Quotes About Society

The nail that sticks out is hammered down.

No one's here this time of year except caretakers: often alcoholic friends of the family who can't handle society, who hide and take care of mansions and animals. He

In much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. That's increasingly the case in Los Angeles where I come from. So that wealthy people in much of the world are insulated from the consequences of their actions." [ Why Societies Collapse , ABC Local, July 17, 2003]

With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.

All human societies contain inventive people. It's just that some environments provide more starting materials, and more favorable conditions for utilizing inventions, than do other environments.

Besides justifying the transfer of wealth to kleptocrats, institutionalized religion brings two other important benefits to centralized societies. First, shared ideology or religion helps solve the problem of how unrelated individuals are to live together without killing each other—by providing them with a bond not based on kinship. Second, it gives people a motive, other than genetic self-interest, for sacrificing their lives on behalf of others.

Gay marriage won't be more of an issue 25 years from now than interracial marriage is today.

Racial identity can be condemned, fought, ignored, or cultivated, but it is unrealistic for a society to pretend it does not exist.

Black solidarity is so taken for granted in America that almost no one ever points out that what is entirely acceptable for blacks would be considered hopelessly racist if done by whites.

Blacks now demand special treatment as a matter of course. In its befuddled way, society is trying to do what is right. But to favor blacks systematically and then call this sorry charade "equal opportunity" is self-delusion of the worst kind.

When they are beyond the reach of the law, Americans revert to the patterns of segregation the law forbids. Why is this?

Virtually all observers agree that it is a terrible disadvantage for a child to come into the world without a father. Fatherless children are much more likely than those from two-parent homes to be poor, fail in school, commit crime, and, in turn, have fatherless children.

As one prominent poll taker reports, "the greatest difference between blacks and whites in polling [is that] the vast majority of blacks believe government can solve anything."290 For many blacks, government is a symbol of white America. White people could solve black people's problems if they really wanted to. Since the government has not solved all their problems, it must not want to.

Americans still say integration is important, but very few do anything to bring it about.

Doctrine holds that white society is seething with hatred for blacks. The very reverse is true. With the best of intentions and for the best of reasons, America has done everything within its power to encourage blacks to hate whites.

Another Harvard research project concluded bluntly that by 2004, American schools were just as segregated as they were in 1969, the year after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.

It is obviously bad for race relations for society constantly to tell one group that another group brought them low and keeps them there, but whites do not do this because they want to improve race relations. They do it because they want to prove their own virtue, even if it poisons race relations and encourages blacks—and now Hispanics—to hate whites.

The black leaders of this generation have much to answer for. They have perpetuated the myth that salvation comes only from whites. They have made careers out of shaking down a guilt-ridden society and dispensing the booty as patronage. In Thomas Sowell's words, these are men "whose own employment and visibility depend upon maintaining an adequate flow of injustices…."1026 Their very livelihoods depend on finding enough white wickedness to denounce.

The reason blacks and whites do not enjoy similar outcomes despite similar treatment by society is that the black and white populations are not equivalent. Although I expressed myself as gently and sympathetically as possible, my conclusion was that black outcomes reflect black behavior rather than oppression by whites. A

President Abraham Lincoln is likewise falsely portrayed, presumably to salve white consciences and to mollify blacks. He is extolled as the Great Emancipator who wanted to set up the freed slave as the equal of his master. He was certainly opposed to slavery, but he did not want free blacks living in the same society as whites. As President he asked Congress several times to appropriate money to send them to Africa, and even argued for a Constitutional amendment for this purpose.818

Scholars are beginning to understand that segregation does not reflect the preferences of whites alone.

Let's be honest about the fact that many of us from all races are racist. . . . We've lied about progress."132

As the researchers noted, single people are more willing to live in mixed neighborhoods, but people with children seek homogeneity.84

Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future.