Quotes About Society

Without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure.

Shouldn't someone tag Mr Kennedy's bold new imaginative program with its proper age Under the tousled boyish haircut is still old Karl Marx-first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother.

The war in Vietnam threatened to tear our society apart, and the political and philosophical disagreements that separated each side continue, to some extent. It's been said that these memorials reflect a hunger for healing.

You know, it was only a generation ago that actors couldn't be buried in the churchyard.

As government expands, liberty contracts.

We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.

In all ages, whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic, or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the façade; and Roman history, Republican or Imperial, is the history of the governing class.

Es gibt etwas Wichtigeres als politische Freiheit, und politische Rechte sind ein Mittel, kein Selbstzweck. Ihr Zweck ist Sicherheit für Leben und Eigentum, und diese Sicherheit konnte durch die Verfassung im republikanischen Rom nicht garantiert werden. Das durch Bürgerkriege und Unruhen verbrauchte und gebrochene römische Volk war bereit, das zerstörerische Privileg der Freiheit aufzugeben und sich wie am Anfang der Zeiten einer strengen Regierung unterzuordnen.

Sir, married or unmarried, all women bleed.

Information game into the universe when the first hominids began to justify their actions to one another by making assertions and backing those assertions up with further assertions.

Engineers, medical people, scientific people, have an obsession with solving the problems of reality, when actually … once you reach a basic level of wealth in society, most problems are actually problems of perception.

Most fundamentally, the U.S. military is—and will continue to be—a product of our culture and our collective decisions. Whatever it is, it's what we have made it.

anthropology

American society asks police officers to use violence when needed to enforce the law, but we also ask them to serve as mediators, protectors, social workers, mentors, and medics. But it's very difficult to play any one of these roles well—and it's almost impossible to be good at them all.

We tell ourselves that a central project of law and political institutions is the reduction of violence, but this is mostly a fairly tale. Law and politics play a role in structuring violence, but rarely "reduce" it.

Violence is a puzzle. We all say we oppose violence and want to reduce it, but no human society gets by without it.

Only the hammer blow of revolution, that is to say, the conquest of political power by the proletariat can break down [the] wall [between capitalist society and Socialist society].

There was no doubt for Marx and Engels about the necessity of having the proletariat conquer political power. It is left to Bernstein to consider the poultry-yard of bourgeois Parliamentarism as the organ by which we are to realize the most formidable social transformation of history, the passage from capitalist society to Socialism.

What distinguishes bourgeoisie society from other class societies…? Precisely the fact that class domination does not rest on "acquired rights" but on real economic relations – the fact that wage labor is not a judicial relation, but purely an economic relation… How can wage slavery be suppressed by the "legislative way", if wage slavery is not expressed [by] the laws?

Capitalist development modifies essentially the nature of the State, widening its sphere of action, constantly imposing on it new functions (especially those affecting economic life), making more and more necessary its intervention and control in society.

Lagenliga reformer och revolution är alltså inte olika metoder för historiskt framåtskridande, vilka man kan välja efter behag vid historiens disk, som man gör med varm eller kall korv, utan de utgör olika moment i klassamhällets utveckling.

Geschändet, entehrt, im Blute watend, von Schmutz triefend – so steht die bürgerliche Gesellschaft da, so ist sie. Nicht wenn sie, geleckt und sittsam, Kultur, Philosophie und Ethik, Ordnung, Frieden und Rechtsstaat mimt – als reißende Bestie, als Hexensabbat der Anarchie, als Pesthauch für Kultur und Menschheit –, so zeigt sie sich in ihrer wahren, nackten Gestalt.

Y eso es lo que nuestra sociedad no maneja bien: enseguida escondemos o prohibimos tácitamente el sufrimiento.

Simone de Beauvoir llamaba mujeres pelota a aquellas que, tras triunfar con grandes dificultades en la sociedad machista, se prestaban a ser utilizadas por esa misma sociedad para reforzar la discriminación; y así, su imagen era rebotada contra las demás mujeres con el siguiente mensaje: «¿Veis? Ella ha triunfado porque vale; si vosotras no lo conseguís no es por impedimentos sexistas, sino porque no valéis lo suficiente.»