Quotes About Society

Our affluent society contains those of talent and insight who are driven to prefer poverty, to choose it, rather than submit to the desolation of an empty abundance.

most people since the dawn of human time have been simply programmed by their birth to a short and brutish life that is not shaped by them or anyone else.

The notion that one must know history in order to understand the present has a certain justification when applied to the history of events, but not for the structural history of society. Rather, the opposite is the case: to examine the *constitution* of a particular social and economic structure, one has to be already familiar with the *completed* structure. Only then will one know what to look for in history.

The measure of a country's prosperity should not be how many poor people drive cars, but how many affluent people use public transportation.

Marx had it backwards. In the US at least, it should be "Opiates are the religion of the masses.

Theology, not morality, is the first business on the church's agenda of reform, and the church, not society, is the first target of divine criticism.

it is possible to cause more trouble with a rouble than with a club; it is only political economy that does not want to know it. — Leo Tolstoy, What Shall We Do Then? (1886)

Economics ultimately is political economy. To claim that it is "disinterested" and scientific is to cover up its political motives. The entire history of political economy has centered on the conflict between reformers seeking to free society from rentiers – landlords, creditors and monopolists – and the reaction by these wealthy vested interests to maintain their grip on the status quo that favors them.

demonstrate that taxing rent re-captures for society the natural resource patrimony and rising site value. This rental valuation is created not by landlord efforts but by society's overall prosperity and public investment in transportation systems, schools and other infrastructure that define "location, location and location.

The way societies have coped with this deepening indebtedness should be the starting point of financial theorizing. Money is not a "factor of production." It is a claim on the output or income that others produce. Debtors do the work, not the lenders. Before a formal market for wage labor developed in antiquity, money lending was the major way to obtain the services of bondservants who were compelled to work off the interest that was owed.

the economic aim of debt jubilees was to restore solvency to the population as a whole. Many royal proclamations also freed businesses from various taxes and tariff duties, but the main objective was political and ideological. It was to create a fair and equitable society.

merely aimed to provide citizens with the basic minimum standard needed to be self-sustaining. Wealth accumulation was permitted and even applauded, as long as it did not disrupt the normal functioning of society at large.

Today's mainstream political and economic theories deny a positive role for government policy to constrain the large-scale concentration of wealth.

He recognizes that the inherent tendency of history is for the wealthy to win out and make society increasingly unequal. This argument also has been made by Thomas Piketty and based largely on the inheritance of great fortunes

Government is an extremely prominent and fundamental feature of the structure of our society. We know that people tend to have a powerful bias in favor of the existing arrangements of their own societies. It therefore stands to reason that, whether or not any government were legitimate, most of us would have a strong tendency to believe that some governments are legitimate, especially our own and others like it.

The American political experience can therefore be viewed as optimism in the collective.

This people learned to put aside domestic differences, develop sound military and civil defense tactics, and build a collective sense of well-being by working together for a common purpose. This form of collective action is essential to a society. It comprises one of the founding organizing principles of any group or groups of people who successfully gather together to complete higher order tasks.97

The second factor that led to the Roman society's ability to organize collectively in the face of threat was the internal situation, to include such factors as the family, tradition, obedience, spirituality, incentives and concessions. It was a combination of these factors that helped the society overcome an unjust political and social structure and band together in the face of threat.

A politics of moral engagement is not only a more inspiring ideal than a politics of avoidance. It is also a more promising basis for a just society.

Putting aside the issue of how compelling her need for money may have been, and how significant her understanding of the consequences, we suggest that her consent is irrelevant. There are, in a civilized society, some things that money cannot buy.41

It isn't easy to teach students to be citizens, capable of thinking critically about the world around them, when so much of childhood consists of basic training for a consumer society.

Some see in our rancorous politics a surfeit of moral conviction: too many people believe too deeply, too stridently, in their own convictions and want to impose them on everyone else.

It is said that the Puritans banned bearbaiting, not because of the pain it caused the bears but because of the pleasure it gave the onlookers.

Altruism, generosity, solidarity and civic spirit are not like commodities that are depleted with use. They are more like muscles that develop and grow stronger with exercise. One of the defects of a market-driven society is that it lets these virtues languish. To renew our public life we need to exercise them more strenuously.