Quotes About Society

In terms of class, for example, the dominant elite in one section tended to ally itself with the proletariat in the other.

Of all the English-speaking people in the seventeenth century, the Quakers moved farthest toward the idea of equality between the sexes.

David Riesman] had made a hobby of studying the American Civil War and he had always been disturbed by the passions which it had unleashed in the country, the tensions and angers just below the surface, the thin fabric of the society which held it all together, so easy to rend.

In a new, modern, industrial, demographically young society, this was symbolized by nothing so much as congressional control by very old men from small Southern towns, many of them already deeply committed, personally and financially, to existing interests; to a large degree they were the enemies of the very people who had elected John F. Kennedy. He was caught in that particular bind.

Events," wrote George Ball, paraphrasing Emerson "are in the saddle, and ride mankind.

particular rootlessness of the society had always lent itself to powerful extremes of both the left and the right, there was, in the volatility and evanescence of the culture an atmosphere ripe for extremism, each side with its own Utopian dreams, each side driving the other to a more polarized position.

If the norm of the society is corrupted, then objective journalism is corrupted too, for it must not challenge the norm. It must accept the norm.

For Marx, capital is not a thing, but a process—a process, specifically, of the circulation of values.

There is a big difference between the circulation of money as a mediator of commodity exchange and money used as capital. Not all money is capital. A monetized society is not necessarily a capitalist society. If everything revolved around the C-M-C circulation process, then money would be merely a mediator, nothing more. Capital emerges when money is put into circulation in order to get more money.

the labour-time necessary for the production of labour-power is the same as that necessary for the production of those means of subsistence; in other words, the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner.

the wealth of a society is going to be measured by how much disposable free time we all have to do what the hell we like without any constraints because our basic needs are met.

Planning and control are being attacked as a denial of freedom. Free enterprise and private ownership are declared to be essentials of freedom. No society built on other foundations is said to deserve to be called free. The freedom that regulation creates is denounced as unfreedom; the justice, liberty and welfare it offers are decried as a camouflage of slavery.35 The

This is what the bourgeois political economists have done: they have treated value as a fact of nature, not a social construction arising out of a particular mode of production. What Marx is interested in is a revolutionary transformation of society, and that means an overthrow of the capitalist value-form, the construction of an alternative value-structure, an alternative value-system that does not have the specific character of that achieved under capitalism.

It is no longer the case, if it ever was, that capitalism can be construed as a peaceful, lawful, and non-coercive system.

Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.

Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff.

The catastrophe of every socialist scheme in the 20th century has had a devastating effect on leftwing optimism and has replaced it with the corrosive nihilism that makes it impossible for most leftists to defend a country which, compared to the socialist paradises, is a veritable heaven on earth. All that remains of the revolutionary project is the bitter hatred of the society its exponents inhabit, and their destructive will to bring it down.

America can win a war against any external foe. Consequently, it is the war at home that will ultimately decide America's fate

This avidity alone, of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society.

Human Nature is the only science of man and yet has been hitherto the most neglected.

Enthusiasm produces the most cruel disorders in human society; but its fury is like that of thunder and tempest, which exhaust themselves in a little time, and leave the air more calm and serene than before.

It's seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.

Governments too steady and uniform, as they are seldom free, so are they, in the judgment of some attended with another sensible inconvenience: they abate the active powers of men; depress courage, invention, and genius; and produce a universal lethary in the people.