Quotes About Society

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalistic System was to debauch the currency... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million can diagnose.

The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems -- the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.

The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.

It is a mistake to think businessmen are more immoral than politicians.

The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably.

Once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant's profit, we have begun to change our civilisation.

There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

There is only one thing more harmful to society than an elected official forgetting the promises he made in order to get elected that's when he doesn't forget them.

The slogan was 'Don't trust anyone over thirty'. Sixty years later the slogan became, 'Don't trust anyone over ninety'.

To me, "manners" meant sleeping linesmen at Wimbledon, and bowing and curtsying to rich people with hereditary titles who didn't pay any taxes. Manners meant tennis clubs that demanded you wear white clothes, and cost too much money to join, and excluded blacks and Jews and God knows who else. Manners meant the hush-hush atmosphere at tennis matches, where excitement of any kind was frowned upon.

Consumer society begins at the moment when what was once the province or function of the family and community migrates to the marketplace.

going to have an industrial society you must have places that will look terrible. Other places you set aside—to say, 'This is the way it was.'

I wasn't interested in society, or ancient people's money troubles. I wanted to know what books really meant.

Obviously all the girls, whether they talked about it or not, were on the lookout for any reprieve from the hassle of not having a boyfriend: the way it exposed you to censure and nosiness.

He said that we had forgotten the clowns, who now performed only in prisons and insane asylums. The implication was that this was a bad thing.

I understood that novels, unlike children's books, were serious and important and that, just as my parents' job was to treat patients in a hospital, so, too, was it someone's job to write novels. Every civilized country had such people. They were in some way the very mark of civilization.

Phones," he says to Andrea. "They'll be the death of civilization.

All Ursula can come up with is that when people were alone in the voting booth, they couldn't bring themselves to vote for a woman. The problem wasn't Ursula. It was American society. Of course Ursula harbored plenty of private fears

She hadn't seemed maternal enough, or like a devoted-enough wife. So much more was expected of a female candidate.

Driven by a concern with institutions, we re-enter the world of the behavioralists. But we do so not in protest against the notion of rational choice, but rather in an effort to understand how rationality on the part of individuals leads to coherence at the level of society. (Bates 1988, p. 399)

As long as a single center has a monopoly on the use of coercion, one has a state rather than a self-governed society.