Quotes About Society

But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. . . . Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.

Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief.

But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy.

bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy.

When the logic of history hungers for bread and we hand out a stone, we are at pains to explain how much the stone resembles bread.

There is a feeble minority called conservationists, who are indignant about something. They are beginning to realize that their task involves the reorganization of society, rather than the passage of some fish and game laws.

La nostra società, sempre più grande e bella, a questo punto è come un ipocondriaco, talmente ossessionato dalla sua salute finanziaria da aver perso la capacità di rimanere sano. Il mondo è così incessantemente avido di vasche da bagno che ha perduto l'equilibrio necessario per costruirle e persino per chiudere i rubinetti.

our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. The whole world is so greedy for more bathtubs that it has lost the stability necessary to build them, or even to turn off the tap.

It might be wise to prohibit at once all teaching of real botany and real history, lest some future citizen suffer qualms about the floristic price of his good life.

The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

There are few who would not rather be taken in adultery than in provincialism.

The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and mysteries. Nor did they posses a really effective system of mind-manipulation. Under a scientific dictator, education will really work with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.

most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.

That we should all have a say in choosing our own rulers and that those rulers 'powers over us should be limited—these principles are in obvious tension, as every society that has tried to combine liberty and democracy has discovered. Without Protestantism and its peculiar preoccupations, that strange and marvelous synthesis could never have come into being as it has.

La Sociedad Científicos Sentimentales era una locura. Pero tal vez hace falta un poco de locura entre tanta exactitud y precisión. Serán buenos los cálculos y los teoremas inexpugnables, si es que se aplican a rombos, ángulos y cubos. Pero empiezan a fallar cuando se trata de personas.

Tal vez si prohibieran la literatura como la cocaína, la gente por puro morbo, buscaría meterse un par de líneas.

Although really society should not change, it should mutate. And, little by little, it is mutating... ... Society is like the body of a chicken: the chicken's foot is hard and insensitive while the eye is very alive. And there are beings who embody the cells of the eyes and others who embody the cells of the feet, of the wings, or of the anus.

I knew I would be forever isolated, desolate, useless. Life? To be born for no reason, to suffer constantly, to die ignorant. God? Extant but unreachable. Blind, deaf, and mute for His creatures. Human society? A prison filled with lunatics, thieves, and drunks.

What I am trying to do when I use symbols is to awaken in your unconscious some reaction. I am very conscious of what I am using because symbols can be very dangerous. When we use normal language we can defend ourselves because our society is a linguistic society, a semantic society. But when you start to speak, not with words, but only with images, the people cannot defend themselves.

Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers -- such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a fa?ade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.