Quotes About Society

Here, race was so difficult and complicated, it was a kaleidoscope you could keep on turning.

A kind of affectionate racism prevailed among the delta gentry, they had kind, paternalistic feelings toward black people and a genuine appreciation for black culture, but they didn't want a black man dating their daughters or sitting down to eat dinner at their table, because that wasn't the way things were done or meant to be.

In fact, Herman never resolves satisfactorily why this achievement should have happened in the particular society of Scotland, so small and backward. The nearest he comes is to argue that, after union with England in 1707, Scottish intellectuals had to cope with the challenge, today common, of "deal[ing] with a dominant culture that one admired but that threatened to overwhelm one's own heritage and oneself with it.

Hume decreed that "Liberty is the perfection of society," but believed equally that "authority must be acknowledged as essential to its [freedom's] very existence.

Social practices, and the laws that reflect them, often persist not because they are wise but because Humans, often suffering from self-control problems, are simply following other Humans. Inertia, procrastination, and imitation often drive our behavior. Once

Social influences come in two basic categories. The first involves information. If many people do something or think something, their actions and their thoughts convey information about what might be best for you to do or think. The second involves peer pressure. If you care about what other people think about you (perhaps in the mistaken belief that they are paying some attention to what you are doing—see below), then you might go along with the crowd

there is no question that social pressures nudge people to accept some pretty odd conclusions—and those conclusions might well affect their behavior.

By properly deploying both incentives and nudges, we can improve our ability to improve people's lives, and help solve many of society's major problems. And we can do so while still insisting on everyone's freedom to choose.

those working men who, before prohibition, could not resist the lure of the saloon on the way home Saturday night

It's not just the kid who's spent every penny from his job to upgrade his car to tell the world he cares about sports cars, it's also the person driving around in a fuel-conscious hybrid electric car, because it's more a message to the world than an effective means of saving fuel, to be quite honest.

One would say that, instead of a tendency to equality in human beings, the tendency is to make the most of inequalities, natural or artificial.

The delicate thing about the university is that it has a mixed character, that it is suspended between its position in the eternal world, with all its corruption and evils and cruelties, and the splendid world of our imagination.

A university is not a service station. Neither is it a political society, nor a meeting place for political societies. With all its limitations and failures, and they are invariably many, it is the best and most benign side of our society insofar as that society aims to cherish the human mind.

the danger that American society as a whole will over-esteem intellect or assign it such a transcendent value as to displace other legitimate values is one that hardly troubles us.

No society can work unless its members feel responsibilities as well as rights.

External effects are everywhere. Almost every major transaction we make affects other people who are not a party to the transaction. When someone buys a Lexus, he sets a new standard for the street. When a firm advertises a Barbie doll, it creates a want that was not there before.

Society takes enormous trouble over who is allowed to adopt a child, but none about who is allowed to produce one. This has led the psychologist David Lykken to suggest that parents should have to get a licence before child-bearing, or otherwise risk the danger that their child will be taken away for adoption.

Why do so many Americans say they want their children to watch less TV, yet continue to expand the opportunities for them to watch it? More important, why do so many people no longer consider the physical world worth watching?

Famine was the mark of a maturing agricultural society, the very badge of civilization.

A thirty-two-ounce soda and a tank of gas is America distilled to its seminal fluids.

Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man.

Crossing your fingers, Neville? Knocking on wood? He ignored that, beginning to suspect his mind of harboring an alien. Once he might have termed it conscience. Now it was only an annoyance. Morality, after all, had fallen with society. He was his own ethic. Makes a good excuse, doesn't it, Neville? Oh, shut up.

And suddenly he thought, I'm the abnormal one now. Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man.

Morality, after all, had fallen with society. He was his own ethic. Makes