Quotes About Society

We need to make a world in which fewer children are born, and in which we take better care of them.

For all the communities available to us, there is not one I would want to devote myself to, except for the society of the true searchers, which has very few living members at any time.

Imagine what could be accomplished if only the human race would shed its humanity.

Americans worship technology. It's an inherent trait in the national zeitgeist.

We relinquished our freedom that day, and we were more than happy to see it go. From that moment on we lived in true freedom, the freedom to point to someone else and say "They told me to do it! It's their fault, not mine." The freedom, God help us, to say "I was only following orders."-World War Z

People are going to behave however the social norms permit, and beyond that.

We wanted a labor force, but humans came.

We asked for workers. We got people instead.

A society needs famous people; the question is whom it chooses for that role. Any criticism of its choice is by implication a criticism of that society.

Die Bild-Zeitung ist ein Organ der Niedertracht. Es ist falsch, sie zu lesen. Jemand, der zu dieser Zeitung beiträgt, ist gesellschaftlich absolut inakzeptabel. Es wäre verfehlt, zu einem ihrer Redakteure freundlich oder auch nur höflich zu sein. Man muss so unfreundlich zu ihnen sein, wie es das Gesetz gerade noch zuläßt. Es sind schlechte Menschen, die Falsches tun

It did not occur to Hitler, after his victories in the west, that it might be more difficult to overcome a brutalised society, inured to suffering, than democracies such as France and Britain, in which moderation and respect for human life were deemed virtues.

Adolf Hitler had led one of the most educated and cultured societies on earth to a moral, political and military abyss. He now sought to ensure that as many as possible of his own people accompanied him over the brink.

The French were more tolerant of brothels than any other nation in Europe, though there was some dispute about whether this reflected enlightenment or depravity.

Amoz Oz, who said something of the same kind, but from a different perspective: 'People like you', he said to me, 'are going to become very disappointed in Israel in the years ahead. You want it to behave like a European society. Instead, it is becoming a Middle Eastern society. I hope that it will not behave worse than other Middle Eastern societies. But you should not delude yourself that it is likely to behave much better.

It seems a fair test of any political movement to enquire not whether it is capitalist, communist or fascist, but whether it is fundamentally humane.

The Götterdämmerung of the bourgeois world is approaching.

Pragmatism reflects a society that has no time to remember and meditate.

Well-informed cynicism is only another mode of conformity.

He has nothing useful to say about fascism who is unwilling to mention capitalism.

The self, entirely encompassed by civilization, is dissolved in an element composed of the very inhumanity which civilization has sought from the first to escape.

Nuestra misión actual es, antes bien, asegurar que en el futuro no vuelva a perderse la capacidad para la teoría y para la acción que nace de esta [...] Debemos luchar para que la humanidad no quede desmoralizada para siempre por los terribles acontecimientos del presente, para que la fe en un futuro feliz de la sociedad, en un futuro de paz y digno del hombre, no desaparezca de la tierra.

America is a passionate idea or it is nothing. America is a human brotherhood or it is chaos.

The priest persuades a humble people to endure their hard lot, a politician urges them to rebel against it, and a scientist thinks of a method that does away with the hard lot altogether.

Ressentiment must therefore be strongest in a society like ours, where approximately equal rights (political and otherwise) or formal social equality, publicly recognized, go hand in hand with wide factual differences in power, property, and education.