Quotes About Society

After half a millennium of dominance, the West is being eclipsed in the global era, the United States as the lead society in the West stands on the verge of relative if not absolute decline, and much of the Christian Church in both Europe and North America is in a sorry state of weakness, confusion, unfaithfulness and cultural captivity.

For a consumer society thrives by stoking unquenchable desires into unsustainable cravings and fanning them with an inflated rage for rights. The restlessness it creates by providing false satisfactions and deadening true desires simultaneously fuels the economy and destroys happiness.

As followers of Jesus, we must not duck the enormity of a simple but shattering fact: with relatively few exceptions, such as some branches of Buddhism, almost all the most militantly secularist societies in history have been the product of Christian societies. The church is a leading spawning ground for atheists.

To most people at the time it was unthinkable that religion might ever not be what it was then. However, Bryce mused, if religion in America were ever to lose its strength and authority, the result would be "the completest revolution of all." The strongest bonding in American society would have gone, and unbounded freedom would run amok and work to cause its own undoing.

With the ability to produce more goods than people need, consumer capitalism has to make children into consumers earlier and keep them at it longer. Hence contemporary America, a culture of perennial adolescents.

If Sparta and Rome perished," Rousseau wrote, "what state can hope to endure for ever?

This means that, bad though it is and dangerous though its slipway may prove, there is a sense in which hypocrisy may be preferable to wickedness. Hypocrisy still cares enough about virtue to want to pretend to be virtuous, or at least it recognizes that the society around still prizes virtue enough to make it worth flattering.

A striking symptom of the church's problems in the West today is the fact that in a country such as the United States, Christians are still the overwhelming majority of citizens, but the American way of life has moved far from the way of life of Jesus—which means simply that the Christians who are the majority are living a way of life closer to the world than to the way of Jesus. In a word, they are worldly and therefore incapable of shaping their culture.

we Christians are not practicing what we preach, we cannot expect our society to enjoy the fruits of the way of life of Jesus, and our Christian faith is likely to be implausible and off-putting to the wider world.

One overall conclusion is plain: under the weight of the combined impact of exploding pluralism, the expansion of the state, and emerging separationism, the early American settlement, so brilliantly described by Tocqueville, is gone, and gone for good.

If you [Americans] are sincere in your desire for peace and security, we have answered you.

I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in and the West in general into an unbearable hell and a choking life.

People talk of "social outcasts." The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a "social outcast" from the moment I was born. If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.

What did he mean by "society"? The plural of human beings?

Unhappiness. There are all kinds of unhappy people in the world. I suppose it would be no exaggeration to say that the world is composed entirely of unhappy people. But those people can fight their unhappiness with society fairly and squarly, and society for its part easily understands and sympathizes with such struggles. My unhappiness stemmed entirely from my own vices, and I had no way of fighting anybody.

What is society but an individual? [...] The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This was how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror at the illusion of the ocean called the world.

Victims. Victims of a transitional period of morality. That is what we both certainly are.

the more I feared people the more I was liked, and the more I was liked the more I feared them—a process which eventually compelled me to run away from everybody.

From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual?

Unhappiness. There are all kinds of unhappy people in the world. I suppose it would be no exaggeration to say that the world is composed entirely of unhappy people. But those people can fight their unhappiness with society fairly and squarly, and society for its part easily understands and sympathizes with such struggles.

What is society but an individual?

If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.

The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is the individual.

A science which is postulated on the assumption that human beings are avaricious through all eternity is utterly devoid of point (whether in problems of distribution or any other aspect) to a person who is not avaricious.