Quotes About Society

As "voyeurs of billionaires" (Goolsbee, 2007) material excess has become our metronome of modern living.

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.

Quizá parte de lo anterior explique lo que se ha dado en llamar "espíritu colectivo".

The surest way to keep a people down is to educate the men and neglect the women. If you educate a man you simply educate an individual, but if you educate a woman, you educate a family.

To live is to be among men, and to be among men is to struggle, a struggle not only with them but with oneself; with their passions, but also with one's own.

The breakdown of society will force the building of a new model--emulating the Jewish people in Babylon 3500 years ago.

Every age has gifts we need, and every age has needs we gift.

I'm naive enough to believe that society will be changed by examination of ideas through books and the press and that information can prove to be greater than the dissemination of stupidity.

These days all the girls is down to roll. I hit the strip club and all them bitches find a pole.

They say real girls aint never perfect, perfect girls aint real.

Working women seemed "brazen," even to those like Lila Chunn who understood and encouraged necessary departures from tradition.

Joynes was careful to maintain the notion of separate spheres, even as he advocated significant change. A reformed system of women's schooling "should be based upon the idea that woman is woman, and not man-nor a butterfly," neither man's "plaything nor his rival.

She had, she declared, "no patience with women whom I hear telling what wonders they would do if they were only men, when I see so much of their legitimate work left undone.... I could name many things they could do," she continued in a revealing concession to prevailing anxieties about respectability, "without ever going into a ward."47

Females are human and rational beings. They may be found of better faculties and better qualified to exercise political privileges and to attain the distinctions of society than many men; yet who complains of the order of society by which they are excluded from them?

What our culture lacks are honest messages about what it really means to be a healthy human being. Or how you make humans grow.

Unfortunately, it's not against the law in this country to drink yourself to death.

Dónde empieza la libertad de las mujeres? Debería empezar con la exigencia de que nos liberemos del uso de la comparación de géneros como ideal de igualdad.

Crime, like war, is an aberration of creation.

Corruption, my boy, makes the world go round.

we routinely explain social trends in terms of what society "is ready for." But the only way we know society is ready for something is because it happened. Thus, in effect, all we are really saying is that "X happened because that's what people wanted; and we know that X is what they wanted because X is what happened."5

Finally, even random differences in opportunities that arise early in one's career can accumulate, via the Matthew Effect, to generate large differences in outcomes over the course of a lifetime. Rawls's claim was that because the mechanisms of inequality are essentially accidents—whether of birth, or of talent, or of opportunity—a just society is one in which the adverse effects of these accidents is minimized.

Rawls's point was just that the rules of the game themselves should be chosen to satisfy social, not individual, ends. Bankers, in other words, are entitled to whatever they are able to negotiate with their employers, but they are not entitled to an economic system in which the financial industry is so much more profitable than any other.

Libertarian arguments about what would or would not be fair in a state of nature are simply irrelevant, because in a state of nature nobody would be getting a $10-million bonus.

Sandel therefore concludes that a just society is not one that seeks to adjudicate disputes between individuals from a morally neutral perspective, but one that facilitates debate about what the appropriate moral perspective ought to be. As Sandel acknowledges, this is likely to be a messy affair and always a work in progress, but he does not see any way around it.