Quotes About Society

Such manifestations I account as representing the creative leadership of the new forces of thought and appreciation which attend changes in technological pattern and therefore of the pattern of human relationships in society.

How could homosexuals possibly srew up the sanctity of marriage any worse than heterosexuals?

In the English language, it all comes down to this: Twenty-six letters, when combined correctly, can create magic. Twenty -six letters form the foundation of a free, informed society.

We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?

Learning that flowered in days of yore In these our times is thought a bore. Once knowledge was a well to drink of; Now having fun is all men think of.

history is to society what memory is to the individual.

that material like Hammurabi's stele imposed no obligations on society or the courts. It did not represent at any level the "law of the land," and there is no call to obey. This assessment is confirmed by the fact that it does not serve as a reference in the judicial system, which is illuminated for us through thousands of court documents.

In the foreword of Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death, he compares the apocalyptic visions of George Orwell (1984) to those of Aldous Huxley (Brave New World). One of the comparisons speaks to the issue at hand: "In 1984 . . . people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

PTL was more Pentecostal than fundamentalist. Pentecostals have a better sense of how a culture feels than how a society works.

A dead cow or sheep lying in a pasture is recognized as carrion. The same sort of a carcass dressed and hung up in a butcher's stall passes as food.

Society is always engaged in a vast conspiracy to preserve itself — at the expense of the new demands of each new generation.

If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society... It is the education which gives a man a clear, conscious view of their own opinions and judgements, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought to detect what is sophistical and to discard what is irrelevant.

People who run for president seriously and people who become president enter a bizarre secret society in which they have had an experience that none of us will ever have.

Suddenly, Pinocchio's identity as a puppet takes on the power of metaphor. Until now, it has been possible to think of him more or less as a naughty little boy. But now his being a marionette becomes central to the story - and to the message, of the importance of education, that Collodi is using the story to convey. If you don't study and make a contribution to society, you will forever remain a puppet. You will never grow. And, as the story goes on to relate, your life will be blighted.

By the time I finally finished writing The End of Science , I'd concluded that people don't give a shit about science.... They don't give a shit about quantum mechanics or the Big Bang. As a mass society, our interest in those subjects is trivial. People are much more interested in making money, finding love, and attaining status and prestige. So I'm not really sure if a post-science world would be any different than the world of today.

We've reached a poor state when people are afraid that doing the decent and right thing is going to help the communist conspiracy.

Traditionally, common social location meant that the two partners used the same family name. In recent years alternative patterns of naming have been developed, for reasons which are more convincing to feminists than they are to genealogists or to mail carriers.

There are times when a society is so totally controlled by an ideology that the greatest need is that someone simply identify a point where he can say a clear no in the name of his loyalty to a higher authority. We have no right to say that those who refused to enroll in the racist crusade of Adolf Hitler should first have been obligated practically or morally to propose an alternative social strategy before they had the right to refuse.

what the pictures cannot do is express the complexity that might help us understand why these terrible things are happening. Only words can do that. A world that depends more on images and dismisses reading and writing as 'cumbersome' will be a much cruder and probably an even more dangerous place. I

Hollywood has always been a cage... a cage to catch our dreams.

Descendants of European immigrants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have largely assimilated into U.S. society. Groups once viewed as outsiders now view themselves, and are viewed by others, as part of the American mainstream.

In other words, they feel part of the mainstream, and they are less likely to perceive the importance of race in other people's lives. This is what some commentators would refer to as "white privilege.

In other words, race is a social construction, and how groups are defined varies over time and place.

In this dirty minded world, you are either someone's wife or someone's whore. And if you're not either people think there is something wrong with you....but there is nothing wrong with me