Quotes About Society

We see ourselves as non-conformists but I think all of this is creating a more conformist, conservative age. "Look," were saying, "we're normal. This is the average." We're defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside of it.

society was, they claimed, an expression of that particular sort of madness.

society to be a fundamentally rational thing

I remembered those psychologists who said psychopaths made the world go around. They meant it: society was, they claimed, an expression of that particular sort of madness.

Look! We're saying. We're normal! This is the average! We're defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside of it.

Psychopaths don't change, she [Essi Viding] said. They don't learn from punishment. The best you can hope for is that they'll eventually get too old and lazy to be bothered to offend. And they can seem impressive. Charismatic. People are dazzled. So, yeah, the real trouble starts when one makes it big in mainstream society.

There's a societal push for conformity in all ways. There's less tolerance of difference. And so maybe for some people having a label is better. It can confer a sense of hope and direction. (interview with Allen Frances)

It is a frightening and huge thought," I said, "that the ninety-nine percent of us wandering around down here are having our lives pushed and pulled around by that psychopathic fraction up there." "It

Many kids who would have been called eccentric, different, were suddenly labeled autistic." I

The consensus from the beginning was that only 1 percent of humans had it, but the chaos they caused was so far-reaching it could actually remold society, remold it all wrong

Terrible things had been done in Haiti in his name. He had profoundly altered Haitian society for three years, set it spiraling frantically in the wrong direction, destroying the lives of thousands, tainting hundreds of thousands more.

The reason I don't worry about society is, nineteen people knocked down two buildings and killed thousands. Hundreds of people ran into those buildings to save them. I'll take those odds every f*cking day.

What are you so mad about? That we still have a government? We still have "traffic lights." We're sorry. The government's not perfect, but some people wish it was better, not gone.

If there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying. I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

We're not going to get the jack-booted thugs stomping on a human face that you get in '1984' but we might get the 'Brave New World' where the biggest problem there is how to deal with the fact that everyone is so happy...[W]hat we're going to get is a nanny-type of fascism, if we get one at all...[S]imply because the nanny-state wants to hug you doesn't mean it's not tyrannical if you don't want to be hugged.

Unlike classical liberalism, which saw the government as a necessary evil, or simply a benign but voluntary social contract for free men to enter into willingly, the belief that the entire society was one organic whole left no room for those who didn't want to behave, let alone "evolve.

When we fail to properly civilize people, human nature rushes in. Absent a higher alternative, human nature drives us to make sense of the world on its own instinctual terms: That's tribalism.

At eight you're dead serious about what the world owes you: Civilization starts in your own room and moves out from there.

To have a viable civilization, people have to have a benign government, a semblance of education, spare time, imagination, and manners

To the privileged, equality feels like a step down. Understand this and you understand a lot of populist politics today.' ?yad el-Baghdadi, Twitter, 1:36 p.m., 25 July 2016

It's a reminder that what is inevitable may also be spiritually unendurable, that what is justifiable may be atrocious . . . that, like our Mad Mother Nature, our Mad Father Society is an organization of deaths as well as of lives . . .

Where are the laughs in massacre, famine and climate change, exactly? What's so funny about the Middle East, North Korea and Afghanistan? Who's going to chuckle when they pick up the London Review of Books and find John Lanchester arguing, convincingly as always, that the banking habits of the British people pose a greater threat to their own security than terrorism?

Nobody gives a tinker's fuck about fiction any more, not real fiction, and the only kind of … values anybody seems to care about are the ones that can be added up on a balance sheet.

There's hardly anybody who doesn't hate somebody now, and nobody at all whom somebody doesn't hate.