Quotes About Society

Conservatism as we know it today is a distinctively modern outlook, shaped by the Enlightenment and by the emergence of societies in which the 'we' of social membership is balanced at every point against the 'I' of individual ambition.

Even socialists steer away from any criticism of the real corporate predation, which is the predation on future generations in which we too are involved. Like

So conceived, the English police force served to emphasize a fundamental truth about the English law, which is that it exists not to control the individual but to free him. The

Burke saw society as an association of the dead, the living and the unborn. It's 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 recieving, and to recognize that the good things we inherit our not ours to spoil.

It is only when people have rights of property, and can freely exchange what they own for what they need, that a society of strangers can achieve economic coordination. Socialists

the growing materialism of our societies. This materialism informs political discourse at every level, making wealth and its distribution the only issue that is discussed for long. As a result, people think of conservatism merely as a form of complacency towards the current system of material rewards, which has nothing whatever to say about the things that 'money can't buy', or about the effect of the consumer society on our deeper values. Yet

Subsequent revolutions have in like manner regarded the Church as Public Enemy number 1, precisely because it creates a realm of value and authority outside the reach of the state. It

For the socialist, men are equal in their needs, and should therefore be equal in all that is granted to them for the satisfaction of their needs. For the liberal, they are equal in their rights, and should therefore be equal in all that affects their social and political standing.

Political order, in short, requires cultural unity, something that politics itself can never provide.

When society is organised from above, either by the top-down government of a revolutionary dictatorship, or by the impersonal edicts of an inscrutable bureaucracy, then accountability rapidly disappears from the political order, and from society, too. Top-down government breeds irresponsible individuals, and the confiscation of civil society by the state leads to a widespread refusal among the citizens to act for themselves.

Beneath every society where self-interest pays off, lies a foundation of self-sacrifice.

Something new seems to be at work in the contemporary world - a process that is eating away the very heart of social life, not merely by putting salesmanship in place of moral virtue, but by putting everything - virtue included - on sale.

Hence, by a series of almost unnoticed changes, allowing ever easier divorce, and ever more blatant neglect of children, the state has overseen the gradual undoing of the marriage vow, to

In short, freedom belongs to individuals only by virtue of their membership in the 'we'.

People become free individuals by learning to take responsibility for their actions. And they do this through relating to others, subject to subject. The free individuals to whom the Founders appealed were free only because they had grown through the bonds of society, to the point of taking full responsibility for their actions and granting to each other the rights and privileges that established a kind of moral equality between them.

It should not be thought that the cost of a system which makes an idol of ignorance and a prophet of the crowd is small.

You are a deviant from the social norm! Is that an insult or a diagnosis?

I have always found that hell is other people.

Il volto quasi familiare diventa un fenomeno comune in una società affollata ed in un continuo movimento. Penso talvolta che sia proprio ciò che in ultima analisi rimane di noi: schemi di lineamenti, alcuni un po' più persistenti degli altri, impressi sullo scorrere dei volti. (Il Boia torna a casa)

Black money is so much a part of our white economy, a tumour in the centre of the brain - try to remove it and you kill the patient.

People sleeping on pavements gives industry a bad name. My friend was saying last week—he's the director of a multinational, mind you, not some small, two-paisa business—he was saying that at least two hundred million people are surplus to requirements, they should be eliminated.

Rohinton Mistry

I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals; I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.

For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life. Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death.