Quotes About Society

The church has lost the chance of becoming the unifying element in our American society. It is not anticipating any facts. It is merely catching up very slowly to the new social facts created by economic and other forces. The American melting pot is doing its work. The churches merely represent various European cultures, lost in the amalgam of American life and maintaining a separate existence only in religion.

Men will not cease to be dishonest, merely because their dishonesties have been revealed or because they have discovered their own deceptions. Wherever men hold unequal power in society, they will strive to maintain it. They will use whatever means are most convenient to that end and will seek to justify them by the most plausible arguments they are able to devise.

Teachers of morals who do not see the difference between the problem of charity within the limits of an accepted social system and the problem of justice between economic groups, holding uneven power within modern industrial society, have simply not faced the most obvious differences between the morals of groups and those of individuals.

Men will not cease to be dishonest, merely because their dishonesties have been revealed or because they have discovered their own deceptions. Wherever men hold unequal power in society, they will strive to maintain it.

If superior abilities and services to society deserve special rewards it may be regarded as axiomatic that the rewards are always higher than the services warrant. No impartial society determines the rewards. The men of power who control society grant these perquisites to themselves.

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values.

It is a communion at once mystic & real, in the guise of metal. Money which is liberty, is also fecundation. It is the universal sperm without which human societies would remain but barren wombs. Paganism, which knew & understood everything, opens to a shower of gold from on high the conquered thighs of Danae. That is what we should see on our coins, instead of a meaningless head, if we were capable of contemplating without embarrassment that religious tableau.

those people who formerly had been half wilde, and civiliz'd but by degrees, made their laws but according to the incommodities which their crimes and their quarrels constrain'd them to, could not be so wel pollic'd, as those who from the beginning of their association, observ'd the constitutions of some prudent Legislator.

A few beings are neither in society nor in a state of dreaming. They belong to an isolated fate, to an unknown hope. Their open acts seem anterior to time's first inculpation and to the skies' unconcern. It occurs to no one to employ them. The future melts before their gaze. They are the noblest and the most disquieting.

The distance between Don Quixote and the petty bourgeois victim of advertising is not so great as romanticism would have us believe.

When the father is no longer an overbearing patriarch the son looks everywhere for the law - and finds no lawgiver.

Some primitive societies avoid striking out at the true guilty party because it might awaken the spirit of vengeance. Channeling violence toward a sacrificial victim as if toward a lightning rod doubtless stops violence, but it's not very pretty.

A dynamic force seems to be drawing first Western society, then the rest of the world, toward a state of relative indifferentiation never before known on earth, a strange kind of nonculture or anticulture we call modern.

The preference that cultures grant to themselves, in other words, must be perpetuated at any cost. This preference is inseparably bound up with the identity, the autonomy, the very existence of these cultures.

In a society that has fallen prey to anarchy the voracious appetite for persecution feeds on victims indiscriminately, as long as they are weak and vulnerable. The least pretext is enough. No one really cares about the guilt or innocence of the victim.

Human culture is fundamentally and originally religious, rather than secondarily and supplementally.

War is a total social phenomenon. In this respect, Clausewitz's analysis is a precursor of Durkheim's sociology. Clausewitz has things to teach us about "mass" violence and contagion.

We are ready to deconstruct anything except the idea that we are self-directed and that the persecutors are always the others.

nous avons toujours regretté que les habitudes de l'époque actuelle ne nous aient pas permis de faire paraître nos ouvrages sous le couvert du plus strict anonymat, ce qui eût tout au moins évité à certains d'écrire beaucoup de sottises, et à nous-même d'avoir trop souvent la peine de les relever et de les rectifier. (Études Traditionnelles, juillet-août 1950, Métaphysique et dialectique, note 4)

W]hat is this law of the greatest number which modern governments invoke and in which they claim to find their sole justification? It is simply the law of matter and brute force, the same law by which a mass, carried down by its weight, crushes everything that lies in its track. It is precisely here that we find the point of junction of the democratic conception and materialism...

Anyone who wants still further evidence of this truth can find it in the tremendous importance that economic factors take on nowadays, both in the lives of peoples and of individuals: industry, commerce, finance—these seem to be the only things that count; and this is in agreement with the fact already mentioned that the only social distinction that has survived is the one based on material wealth.

Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.

he writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated lo neliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.