Quotes About Society

Digamos que el pobre maestro hubiera podido disfrutar por mucho tiempo de una existencia plácida y feliz, ... de no haberse cruzado en su camino la criatura que más turbaciones causa en la existencia del hombre, mayores aún que cualesquiera espectros, demonios y brujos juntos: una mujer.

The orders of society, in all well-constituted governments, are mutually bound together, and important to each other; there can be no such thing in a free government as a vacuum; and whenever one is likely to take place, by the drawing off of the rich and intelligent from the poor, the bad passions of society will rush in to fill up the space, and rend the whole asunder. Though

homogenous: Men in their twenties

They can't afford to solve the issues because they've turned the conflict itself into profit.

Crazy people are considered mad by the rest of the society only because their intelligence isn't understood.

The common sayings of the multitude are too true to be laughed at.

We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.

Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.

Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land's inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows. These farmers produce valuable goods, of course; but they also conserve soil, they conserve water, they conserve wildlife, they conserve open space, they conserve scenery.

People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

Today it is not big business that we have to fear. It is big government.

We live under a government of men—and morning newspapers.

Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm, living public opinion.

When we talk of freedom and opportunity for all nations, the mocking paradoxes in our own society become so clear they can no longer be ignored.

To suppress minority thinking and minority expression would tend to freeze society and prevent progress...Now more than ever, we must keep in the forefront of our minds the fact that whenever we take away the liberties of those we hate, we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love.

Like the Artha-shastra, but perhaps for the opposite reason, the Kama-sutra is wary of nuns; it advises a married woman not to hang out with "any woman who is a beggar, a religious mendicant, a Buddhist nun, promiscuous, a juggler, a fortune-teller, or a magician who uses love-sorcery worked with roots (4.1.9).

Nonviolence is an ideal propped up against the cultural reality of violence.

In their ambivalent attitude to violence, the Hindus are no different from the rest of us, but they are perhaps unique in the intensity of their ongoing debate about it.

Men are wimps . Why do you think women have the babies?

Be honest, but don't hurt anyone's feelings be independent, but not a loner be smart, but not a nerd be sexy, but not a slut be skinny, but don't barf up your burger be funny, but not to hide some other deficiency. How the heck is a girl supposed to "be" anything?

As recently as the fifties, respectable women were given the sexual choice of marriage or celibacy. Anything else meant ostracism. Women who demanded pleasure in sex were condemned as "nymphomaniacs," much as they are pitied today as "victims of male culture" by anti-porn feminists.

The mere fact that some women are upset by the presence of pornography tells us very little. It tells us nothing about whether porn is right or wrong, valuable or useless. After all, feminism distresses a great many people. Yet feminists would argue that the movement should not only be tolerated, it should be nurtured. They consider women's rights to have a positive, rather than a negative effect on society-even if it causes distress. Perhaps the same is true of the graphic depiction of sex.

For us, people who are not privileged enough to have the freedom to be good people, we have to make some bad choices and do some evil things. That's shitty, but it is what it is.