Quotes About Society

Sometimes I think it's only post-scarcity that evil exists. Before that, it could always be put down to want or fear. It was possible to believe, as apparently you did, that when fear and want went away, bad deeds would too. Humanity would be revealed as some kind of bonobo, an altruistic cooperator, a lover of all.

it looked like the great heat wave would be like mass shootings in the United States— mourned by all, deplored by all, and then immediately forgotten or superseded by the next one, until they came in a daily drumbeat and became the new normal.

Efficiency was just a measurement of how fast money moved from the poor to the rich. We prefer the opposite of efficiency, which is to say, justice.

Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since

If our government tries to back the banks instead of us, then we elect a different government. We pretend that democracy is real, and that will make it real. We elect a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That was the whole idea in the first place. As they used to tell us in school. And it's a good idea, if we could make it real. It might never have been real, up till now. But now's the time. Now's the time, people!

Capital itself is simply the useful residue of the work of past laborers, and it could belong to everyone as well as to a few.

It was a whiny culture, we were finding.

Fuck Margaret Thatcher, I said when I could catch my breath. And I say it again now: fuck Margaret Thatcher, and fuck every idiot who thinks that way. I can take them all to a place where they will eat those words or die of thirst. Because when the taps run dry, society becomes very real.

Saint George, a social terrarium in which the men think they are living in a Mormon polygamy, while the women consider it a lesbian world with a small percentage of male lesbians

When you have a strong conservative streak in your society," Zeyk would say, "which detaches itself from the progressive streak, that's when you get the worst kinds of civil wars. As in the conflict in Colombia that they called La Violencia, for instance. A civil war that became a complete breakdown of the state, a chaos that no one could understand, much less control.

That is what capitalism is—a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings.

Kim Stanley Robinson

They talked and talked and talked. Twenty-four biomes, ten thousand conversations. Talk talk talk. As they talked, it began to come clear to them that they had no very effective method of governance, when it came to making decisions as a group. Had humans ever had such a thing, they asked themselves, since leaving the savannah? Since congregating in cities? They could not be sure. The histories suggested maybe not.

The invisible hand never picks up the check.

But just as nature abhors a vacuum, people abhor anarchy.

Depressed people did not usually engage in criminal conspiracies

We are more than food and drink and shelter. It seems like those should be the crucial determinants, but many a well-fed citizen is filled with rage and fear.

it looked like the centuries-long wrestling match between state and capital had ended in a decisive victory for capital. Possibly

we can't think in anything but economic terms, our ethics must be quantified and rated for the effects that our actions have on GDP. This

Rent goes to people who are not creators of value, but predators on the creation and exchange of value.

Kim Stanley Robinson

We pretend that democracy is real, and

Inequality has now reached levels not seen since the so-called Gilded Age of the 1890s.

Survival of the fittest, which Sax had always considered a useless tautology. But if social Darwinists were taking over, then maybe the concept gained importance, as a religious dogma of the ruling order....