Quotes About Society

do not mean that the sociologist is unaware of the existence and complex nature of communications in society, but until recently he has tended to overlook the extent to which they are the cement which binds its fabric together.

To discover the history of women and art is in part to account for the way art history is written. To expose its underlying values, its assumptions, its silences and its prejudices is also to understand that the way women artists are recorded is crucial to the definition of art and artists in our society.

Kohei Goshi, the 81 year old founder of the Japan Productivity Center, our host in Japan, said, "Americans are very good at inventing, but we may be better at raising a baby.

Without food, man can live at most but a few weeks without it, all other components of social justice are meaningless.

The intermediate stage between socialism and capitalism is alcoholism.

The big question about the hunter-gatherers, therefore, does not seem to be 'How did they progress towards the higher level of an agricultural and politicised society?' but 'What persuaded them to abandon the secure, well-provided and psychologically liberating advantages of their primordial lifestyle?'.1

Because we could change, we did not always know what was natural in us and what was acquired from our culture. Because we could change, we could be overly shaped by culture and society, to a point where we drifted too far from our true nature and became alienated from ourselves. While we may rejoice at the thought that the brain and human nature may be "improved," the idea of human perfectibility or plasticity stirs up a hornet's nest of moral problems.

civilization will always be a tenuous affair that must be taught in each generation and is always, at most, one generation deep.

You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.

The law does not content itself with classifying and punishing crime. It invents crime.

We take children from their parents because these cannot give them an intellectual training. So far, good. But we fail to give them that training in character which parents alone can give. Home influence, as Grace Aguilar conceived it—where has it gone? It strikes me that this is a grave danger for the future.

In response to [the Philistine] threat [in the ninth century B.C.], the Hebrews could no longer rely on the leadership of 'judges,' ad hoc military leaders (some of them, peculiarly, women; perhaps reflecting as feminists claim, and earlier matriarchal society).

Roman] society became steadily more cosmopolitan. By 212 A.D., all inhabitants of the empire, except for slaves, were deemed to be citizens. The old Roman aristocracy was not fixated upon race and color. Wealth and literacy were what opened the doors of their urban mansions and country villas.

It is not uncommon for textbooks on language to have sections on the relationship 'between' language and society, as if these were two independent entities which just happen to come into contact occasionally. My view is that there is not an external relationship 'between' language and society, but an internal and dialectical relationship.

Whenever I see he/him or she/her, I think fuck/you. You must be living an awfully precious life if, amid the pervasive despair of an economy in free fall, your uppermost concern is clinging to your pronouns.

There was class distinction in the RAF, as there was and still is in British society as a whole. It was said, for example, that a regular officer was an officer trying to be a gentleman, an auxiliary was a gentleman trying to be an officer and a VR was neither trying to be both.

Folk wisdom has it that five Jews wrote the rules of society: Moses said, "The law is everything." Jesus said, "Love is everything." Marx said, "Money is everything." Freud said, "Sex is everything." Einstein said, "Everything is relative.

The abashed modesty that faddish cultural relativism seeks to impose on us is not merely unwarranted on intellectual grounds. It is a species of grave moral delinquency. Our doctors not only "know different" about how the body works, and how its illnesses and injuries may be treated, they "know better." To deny this is to open the door to all kinds of avoidable suffering, in this society and elsewhere.

When it comes to the ever-elusive goal of achieving what is usually called "scientific literacy" for the general population, it is hard not to conclude that the task is hopeless.7b

Scientists are mistaken if they think that because the society that surrounds them revels in the plenty that science bestows, it has developed a frame of mind that reflects the scientific ethos. More ancient tendencies are in play in the collective imagination.

Nonspecialist science education has to pass along a general sense of the content, methods, efficacy, and authority of science. Yet it must do so without evoking the complex of resentments and anxieties that so ominously besiege science in contemporary society. At best this would be a daunting task. In the current climate, where our various social and political mechanisms are pulling in a dozen different directions at once, it may be an impossible one.

The question of the stranger in a society which estranges everybody from it--while forcing everybody to assimilate their own alienation--takes cover under dubious and sinister masks.

All currency is neurotic currency.

The dynamics of capitalism is postponement of enjoyment to the constantly postponed future.