Quotes About Society

Now, everyone knows everything. No one on the planet is ignorant of the real conditions of our shared social existence. That's one real thing those stupid smartphones have done; you can be illiterate, many are, and still have an excellent idea of how the world works.

Kim Stanley Robinson

We live in a world where people pretend money can buy you anything, so money becomes the point, so we all work for money.

the shift from feudal land power to bourgeois money power was complete.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Liberal democracy says that cultural tolerance is essential, but you don't have to get very far away from liberal democracy for liberal democrats to get very intolerant.

We are making a better way to live. This was the myth, they had all grown up with it.

A nadie le importan los libros, por eso puedes escribir lo que te dé la gana en ellos. A la gente le importan las normas.

That's all civilization is, a giant mill grinding out gossip.

It's a life or death thing, society, and I think people mainly do recognize that, and the people who deny it are stupid fuckers, I say this unequivocally. Ignorant fools. That kind of stupidity should be put in jail.

Another man said I don't own my kids' teacher, I don't own my doctor, I don't need to own my house. I just want to pay the collective for it, not some landlord.

And the unequal accumulation of wealth by the elites continued.

because economics was above all a system of quantified ethics and political power that depended on measurement.

Revolution suspends habit as well as law. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, people abhor anarchy.

Either everyone's happy or no one is safe. But we're never happy. So we'll never be safe.

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.

It's the structure of feeling in our time; 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 is said to be the only thing people can agree on. Although those who say this are often economists.

America also stands for the melting pot. The idea of the melting pot. It was the place where people could come from anywhere and be a part of it. Such was the theory. There are lessons there for us.

And with our work," John continued, "we are carving out a new social order and the next step in the human story"—i.e., the latest variant in primate dominance dynamics.

But the problem of utopia, of collective meaning, is to find an individual meaning. —Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia

Götterdämmerung capitalism

They would understand the fundamental laws of the universe before they had even the slightest handle on society.

What's the monetary value of human civilization? Trying to answer that question proves you are a moral and practical idiot. Well, economists make such calculations all the time, but that's their job, and they think it makes sense.

You know a constitution is kind of like a blueprint," Charlotte said thoughtfully. "Getting a real working government out of it is the true act of construction.