masterminds peddling abstractions and fantasies in pursuit of a nonexistent paradisiacal society, and the concomitant accretion of governmental power in an increasingly authoritarian and centralized federal Leviathan—abounds.

It is essential, therefore, that in republican government, representatives avoid efforts intended to change the general spirit of the nation—that is, the legislator must help preserve and protect society, not eradicate it.

Liberty's permeance in American society often makes its manifestations elusive or invisible to those born into it. Even if liberty is acknowledged, it is often taken for granted and its permanence assumed. Therefore, under these circumstances, the Statist's agenda can be alluring. . . . It is not recognized as an increasingly corrosive threat to liberty but rather as co-existing with it."11

The laws of economics, like the laws of science, are real, unlike the utopian images and empty assurances of expedient and self-aggrandizing politicians and bureaucrats. There is a point of irreversibility from which no generation and the larger society can recover.

GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY ECONOMICS professor Dr. Walter Williams rightly describes the underlying pathology driving the nation to economic and financial ruin as a moral problem: "We've become an immoral people demanding that Congress forcibly use one American to serve the purposes of another.

Locke said, as have others, that natural law is forever and enduring, and man-made law, which may vary from place to place and time to time, clearly is not.

For the first time in our history, the news increasingly is produced by companies outside journalism, and this new economic organization is important.

In these times of rampantly increasing inequality, I would love to see a truly great social novel … books that really try to tell us how we're living now ... holding a mirror up to our society ... we can't think about trying to change our society before we understand it.

No offense, but it seems like the whole point of civilization is to get someone else to do your killing for you.

Monotheistic Yahwism resembled neither a Greek philosophical notion of Deity as nonsexual Being nor some type of divine bisexuality. Instead, Israelite society perceived Yahweh primarily as a god, embodying traits or values expressed by gendered metaphors yet transcending such particular renderings. It is unnecessary and it is not supported by any biblical text to argue that monotheistic Yahweh involved either androgyny or homoeroticism

Gandhi believed that the means of struggle a people used would shape the society that grew out of the struggle.

Of course, fashions come and go but metrosexuality isn't a fashion – it's an epoch. It represents a fundamental shift in what men are allowed to be and to want. Men are now permitted to be 'passive' – inviting our gaze.

There's a famous quote which goes something like, 'You are what you are, having secretly become what you wanted to be'. Maybe there's some truth to that. We like to think that society shapes us, but I don't think that that's the way it happens. Select, 1991