Quotes About Society

Friendship! Mysterious cement of the soul, Sweet'ner of life, and solder of society.

Thomas More: ...And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you--where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast--man's laws, not God's--and if you cut them down...d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons . . . And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you--where would you hide, . . . the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast--man's laws, not God's--and if you cut them down . . . do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I would give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake."

A society deadened by a smothering network of laws while finding release in moral chaos is not likely to be either happy or stable.

Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.

If you think that someone is out to steal everything you have, you're either paranoid or a member of the middle class.

If a language is corruptible, then a constitution written in that language is corruptible.

If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.

Ye'll try the world soon, my lad; And, Andrew dear, believe me, Ye'll find mankind an unco squad

Women wear the breeches… in a word, the world turned upside downward.

A woman's death, through much of the same history, was thought to be a simpler thing, preferably quiet and uncomplaining, or tragically in childbirth. Just as women were denied the right and the capacity to a full life, they were denied the right and the capacity to a full death as well.

J'ai lu les postmodernistes avec un certain intérêt avec même admiration. Mais quand je les lis, j'ai toujours cet horrible sentiment lancinant que quelque chose d'absolument essentiel est oublié. Plus on dit qu'une personne est un produit social, ou un confluent de forces ou fragmentée, ou marginalisée et plus on ouvre tout un nouveau monde d'excuses.

In the ensuing "higher phase" of communist society, which became known among Marxists as "communism" or "full communism," the modern productive powers that had been developed but fettered by capitalism would be completely liberated, material plenty would be achieved, people would be remunerated according to need, and government in the old repressive sense would cease to exist.[570]

What the "one country" idea meant to Stalin, as became quite clear from his many speeches of the middle twenties, was that Russia, which had shown the world the way to proletarian revolution, would now be able, with or without help from outside, at the cost of great exertions, to accomplish the second historic feat of constructing a full socialist society.

Does the mass give the leaders the program and its argumentation, or do the leaders give it to the mass?[163]

Hence the abolitionist-minded intelligentsia, along with liberal elements in Russian society and within the bureaucracy, inclined not toward a constitutionalist program, realization of which would only strengthen the political influence of the landowners, but to the idea of a progressive autocracy.

Russian Jacobinism.

Judging by the pervasiveness of this theme in Djugashvili's early writings, and the way he emphasized it, he was strongly attracted to Marxism's vision of past and present society as a great battleground whereon two hostile forces—bourgeoisie and proletariat—are locked in mortal combat.

Consequently, it would be in no sense un-Marxist for the party to seize power and rule dictatorially in the interest of building a socialist society in Russia. This was the practical political conclusion implicit in every line of Lenin's seemingly scholastic theoretical treatise on Marxist views about the state.

In the NEP era Soviet society was not yet the tightly controlled organism that it would become during the Stalinist thirties as a result of the revolution from above that Stalin initiated in late 1929, when the power to do so was finally in his hands.

innovation lay in asserting the autonomy of the Russian national revolutionary process, in making the construction of a socialist society at home independent of the international revolution.

Legal abortion will never rest easy on this nation's conscience.

However, we might oppose it, abortion is a sad feature of modern life.

Tolerance is the price we pay for living in a free, pluralistic society.