Quotes About Society

If theft is advantageous to everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn't the only morality that evolution produces be the kind Bill Clinton had - being sorry you got caught?

What all of these stories point to is the pivotal role women play in suffering, violence, and reconciliation. They are frequently the victims. They are the ones left behind to reconstruct a new society. They are the ones who survive. And they are the ones who find a non-violent way out of violent situations. They teach others how to cope, to heal memories, and to move on.

Christ has to be more than a friend of the middle and upper classes.

The human race puzzles me, with striving for freedom, and then basically just giving it away.

Carlisle wondered if it was still possible for him to live alongside civilization and yet be somewhat apart from it. Find a slice of quiet in the layers of noise, conduct a rain into the noise now and then for some work, take the gold and run like hell back to the quiet place....Flight was no good. You couldn't escape it, whatever 'it' was.

had come to accept that the court was an important forum where society, through battle, finds out and defines what it stands for.

In a society that rejects absolute truth, the only vice that cannot be tolerated is the sin of intolerance.

American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy paints a bleak picture: Many families in the United States are touched by divorce. The current divorce rate is calculated to be between 40 and 60% for those recently married and up to 10% higher for remarriages.

The United States is a society in which people not only can get by without knowing much about the wider world but are systematically encouraged not to think independently or critically, and instead to accept the mythology of the United States as a benevolent, misunderstood giant as it lumbers around the world trying to do good.

Whiteness–the whole constellation of practices, beliefs, attitudes, emotions that are mixed up in being white–is the problem. Whiteness is degraded and depraved[…] To the degree that we accept any of the meaning that the dominant society gives to whiteness, we white people are degraded and depraved.

Our goal should not be to reshape masculinity but to eliminate it. The goal is liberation from the masculinity trap.

Our goal should be not to redefine masculinity, but to abolish it.

In the 200,000 years of the species Homo sapiens, patriarchy accounts for less than 5% of our evolutionary history. If we consider the 2.5 million years of the Homo genus, our direct ancestors, patriarchy is less than 0.5% of our history.

More broadly, most of us believe that we have arrived at many of our deeply held beliefs through careful thought and do not want to recognize that if we had been brought up by different parents, let alone in a different society, our fundamental values and attitudes would be very different.

He was swimming in a sea of other people's expectations. Men had drowned in seas like that.

Trustees are accountable to all parties at interest for the best possible performance of the institution in the service of the needs of all constituencies—including society at large.

The world of affairs, as I have experienced it, is a very ambiguous one. The problem of preparing people to serve and be served by this society is, as Chesterton says, that the world is nearly reasonable but not quite. It is not illogical, yet it is a trap for logicians.

The great asset of a broad liberal arts education, as I know it, is that it does not have much bearing on any vocation in particular but has great relevance to all vocations in general—provided that the college environment within which it is carried out is accepted as real, as real as any chapter in one's life, and provided that an explicit effort is made to prepare students to serve and be served by the present society, using the college experience as the working laboratory.

Too much of the public concern for the quality of society is still devoted to caring directly for individuals and not enough attention goes to caring for institutions and the way they are structured. Structural flaws can cause harm to individuals; conversely, conceptually sound and ably administered institutions can build people and enrich society. All too often we seem to disregard this important influence that institutions can have on people.

In Russia everything is a secret, but there is no secrecy.

These children were deprived of something more important than money—love. They ended up paying for that deprivation during the remainder of their lives, and society suffered, too, because their crimes removed many people from the world and their assaultive behavior left alive equally as many victims who remain permanently scarred.

As our society grows more mobile, and as the availability of weapons of mass destruction increases, the ability of the antisocial personality to realize his rapacious and murderous fantasies grows apace.

As a society, we seem to be flying too close to the flame, looking for stimulation—we are bored audiences more attuned to fantasy than to reality, in danger of falling completely into the abyss about which Nietzsche warned us.

We are already the most over informed, under reflective people in a history of civilisation. We already have a 24h news cycle, internet newspapers and continuous information about day to day unfolding of civic proceedings. Better informed people are not necessarily better educated people.