Quotes About Society

When modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them. —Plato

Birthright citizenship remains an eloquent statement about the nature of American society and a repudiation of a long history of equating citizenship with whiteness.

Reconstruction revisionism arose in tandem with and provided a usable past for the civil rights movement. More than most historical subjects, Reconstruction history matters. Whatever the ebb and flow of historical interpretations, I hope we never lose sight of the fact that something very important for the future of our society was taking place during Reconstruction.

Known as American exceptionalism, this interpretation casts the colonial period simply as an Anglophone preparation for the United States, defined as a uniquely middle-class society and democracy.

The periodic famines, the burden of labour which made men old at forty and women at thirty, were acts of God; they only became acts for which men were held responsible in times of abnormal hardship or revolution.

There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.

Scratch an intellectual, and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of common folk.

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.

Those who would sacrifice a generation to realize an ideal are the enemies of mankind.

If a society is to preserve stability and a degree of continuity, it must learn how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, values, and fantasies on everyday life.

Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America

They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society. The frustrated, oppressed by their shortcomings, blame their failure on existing restraints. Actually their innermost desire is for an end to the "free for all." They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society. 29

though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious.

It is maintained that a society is free only when dissenting minorities have room to throw their weight around. As a matter of fact, a dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.     41

All through the ages schoolmasters seem to have had the delusion that they could order society as readily as they could a classroom.

One cannot escape the impression that the intellectual's most fundamental incompatibility is with the masses. He has managed to thrive in social orders dominated by kings, nobles, priests, and merchants, but not in societies suffused with the tastes and values of the masses.

It is well for those who hug the present and want to preserve it as it is not to play with mass movements. For it always fares ill with the present when a genuine mass movement is on the march.

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents.

For all that we know, the wholly harmonious individual might be without the impulse to push on, and without the compulsion to strive for perfection in any department of life. There is always a chance that the perfect society might be a stagnant society.

Another English revolution by the rich occurred at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was the Industrial Revolution. The breathtaking potentialities of mechanization set the minds of manufacturers and merchants on fire. They began a revolution "as extreme and radical as ever inflamed the minds of sectarians,"8 and in a relatively short time these respectable, Godfearing citizens changed the face of England beyond recognition. When

The inert mass of a nation, for instance, is in its middle section. The decent, average people who do the nation's work in cities and on the land are worked upon and shaped by minorities at both ends—the best and the worst.1

With the coming of automation it may eventually be possible for a ruling intelligentsia to operate a country's economy without the aid of the masses, and it is legitimate to speculate on what the intellectual may be tempted to do with the masses once they become superfluous.

Si estas décadas demostraron algo, fue que el principal problema del mundo, y por su puesto del mundo desarrollado, no era cómo multiplicar la riqueza de las naciones, sino cómo distribuirla en beneficio de sus habitantes

No sabemos a dónde vamos, sino tan sólo que la historia nos ha llevado hasta este punto y -si los lectores comparten el planteamiento de este libro- por qué. Sin embargo, una cosa está clara: si la humanidad ha de tener un futuro, no será prolongando el pasado o el presente. Si intentamos construir el tercer milenio sobre estas bases, fracasaremos. Y el precio del fracaso, esto es, la alternativa a una sociedad transformada, es la oscuridad