Quotes About Society

Everybody knows that England is the world of betting men, who are of a higher class than mere gamblers: to bet is in the English temperament.

I ask you, as a citizen, is it a crime to go to the temple? And if I am propagating superstition by going to the temple, then the whole country is propagating superstition.

You may be educated abroad, you may be a great scientist, politician, but you always have a sneaking fear that if you don't go to temples or do the ordinary things that you have been told to do, something evil might happen, so you conform. What happens to the mind that conforms? Investigate it, please.

We complain of the increased tempo of our lives, but our frenetic lives are just reflection of the economic system that we have created.

Extreme inequality is no temporary blip. It is hard-wired into our economies.

The bestiality I have seen in the South cannot be attributed only to its psychotic and ignorant people. Once and for all, in the face of what we have seen this century, we must all know that the animal in us can be elaborately rationalized in a society until an act of murder is seen as self-defense and dynamited houses become evidence of moral courage. Nor is the confused, damaged South the only region of this country in need of that particular knowledge.

The black children I have come to know in different parts of this country, even those from relatively well-off homes, say critical things about America and its leaders at an earlier age than white children do — and connect their general observations to specific experiences. A black child of eight, in rural Mississippi or in a northern ghetto, an Indian or Chicano or Appalachian child, can sound like a disillusioned old radical.

When you're living with a mob of other people, it's hard not to fall into thinking like as they do, and then you ain't YOU no more.

They don't actually want you to do your own thing, not unless it's their thing too.

They tell you to do your own thing but they don't mean it. They don't want you to do your thing, not unless it happens to be their thing, too.

Mass education, because it produces hosts of badly educated people liberated from fatalism, will contribute to instability (p. 123).

Food in our society is a chronic poverty need, not a life-threatening one. And when we respond to a chronic need as though it were a crisis, we can predict toxic results: dependency, deception, disempowerment.

Subsidizing inactivity is a bad practice. Yes, people have to survive. But they will not thrive if they are induced by charity (public or private, government or religious) to be unproductive. Purposeful work is what establishes one's place in society. In addition to providing legitimate income, work is what gives one purpose, enables one to develop a skill, earns one a positive reputation.

Social dislocation can easily breed a reactionary form of nostalgia.

By contrast, almost all our richer kids said that (with some qualifications) they do trust other people. That comparison reflects not paranoia on the part of poor kids, but the malevolent social realities within which they live and the fact that people and institutions have so often failed them.

The policeman is the most important social worker we have. Often it is far better to settle an argument or disperse a crowd and move on than to make an arrest.

I am a patriot. I have always sought to serve my country, in theory a Republic. Learning that secrecy was evil rather than good was my first step. From there it was a steady march toward open-source everything. Now I see all the evil that secrecy enables in a corrupt Congress, a corrupt Executive, a corrupt economy, and a corrupt society. I see that the greatest service I or any other person can render to the Republic is to march firmly, non-violently, toward open-source everything.

I am not alone in the conviction that real, lasting national security can best be obtained through complete transparency of government, business, and other facets of society, and this includes open access to all of the many available types of information.

What have we done with our twin sister that the culture has forced us to abandon at birth?" So many Middle Eastern poets and

Color is a fact of life, Del. The people who say they don't see color, or race, are the people who do. We see good-looking people and funny people, obnoxious people. Why shouldn't we see something so obvious as color?

In eternally liberal Seattle, it was better for a thief to commit a crime than to have his privacy invaded. "Is

The rich get richer and the poor go to prison.

I harbor ill feelings toward a society, and a clergy, that allows marriage partners to split over the smallest incompatibility, where divorce comes in a multitude of flavors, like Baskin Robbins ice cream, where men and women can blame one another and everything except themselves for matrimony's mess. They look for externals over which they have no control and, fingering them, take no responsibility.

We live in a society that shuns guilt, hardly knows it. It is drummed into us: "Don't feel guilty." No one wants to pay the price of reconciliation, of atonement, of forgiveness.