Quotes About Society

In the United States it is comparatively easy to raise tax rates and to introduce tax-avoidance devices, and it is comparatively hard to lower tax rates and to eliminate tax-avoidance devices.

Before about 1800, only two important attempts were made to establish income taxes—one in Florence during the fifteenth century, and the other in France during the eighteenth.

In an age when we have more choice than ever before, more mobility, more information, more opportunity to fulfill ourselves, how is it that people can prefer to be identical?

It's the social counterpart of natural selection. Those groups within society that craved power at the expense of everything else—morality, self-respect, honest friendship—they achieved dominance long ago. The mass of the public no longer has any contact with government; all they know is that if they step out of line they'll be trodden on.

You know Chad's definition of the New Poor? People who are too far behind with time-payments on next year's model to make the down-payment on the one for the year after?

Right! Right! 'Stead of which, over here, they shit in the water until it's dangerous to drink, then make a fucking fortune out of selling us gadgets to purify it again. Why can't they be made to strain out their own shit?

Faithful: What! why he (Shame) objected against religion itself; he said it was a pitiful, low, sneaking business for a man to mind religion; he said that a tender conscious was an unmanly thing; and that for a man to watch over his words and ways, so as to tie himself up from that hectoring liberty that the brave spirits of the times accustom themselves unto, would make him the ridicule of the times."

without a war, America would descend into total confusion and would have to turn itself into a police state to survive, because its people no longer have any internal structure. Americans can never be defeated by war. It is peace they find intolerable.

Farangs don't understand us Thais. They think if a girl sells her body, then she has no dignity, no limits. Actually, the opposite is often the truth. Women like your mother are very free spirits. Could you imagine Nong ever holding down a normal job? Or putting up with abuse from a man? A woman might sell her body because it's more dignified and safer than being married to a violent drunk who goes whoring without protection.

Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man.

We call it Albion. It is the English-speaking world. The one where they kill babies in the womb, right?" And here I was hoping we'd be famous for the Moonshot, or democracy, or the Beatles, or something.

Remove God from the world of ideas. Remove government, politics from society. Keep sex, humor, utilities. Let private property go.

Veblen called it the price-system. Mills called it the Power Elite. It's probably no more than ninety-nine people who don't know what they are doing. They're involved in high finance. Fascinating form of gambling.

So somebody has talent? So what? Dime a dozen. And we're overpopulated. Actually we have more food than we have people and more art. We've gotten to the point of burning food. When will we begin to burn our art?

where Christ does not reign men are wolves to men. Each

But be it so that public error must have a place in human society, still, in the kingdom of God, we must look and listen only to his eternal truth, against which no series of years, no custom, no conspiracy, can plead prescription.

For nothing is more dangerous than to live   where the public license of crime prevails; yea, there is no pestilence   so destructive, as that corruption of morals, which is opposed neither   by laws nor judgments, nor any other remedies.

I am sure that I have been much more useful to society as a medical physicist.

For the primary function of culture in Gissing's scheme of things was to segregate him from other people. To qualify as culture, knowledge had to be abstruse.

Monsters in movies are us, always us, one way or the other. They're us with hats on. The zombies in George Romero's movies are us. They're hungry. Monsters are us, the dangerous parts of us. The part that wants to destroy. The part of us with the reptile brain. The part of us that's vicious and cruel. We express these in our stories as these monsters out there.

The growth of drug-related crime is a far greater evil to society as a whole than drug taking. Even so, because we have been seduced by the idea that governments should legislate for our own good, very few people can see how dangerously absurd the present policy is.

It wasn't fair that men got the verbs and she ended up with adjectives. Jack plotted and squeezed and bulldozed. She was caught snooping—pathetic participle, half verb, half adjective.

Relying on the market to provide both private and public goods will always lead to underprovision of the latter.

Others think it the responsibility of scientists to coerce the rest of society, because they have the power that derives from special knowledge.