Quotes About Society

In the Orwellian dystopia the original sin was thoughtcrime, but in our new corporate dystopia the secret inner crime is need, particularly financial need. People in America hide financial need like they hide sexual perversions.

In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

Obsessed with success and wealth and despising failure and poverty, our society is systematically dividing the population into winners and losers, using institutions like the courts to speed the process.

When the Crossfire paradigm loses its force, all that's left is a bunch of people with different views all sitting together in a room, wondering why they're all paying three bucks a gallon for gas, why they have no health insurance, why their tax rates are higher than Warren Buffet's. If we're all equally a bunch of suckers, how could any of us be worth hating?

So I worked at Starbucks, making coffee for successful young women who paid while looking at their phones and barely noticed me.

poor white trash became the subject of extensive public debates in the antebellum period.

social sanitation

Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one.

One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man's life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that day, and far more still on what he reads during it.

That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.

Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

I knew the mass of men conceal'd Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd They would by other men be met With blank indifference.

Oh, born in days when wits were fresh and clear,And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;Before this strange disease of modern life,With its sick hurry, its divided aims,Its heads o'ertaxed, its palsied hearts, was rife.

The sterner self of the Populace likes bawling, hustling, and smashing; the lighter self, beer.

Society may be imagined so uniform that one education shall be suitable for all its members; we have not a society of that kind, nor has any European country.

One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class

Therefore, when we speak of ourselves as divided into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace, we must be understood always to imply that within each of these classes there are a certain number of aliens, if we may so call them,??persons who are mainly led, not by their class spirit, but by a general humane spirit, by the love of human perfection

The difficulty for democracy is, how to find and keep high ideals.

a classic example of Robert Heinlein's famous saying, that an armed society is a polite society.

All of these new "Big Brother" laws had been sold under the guise of combating terrorism and increasing security, but none of them dared to address the specific threat posed by Islamic terror. Instead, the federal government seemed to prefer to increase security by treating all Americans equally: equally as criminal suspects in a vast open-air penal system.

Let's face it: the vast majority of the American people are just not intelligent enough to function independently in a modern technological society. They have to be led, for their own good. The problem is, most of them are too ignorant to know what's best for them.

He espoused a Burkean conservatism of adaptation to changing circumstances. "A conservative in government expects such changes in society as time goes by," he wrote in The Conservative Soul (2006). "His job is to accommodate them to existing institutions." But the Right no longer widely practiced this sort of institutionalism.

In the Randian cosmology the dollar replaced the crucifix. Christianity, she said, is "the symbol of the sacrifice of the ideal to the nonideal.

The danger was that the alienation from and antagonism toward American culture and society expressed by many on the right could turn into a general opposition to the constitutional order.