Quotes About Society

In general it can be said that a nation's art is greatest when it most reflects the character of its people.

we are waiting and waiting and doing nothing, until it is too late, and they commit crimes so serious that all society wants to do is punish instead of rehabilitate.

Is it always in the interest of the public safety to seek the prosecutor's traditional solution -- the harshest penalty possible? Or is the public best served by finding ways to change a kid's lot in life for the better, even if that means opening the prison door?

Locking everyone up is not the solution,' she sighs, staring into a cup of coffee gone cold as The Box at Juvenile Hall. 'It's just the symptom of the problem. It's the proof that we're doing something wrong.

immorality, materialism, and godlessness.

I don't believe that in our society that we should have guns.

The public is not cognizant of the real value of education, and does not realize that education as a social force is not receiving the kind of attention it has the right to expect in a democracy.

Bernays's tone is managerial, not millenarian, nor does he promise that his methodology will turn this world into a modern paradise. His vision seems quite modest. The world informed by "public relations" will be but "a smoothly functioning society," where all of us are guided imperceptibly throughout our lives by a benign elite of rational manipulators.

It is a sort of managerial aristocracy that quietly determines what we buy and how we vote and what we deem as good or bad. "They govern us," the author writes, "by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure.

To a large degree the press, the schools, the churches, motion pictures, advertising, the lecture platform and radio all conform to the demands of the public. But to an equally large degree the public responds to the influence of these very same mediums of communication.

Public opinion is a term describing an ill-defined, mercurial and changeable group of individual judgments. Public opinion is the aggregate result of individual opinions—now uniform, now conflicting—of the men and women who make up society or any group of society. In order to understand public opinion, one must go back to the individual who makes up the group.

The folly of building-centric urban renewal reminds us that cities aren't structures; cities are people.

An ageing society is a less entrepreneurial one.

History tells us that inequality soars when societies develop.

For all the emphasis we place on our multicultural cities, they epitomise our oligarchic reality.

He advised a new 'responsible nationalism', which would 'begin from the idea that the basic responsibility of government is to maximize the welfare of its citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global good'.76

They yearn for the security of a lost age. Just as America believed it had entered a post-racial era, Britain persuaded itself it had become a classless society.

The paranoia of strongmen far outweighs the supposed efficiency of their methods. Trust is the glue of a successful free society; fear is the currency of the autocrat. It is the former that is most desperately needed. By this measure – the most important of all – Trump is an unabashed autocrat. The more resistance he encounters, the more he will sow mistrust. Technology is Trump's friend. Science is his enemy.

Brecht once said: 'All power comes from the people. But where does it go?

No bourgeoisie, no democracy.

The meritocratic society has given way to a hereditary meritocracy.

The more unequal societies become, the more likely we are to hear from the demophobes. This would strike a chord with my great-grandparents' generation. It would also sound familiar to America's Founding Fathers. 'The newfound aversion to democratic institutions among rich citizens in the West may be no more than a return to the historical norm,' write Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa.53 To put it more bluntly: when inequality is high, the rich fear the mob.

History does not end. It is a timeless repetition of human folly and correction. It follows that there is no single model of how to organise society. Who, barring those of religious faith, can say that view is wrong?

Writing in the 1950s, Daniel Bell, the great American sociologist, said, 'economic growth has become the secular religion of advancing industrial societies'.