Quotes About Society

No longer representative of the dominant culture, Christians need to rethink the way we understand cultural engagement, mission, and evangelism in a newly post-Christian society.

Generally speaking, historically in this country, the care of a child has been thought of as female business.

They say that 'Guns don't kill people, people kill people.' Well I think the gun helps. If you just stood there and yelled BANG, I don't think you'd kill too many people.

But, in the end, we have to allow this "innocent" idea of white America to die. It is irredeemable, but that does not mean we are too.

To make that decision, we will have to avoid the trap of placing the burden of our national sins on the shoulders of Donald Trump. We need to look inward. Trump is us. Or better, Trump is you.

As white America chose itself over a truly just and multiracial society,

This sincerity covers, and pardons all, [and] is the very substance of the American panic.

Color," as he wrote in 1963, "is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality.

landing at Montgomery's airport and feeling the intense hatred in the eyes of three white men

In so many ways, these last two sentences

Baldwin put it this way in No Name in the Street: "One may see that the history, which is now indivisible from oneself, has been full of errors and excesses; but this is not the same thing as seeing that, for millions of people, this history…has been nothing but an intolerable yoke, a stinking prison, a shrieking grave.

in the end, we have to allow this "innocent" idea of white America to die. It is irredeemable, but that does not mean we are too.

what W.E.B. Du Bois described as "a hope not hopeless but unhopeful.

One of the more insidious features of Trumpism is that it deliberately seeks to occupy every ounce of our attention. In doing so, it aims to force our resignation to the banality of evil and the mundaneness of cruelty.

Trump did not stop the "American carnage." He unleashed it.

The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.

Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it.

Beyond these general points about culture, why do specific aspects of the U.S. culture make Humble Inquiry more difficult? THE MAIN PROBLEM–A CULTURE THAT VALUES TASK ACCOMPLISHMENT MORE THAN RELATIONSHIP BUILDING

Help in the broadest sense is, in fact, one of the most important currencies that flow between members of society because help is one of the main ways of expressing love and other caring emotions that humans express.

Suppose a boy steals an apple From the tray at the grocery store, And they all begin to call him a thief, The editor, minister, judge, and all the people – «A thief», «a thief», «a thief», wherever he goes. And he can't get work, and he can't get bread Without stealing it, why the boy will steal. It's the way people regard the theft of an apple That makes the boy what he is.

[T]he progress of civilization corresponds with the spread of general nausea.

You may tempt the upper classesWith your villainous demitasses,But Heaven will protect the working girl.

Americans detest all lies except lies spoken in public or printed lies.

Most people have seen worse things in private than they pretend to be shocked at in public.