Quotes About Society

All rights, all power, all ability, are suddenly expressed in terms of money. In order to be understood, everything has to be reduced to this common denominator. From this point of view, the whole previous history of capitalism seems no more than a mere prelude.

This decorum and etiquette, the whole self-stylization of the upper class, demand among other things that one does not allow oneself to be portrayed as one really is, but according to how one must appear to conform with certain hallowed conventions, remote from reality and the present time. Etiquette is the highest law not merely for the ordinary mortal, but also for the king, and in the imagination of this society even the gods accept the forms of courtly ceremonial.

Aristocracy in general does not favour individualism; it bases its claim to privilege upon virtues which are common to the whole class or at least to whole clans.

Just as the social novel attains its perfection with Balzac, the Bildungsroman with Flaubert, the picaresque novel with Dickens, so the psychological novel enters the phase of its full maturity with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.

Football is not a game but a religion, a metaphysical island of fundamental truth in a highly verbalized, disguised society, a throwback of 30,000 generations of anthropological time.

In our society, the women who break down barriers are those who ignore limits.

When the people become involved in their government, government becomes more accountable, and our society is stronger, more compassionate, and better prepared for the challenges of the future.

A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.

alters/annihilates all pretensions of individual

Americans are broad-minded people. They'll accept the fact that a person can be an alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater, and even a newspaperman, but if a man doesn't drive, there is something wrong with him.

I found that life was a continual struggle for most of us-and this on a plane not much above that of the struggle of wild animals-and that society dismissed this obvious truth as a negligible factor in determining human conduct as well as our mental and physical well-being. I began to see that this economic battle persisted even in the midst of an exhaustless plenty, and that most humans lived and died trying to succeed in a material sense, in short, to reach the goal of a triumphant animalism.

capitalism as an economic and social system that makes people unhappy by making them into part of a human machine in which humanity is expunged and only productivity remains.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his joyful essay "Friendship," I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate. Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine—a possession for all time. An

But at the same time, a bloated welfare state that nudges middle-class citizens away from the labor force is moving our society away from the dignity of earned success.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

Medieval justice was a quaint thing.

Immigrants contribute more than they take. It is a lie that they take public benefits, because they don't qualify for just about every benefit.

I guess as far as leftists are concerned, the United States can't qualify as a 'cultured society' simply because we've actually created a society that works.

Society tells women that you can't be a complex human being with contradicting qualities.

We - our children need a quality public education.

We have to become a learning society, committed to quality education from early childhood right through to re-training in later life.

The quality of life in America is dependent on the quality of the journalism. Most people don't realize that, but if you think about it, journalism is one of the pillars on which our society is perched.