Quotes About Society

love of independence and property, the most steady and industrious of all human appetites." Commercial society supplies that "love of independence" in abundance.

love of independence and property, the most steady and industrious of all human appetites." Commercial society supplies that "love of independence" in abundance. It encourages men to overturn custom and tradition, and establish a new kind of law, based on a free circulation of goods and services.

In every society," Kames concluded, "the advances of government toward perfection are strictly proportioned to the advance of society" toward mutual cooperation and improvement. The better we all get along, in other words, the more benign our rulers can afford to be.

For Plato, we find our true freedom only when we find our proper place within the political community. Aristotle, by contrast, concludes that community exists to serve the individuals who make it up, not the other way around.

For Aristotle, diversity is the keynote of the free society, and free exchange lies at its heart. In the true (as opposed to the ideal) political community there must be a diversity of social roles

Aristotle's free society is one in which the citizens participate in their government rather than submit to it. All will be rulers in one way or another, at one time or another. "This means some rule, and others are ruled, in turn, as if they had become, for the time being, different persons.

The Nietzschean nihilist could "implant into that which is degenerate and desires to die a longing for the end"—in other words, by planting the idea of decline in society one could actually hasten its demise.11

For Sale, Europeans are nature-haters; they are cut off from life.

Ever since the emperor Constantine had invested dominion over the Church in the bishop of Rome,‡ successive popes had borrowed his Neoplatonist vocabulary of imperial authority to describe their own. The Catholic Church saw itself as a Platonic copy of the true Universal Church, the Body of Christ. And just as the Body of Christ has only one head, went the argument, so also must Christian society. God

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner

Nordau's theories gave a new twist to the question of how man's biological evolution and society's historical evolution intersected. A fourth and disturbing possibility now presented itself: even healthy human specimens living in advanced civilized society would, unless corrective steps were taken, degenerate into a lesser physical and moral type.

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. —Niccolò Machiavelli, 1513

David Hume would put it even more vividly: all the other passions, including self-interest itself, have relatively minor effect on our lives, compared with the desire for property. "This avidity alone of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society .

with commerce and industry had come literacy for Europe's new urban middle class.

The historical pessimist worries that his own society is about to destroy itself, the cultural pessimist concludes that it deserves to be destroyed.

Once a free people have reached this point, Machiavelli concluded, there is no hope left. Their empire may expand, as Rome's did under the emperors. The wealth can continue to pour in. The arts may flourish; the political factionalism makes for dramatic entertainment, while people ignore the underlying rot. But such a society is doomed, unless a major crisis forces a change in its thinking.

The problem with modern society, Sartre warned, was that it wants everyone to be the same, that is, to be bourgeois. "In fact," Sartre concluded, "one becomes bourgeois by choosing, once and for all, the analytical vision of the world, which tries to impose itself upon every man," capitalist or Communist, eastern or western, black or white.34 Instead, man in the postmodern age must look for a true individualism, the product of what Sartre calls his total situation

Scotland became Europe's first modern literate society. This meant that there was an audience not only for the Bible but for other books as well.

So the basis of Aristotle's secure and stable order is not the Philosopher Ruler, but the good citizen who participates actively in the political, social, and economic life of his community.

Politics on Plato's terms becomes prescriptive, a series of formulae for shaping man and society into what they should be rather than accepting things as they are. Politics on Aristotle's terms will be largely descriptive, in which the more we discover about human nature, the more we recognize our powerlessness to effect real change.

Society acts as a mirror to our inner self, by reflecting back to us the reactions of others, and becomes our guide to what is good and evil in the world.

America, the totem of modern democratic culture, was actually "latently" fascist. The absence of a "genuine" fascist movement in America, like the absence of any "genuine" anti-Semitism, was in fact a sign of how far the corruption had spread. As Herbert Marcuse put it somewhat later, "The fact that we cannot point to an SS or SA here, simply means that they are not necessary in this country."48

nostalgia. Jacobitism reflected a nostalgic yearning for a traditional social order in which everyone supposedly knew his or her preordained place and stayed in it. It satisfied a deep utopian longing for the perfect society—except that it looked backwards, rather than ahead, for its model of perfection.

Politics in modern society, then, must involve a tension between two conflicting, but complementary principles: liberty, which preserves individuals, and authority, which preserves society.