Quotes About Society

Polemarchos no longer maintains that telling the truth is essential to justice. Without knowing it, he thus lays down one of the principles of the Republic. As appears later in the work, in a well-ordered society it is necessary that one tell untruths of a certain kind to children and even to the adult subjects.

research on hunter-gatherer groups ranging from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries shows that the average nomad worked just two to four hours each day.

in the recent past, as the pace of change has quickened, the calculus governing the benefits of embracing novelty has been dramatically altered. Today's society bestows rewards as never before upon those who are comfortable with change, and it may punish those who are not, for what used to be the safe terrain of stability is now often a dangerous minefield of stagnation.

We unfortunately seem to be unconsciously biased against those in society who come out on the bottom. We

The defenders of capitalism spent their time broadcasting the vibrations of guilt and futility. Implicitly or explicitly, they were telling the country: human intelligence is impotent to control the course of society, men are helpless in the face of their own motivation, laissez-faire appeals to the evil in men, but men are stuck with it.

In a primacy-of-consciousness philosophy, virtue consists of allegiance to the ruling consciousness, such as God or society. In Ayn Rand's philosophy, virtue consists of allegiance to existence; it consists of a man's recognizing facts and then acting accordingly.

Collectivism is the theory that the group (the collective) has primacy over the individual. Collectivism holds that, in human affairs, the collective—society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc.—is the unit of reality and the standard of value.

In an objective approach, force and value are opposites. The goal of a proper society, accordingly, is not to compel truth or virtue (which would be a contradiction in terms), but to make them possible—by ensuring that men are left free.

In an advanced, civilized country, a handful of men were able to gain for their criminal schemes the enthusiastic backing of millions of decent, educated, law-abiding citizens. What is the factor that made this possible?

The branch of philosophy that applies ethics to social questions is politics, which studies the nature of social systems and the proper functions of government.

In the field of morality, the Nazi's primary obligation is to renounce, to renounce his self, in the full, literal sense of the term: his values, in the name of society; his judgment, in the name of authority; his convictions, in the name of flexibility.

Dr. Melvin Connors sums it up nicely in just three words: culture stretches biology

As a society and as parents we face a challenge without precedent. We have to help girls and boys make a transition to a gendered adulthood, to adult life as women and men in a culture in which women can do anything, including being rocket scientists, and men can do anything, including staying home to raise a baby. We have to find ways to value and cherish gender differences without restricting freedom of opportunity.

Celebration of the new over the old easily translates into a celebration of young over the old, of young people over old people. The cult of youth, the celebration of youth for youth's sake s more pervasive in the United States than any other culture I have visited . . . When the culture values youth over maturity, the authority of parents is undermined.

The occurrence of monotheism, codified law, and the alphabet all at the same moment in history cannot have been coincidental…. The abstractness of all three innovations were mutually reinforcing. —Robert Logan

Disenchantment, like any other fashion, having started off among the elite had now been passed down to finish its days among the lower orders.

That disillusionment, moreover, like all other vogues, having had its beginning in the higher strata of society, had descended to the lower, where it was being worn threadbare, and that, now, those who were really and truly bored strove to conceal their misfortune as if it were a vice.

Wild-eyed gun nuts who insist that guns don't kill people are purely full of crap, as even a cursory glance at a newspaper on almost any given day will attest.

Who was I now—woman or man? That question could never be answered as long as those were the only choices; it could never be answered if it had to be asked.

More exists among human beings than can be answered by the simplistic question I'm hit with every day of my life: Are you a man or a woman?

But very quickly I discovered that passing didn't just mean slipping below the surface, it meant being buried alive. I was still me on the inside, trapped in there with all my wounds and fears. But I was no longer me on the outside.

If capitalism is to work in the long run, it must make investments that are not in any particular individual's immediate self-interest but are in the human community's long-run self-interest (p. 308).

I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, un-available to us without such drugs.

Probably no country has ever had as large a shift in the distribution of wealth [as what we've seen in the U.S. in the last 30 years] without having gone through a revolution or losing a major war.