Quotes About Society

At the same time, most of what government does that helps them is now so deeply woven into the thread of daily life that it's no longer recognizable as government.

An Apple executive told The New York Times, "We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.

The system is created by people. The question is, 'Which people?' The central issue is not more or less government. It's 'Who is government for?'. In other words, it's all a question of power — who has it and who doesn't.

Current patterns of economic segregation make a self-fulfilling prophecy of the claim that the poor are not like the rest of us.

The threat to capitalism is no longer communism or fascism but a steady undermining of the trust modern societies need for growth and stability. When most people stop believing they and their children have a fair chance to make it, the tacit social contract societies rely on for voluntary cooperation begins to unravel. In its place comes subversion, small and large—petty theft, cheating, fraud, kickbacks, corruption. Economic resources gradually shift from production to protection.

Listen to today's Republicans and you hear a continuous regurgitation of Sumner. "Civilization has a simple choice," Sumner wrote in the 1880s. It's either "liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest" or "not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members." Sound familiar?

Edward G. Ryan, the chief justice of Wisconsin's Supreme Court, warned the graduating class of the state university in 1873. "The question will arise, and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine, 'Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?

Capitalism's role is to enlarge the economic pie. How the slices are divided and whether they are applied to private goods like personal computers or public goods like clean air is up to society to decide. This is the role we assign to democracy.

Capitalism has become more responsive to what we want as individual purchasers of goods, but democracy has grown less responsive to what we want together as citizens

A society where one set of religious views is imposed on a large number of citizens who disagree with them is not a democracy. It's a theocracy. Yet

As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr has written, "The most common form of hypocrisy among the privileged classes is to assume that their privileges are the just payments with which society rewards specially useful or meritorious functions," while accusing the underprivileged of "lacking what they have been denied the right to acquire.

As the great jurist and Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis once said, "We may have democracy or we may have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.

The French government classifies books as an "essential good," along with electricity, bread, and water.

When Republicans recently charged the President with promoting 'class warfare,' he answered it was 'just math.' But it's more than math. It's a matter of morality. Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society: whether we're all in it together. Their answer is we're not. President Obama should proclaim, loudly and clearly, we are.

Today the great divide is not between left and right. It's between democracy and oligarchy.

There can be no "free market" without government. The "free market" does not exist in the wilds beyond the reach of civilization. Competition in the wild is a contest for survival in which the largest and strongest typically win. Civilization, by contrast, is defined by rules; rules create markets, and governments generate the rules.

I mean, technology is amoral. It has no morality.

The human soul aspires to higher things than the society columns of the New York Sunday papers, and the frivolous chatter of an overheated ballroom.

So the government spent five million dollars on a report to expunge the English language of such words as 'manpower', 'mannerism', 'manoeuvre' etc so any feminists working on the government payroll wouldn't be offended. Which should be very comforting to the next homeless kid sleeping near a manhole cover, thought Les, to know that he is now sleeping next to a personhole cover.

desacralizing

It's easy enough to notice how often dysfunctional families and societies finally collapse into an orgy of mutual blaming. That's satanic work.

No man, by the mere force of his own genius, could effect revolutions of this description in society, if society did not place the divining rod in his hands, and voluntarily prostrate itself before the sorcery by which it is first dazzled and then duped.

There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not.

In America there are two classes of travel—first-class, and with children.