Quotes About Society

Social traditions exist because they enable a society to reproduce itself. Destroy them heedlessly and you remove the guarantee offered by one generation to the next.

I believed that 'freedom' is not a clear or sufficient answer to the question of what conservatives believe in. Like Matthew Arnold, I held that 'freedom is a very good horse to ride, but to ride somewhere'.

A society no more exists for the satisfaction of human needs, than a plant exists for its own health.

Burke saw society as an association of the dead, the living and the unborn. Its binding principle is not contract, but something more akin to love. Society is a shared inheritance for the sake of which we learn to circumscribe our demands, to see our own place in things as part of a continuous chain of giving and receiving, and to recognize that the good things we inherit are not ours to spoil.

Top-down solutions have a tendency to confiscate problems from those whose problems they are.

What makes a political order legitimate, in the conservative view, is not the free choices that create it, but the free choices that it creates.

Lo que resulta inaceptable en la filosofía política que hoy se oferta es su incapacidad por reconocer que la mayor parte de lo que somos y debemos nos ha sido dado sin nuestro consentimiento

Smith emphasized that trust, responsibility and accountability exist only in a society that respects them, and only where the spontaneous fruit of human sympathy is allowed to ripen. It is where sympathy, duty and virtue achieve their proper place that self-interest leads, by an invisible hand, to a result that benefits everyone.

In place of top-down government, Burke made the case for a society shaped from below, by traditions that have grown from our natural need to associate. The important social traditions are not just arbitrary customs, which might or might not have survived into the modern world. They are forms of knowledge. They contain the residues of many trials and errors, as people attempt to adjust their conduct to the conduct of others. To

Once we start to celebrate ugliness, we become ugly to.

The author assumed that the main task of government is to distribute the collective wealth of society among its members, and that, in the matter of distribution, the government is uniquely competent. The fact that wealth can be distributed only if it is first created seemed to have escaped his notice.

society is not identical with the state. Society is composed of people, freely associating and forming communities of interest that socialists have no right to control and no authority to outlaw. To

I saw that this desire to control society in the name of equality expresses exactly the contempt for human freedom that I encountered in Eastern Europe. There

People discovered, in their personal lives, that civil society is not goal-directed. It comes into being, in whatever circumstances, as an end in itself, a form of life that is appreciated for what it is, not for what it does.

The freedom to entertain and express opinions, however offensive to others, has been regarded since Locke as the sine qua non of a free society. This

I never swallowed in its entirety the free-market rhetoric of the Thatcherites. But I deeply sympathized with Thatcher's motives. She wanted the electorate to recognize that the individual's life is his own and the responsibility of living it cannot be borne by anyone else, still less by the state. She hoped to release the talent and enterprise that, notwithstanding decades of egalitarian claptrap, she believed yet to exist in British society. The

I have argued that the political process, as we in Western democracies have inherited it, depends upon citizenship, which in turn depends upon a viable first-person plural. And in the previous chapter I gave what to me are incontrovertible arguments for construing that first-person plural in national terms. No such first-person plural can emerge in a society divided against itself, in which local antagonisms and class war eclipse every understanding of a shared destiny.

And I saw that this desire to control society in the name of equality expresses exactly the contempt for human freedom that I encountered in Eastern Europe. There is indeed such a thing as society; but it is composed of individuals. And individuals must be free, which means being free from the insolent claims of those who wish to redesign them.

A society governed by consent does not necessarily issue from a social contract, whether actual or implied. It is a society in which dealings between citizens, and between citizens and those in authority, are consensual, in the manner of daily courtesies, games of football, theatrical events or family meals. As Adam Smith made clear, order may emerge from consensual dealings. But it emerges 'by an invisible hand', and not, as a rule, because someone has imposed it. In

In its 'totalising' vision the left fails to distinguish civil society from the state, and fails to understand that the ends of life arise from our free associations and not from the coercive discipline of an egalitarian elite.

modern economies have developed ways of avoiding costs or passing them on that effectively remove the sanctions from dishonest or manipulative behaviour. The

Two accusations against our political inheritance have lodged in the brains that I have examined in this book: first, that 'capitalist' society is founded on power and domination; second, that 'capitalism' means 'commodification', the reduction of people to things, and the fetishizing of things as agents.

The condition of society is essentially one of domination, in which people are bound to each other by their attachments, and distinguished by rivalries and competition.

Children of married parents find a place in society already prepared for them, furnished by a regime of parental sacrifice, and protected by social norms. Take away marriage and you expose children to the risk of coming into the world as strangers.