Quotes About Society

We're living in the age of mass hypnotism. As long as we keep clapping our hands and believing, the captains of industry will take care of us.

His mind was on patriotism not being enough, politics not being enough, producing, consuming, all amounting to little in the climate of endless violence.

It is an axiom of politics that if there are real problems that responsible people aren't addressing, irresponsible people will exploit them.

Anti-Semitism had a long history in the West and pervaded European society.

it is possible to argue that some people are violent and mentally ill, but it is no longer defensible to argue that people are violent because they are mentally ill.

Such a choice—to tolerate the brutalization of children as we continue to do—is equally violent and equally evil, and we reap what we sow.

Once violence is understood to be a behavior, not a pathology, the fact that it was responsive to social pressures no longer seems mysterious.

Knowing without loving is frankly dangerous for the soul and for society. You'll critique most everything you encounter and even have the hubris to call this mode of reflexive cynicism thinking (whereas it's really your ego's narcissistic reaction to the moment). You'll position things to quickly as inferior or superior, with me or against me, and most of the time you'll be wrong.

organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries.

Knowing without loving is frankly dangerous for the soul and for society. You'll critique most everything you encounter and even have the hubris to call this mode of reflexive cynicism "thinking

Men as a class appear to be at risk, maybe even at high risk.

Even Martin Luther's needed "justification by faith" sent us on a five-hundred-year battle for the private soul of the individual.* Thus leaving us with almost no care for the earth, society, the outsider, or the full Body of Christ. This is surely one reason why Christianity found itself incapable of critiquing social calamities like Nazism, slavery, and Western consumerism.

All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency on them.

All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency on them. There are shared and agreed-upon addictions in every culture and every institution. These are often the hardest to heal because they do not look like addictions because we have all agreed to be compulsive about the same things and blind to the same problems.

The lie was that we believed that we believed all people were created equal! What made us think we were this great free society? Those at the top believed it then, and we at the top believe it two hundred years later. That's the power of myth.

Until we start reading the Jesus story through the collective notion that the Christ offers us, I honestly think we miss much of the core message, and read it all in terms of individual salvation, and individual reward and punishment. Society will remain untouched.

Unless religion leads us on a path to both depth and honesty, much religion is actually quite dangerous to the soul and to society.

We have to accept that human culture is in a mass hypnotic trance. We're sleepwalkers.

gay marriage as the ultimate threat to society

In a materialistic society we have projected our sense of worth almost exclusively onto things. That is why it's hard to rediscover our souls in ourselves.

Most Americans want it to be 1959, with the addition of cappuccino and cable TV.

witness the sad demise of fundamental Western values. Pride. Order. Personal responsibility.

Why does a rich country like ours blame people who have nothing for its problems?

Even to my mother, her hard-won autonomy must at times have resembled a cage. Still, it was a cage of her own design, different from and superior to the one my father and her parents, and Gloversville itself ,would have put her in, if she'd allowed them to.