Quotes About Society

An anti-culture is inherently unstable, said Rieff, but he doubted that people brought up in this social order would ever be willing to return to the old ways.

A virtuous society, by contrast, is one that shares belief in objective moral goods and the practices necessary for human beings to embody those goods in community. To

Cultural memory constitutes the stories, events, people, and other phenomena that a society chooses to remember as the building blocks of its collective identity. A nation's gods, its heroes, its villains, its landmarks, its art, its music, its holidays—all these things are part of its cultural memory.

When the light in most people's faces comes from the glow of the laptop, the smartphone, or the television screen, we are living in a Dark Age,

Parecíamos satisfechos haciendo de capellanes de esta cultura consumista en la que se perdía rápidamente el sentido de lo que significa ser cristiano.

Christianity has become a secondary foundation in people's lives, not the main foundation. Now it's all about career, material success, and one's standing in society.

Defender la ortodoxia bíblica del cristianismo en materia sexual se consideraba ahora de una intolerancia inadmisible. Los conservadores cristianos estaban sentenciados. Este ya no era el país de siempre.

Tradition-minded Christians who have immersed themselves in the writings of Wendell Berry should understand that agrarianism is no panacea. "You can't make a living as a farmer, but you can make a living as a die-setter," says MacDonald. "Industrialism is the new agrarianism. It's not back to the land, but back to the trades.

Reducing the individual to her economic status or her racial, sexual, or gender identity is an anthropological error.

One of contemporary progressivism's commonly used phrases--the personal is political--captures the totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political consciousness. Indeed, the Left pushes its ideology ever deeper into the personal realm, leaving fewer and fewer areas of daily life uncontested. This, warned Arendt, is a sign that a society is ripening for totalitarianism, because that is what totalitarianism essentially is: the politicization of everything.

Thus does the Myth of Progress become a justification for exercising dictatorial power to eliminate all opposition. Today, totalitarianism amounts to strict, forced regimentation of the Grand March toward Progress. It is the method by which true believers in Progress aim to keep all of society moving forward toward utopia in lockstep, both in their outward actions and in their innermost thoughts.

vivir «tras la virtud» no significa solo habitar en una sociedad llena de discrepancias a la hora de considerar virtuosa tal creencia o conducta, sino en una que además cuestiona que la virtud exista. En la sociedad de la posvirtud, los individuos están dotados del mayor grado de libertad de pensamiento y acción y la sociedad se convierte en «una colección de desconocidos que persiguen su interés bajo un mínimo de limitaciones».

Este es el momento en el que Occidente pasó del estadio que el sociólogo Zygmunt Bauman llamó «modernidad sólida» —un periodo en el que el cambio social aún era relativamente predecible y manejable— al de «modernidad líquida», nuestra condición actual, en la que los cambios son tan rápidos que las instituciones sociales no tienen tiempo para cuajar y consolidarse19.

En otras palabras, nuestra cultura actual está basada en el culto al deseo, y en lugar de enseñarnos a qué debemos renunciar si queremos seguir perteneciendo a esta civilización, nos dice que, como seres autónomos con capacidad de elección, debemos desprendernos de las antiguas prohibiciones para descubrir el sentido y el propósito de nuestra existencia.

For Marxists, social justice meant an equal distribution of society's material goods. By contrast, Christian social justice sought to create conditions of unity that enabled all people—rich and poor alike—to live in solidarity and mutual charity as pilgrims on the road to unity with Christ.

No regime is trying to steal our cultural memory and Christian identity from us. We are giving it away ourselves.

The term totalitarianism was first used by supporters of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who defined totalitarianism concisely: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." That is to say, totalitarianism is a state in which nothing can be permitted to exist that contradicts a society's ruling ideology.

Both mainstream liberalism and conservatism are essentially materialist ideologies, and we should not be surprised that both shape a society dedicated to the multiplication of wants and the intensification of desire, not the improvement of character.

el mundo occidental vive como si Dios no existiera», dice. «Creo que es verdad. La fragmentación, el miedo, la desorientación y el ir dando tumbos caracterizan a buena parte de nuestra sociedad».

we should start thinking seriously about why we have become the richest and most free society ever to exist, yet our wealth and personal liberty have bought us so little happiness.

In his 2014 book about Father Dmitry, The Last Man in Russia, journalist Oliver Bullough quotes an atheist saying that after hearing the priest preach, "the immorality of Soviet society, its inhumanity and corruption, its lack of a moral code or credible ideals, means that Christ's teaching comes through to those who it reaches as a shining contrast.

La democracia solo puede triunfar si prosperan instituciones intermedias, como las Iglesias.

Like the early Bolsheviks, SJWs are radically alienated from society. They too believe that justice depends on group identity, and that achieving justice means taking power away from the exploiters and handing it to the exploited. Social justice cultists, like the first Bolsheviks, are intellectuals whose gospel is spread by intellectual agitation. It is a gospel that depends on awakening and inspiring hatred in the hearts of those it wishes to induce into revolutionary consciousness.

I began to wonder what, exactly, mainstream conservatism was conserving. It dawned on me that some of the causes championed by my fellow conservatives—chiefly an uncritical enthusiasm for the market—can in some circumstances undermine the thing that I, as a traditionalist, considered the most important institution to conserve: the family.