Quotes About Society

Laws are only words written on paper, words that change on society's whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges, and policemen. Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion, or economic status, is a fool.

In fact, through deep history, through tens of thousands of years, everyone was a wild human. The very same forces that tamed wolves and made them dogs tamed humans. Call these forces civilization, and yes, obvious and abundant benefits came with the deal. We're not here to dispute those blessings. Our bedrock point has more to do with genes

I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our lack of attention to funding and caring for them properly in the United States has a direct bearing on problems of literacy, productivity, and our inability to compete in today's world. Libraries are everyman's free university.

invisibility is a luxury.

But the health of a society can be measured by how often and how meaningfully its people are able to reach that higher plane, to live lives bigger than they are.

The baseline level—that's where we stumble and fall, that's where we go through the motions. And that's where most of us live, most of the time. But the health of a society can be measured by how often and how meaningfully its people are able to reach that higher plane, to live lives bigger than they are.

resulta muy duro en los tiempos que vivimos estar loco y ser de mediana edad

Vivimos en una sociedad que ha cambiado el concepto de la negación. La negación va acompañada ahora de la suposición de que es sólo una mentira de conveniencia para ser adaptada en algún momento posterior, cuando se ha negociado una verdad aceptable.

In Vedic society the bard was originally the chief's charioteer. His function was not necessarily hereditary nor exclusively reserved to a particular social group.

The outer garments of to-day will become the under-clothes of some destined to-morrow, and centuries hence a man found walking on the public highways dressed as you are will be arrested by the police for shocking the sense of propriety of the community, and so on. It will go on and on until you will find human beings everywhere decked out in layer after layer of clothes until he or she has lost all semblance to that beautiful thing that an all-wise Providence has designed us to be.

I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.

I doubt very seriously whether anyone will hire me.' What do you mean, babe? You a fine boy with a good education.' Employers sense in me a denial of their values.' He rolled over onto his back. 'They fear me. I suspect that they can see that I am forced to function in a century I loathe. This was true even when I worked for the New Orleans Public Library.

You could tell by the way he talked, though, that he had gone to school a long time. That was probably what was wrong with him.

The leisure class has been replaced by another and much larger class to which work has none of the older connotation of pain, fatigue, or other mental or physical discomfort. We have failed to observe the emergence of this New Class, as it may be simply called.

The hallmark of the conventional wisdom is acceptability. It has the approval of those to whom it is addressed.

Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.

By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.

The individual serves the industrial system not by supplying it with savings and the resulting capital; he serves it by consuming its products.

Few people at the beginning of the ninteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

Under capitalism, man exploits man; while under socialism just the reverse is true.

I am worried about our tendency to over invest in things and under invest in people.

The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.

We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action of the machine we have created to serve us.