Quotes About Society

An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.

When guns are outlawed, only the Government will have guns. The Government - and a few outlaws. If that happens, you can count me among the outlaws.

A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repressive and murderous society.

I love America because it is a confused, chaotic mess - and I hope we can keep it this way for at least another thousand years. The permissive society is the free society.

What's more American than violence?" Hayduke wanted to know. "Violence, it's as American as pizza pie.

Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.

I am against all forms of government, including good government.

In social institutions, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students.

Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in, and sometimes, like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut or Leo Tolstoy or Francois Rabelais, a very harsh critic indeed. The others are sycophants, courtiers, servitors, entertainers. Shakespeare was a sychophant; however, he was and is also a very good poet, and so we continue to read him.

In any nation but the USA, it is taken for granted that a man of distinction, ability, wealth or power will keep a mistress and a few girlfriends on the side. Only in America, still suffering from its grotesque, hypocritical Puritan heritage, do we persist in attempting to deny and repeal a million years of basic primate biology.

What reason have we Americans to think that our own society will necessarily escape the world-wide drift toward the totalitarian organization of men and institutions?

I believe that the military-industrial state will eventually collapse, possibly even in our lifetime, and that a majority of us (if prepared) will muddle through to a freer, more open, less crowded, green and spacious agrarian society. (Maybe; of course it may be only a repeat of the middle ages.)

I think the evil is in the food, in the noise, in the crowding, in the stress, in the water, in the air.

Civilization flows; culture thickens and coagulates, like tired, sick, stifled blood.

We are caught," continued the good doctor, "in the iron treads of a technological juggernaut. A mindless machine. With a breeder reactor for a heart.

The gross evil of our time defies all labels.

What's more American than violence?" Hayduke wanted to know. "Violence, it's as American as pizza pie.

To make the distinction unmistakably clear: Civilization is the vital force in human history; culture is that inert mass of institutions and organizations which accumulate around and tend to drag down the advance of life; Civilization is Giordano Bruno facing death by fire; culture is the Cardinal Bellarmino, after ten years of inquisition, sending Bruno to the stake in the Campo di Fiori...

It seems that the U.S. Government—what country is that?—has got another war going somewhere, I forget exactly where, on another continent as usual, and they want Waterman to go over there and fight for them. For IT, I mean—when did a government ever consist of human beings?

and various forms of mental illness, including evangelical Protestantism.

Shine, perishing republic.

Outnumbered, surrounded and overwhelmed, the Navajos will probably be forced in self-defense to malform themselves into the shape required by industrial econometrics. Red-skinned black men at present, they must learn to become dark-brown white men with credit cards and crew-cut sensibilities.

Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.

Anarchism is democracy taken seriously.