Quotes About Society

Democracy unleashes the State in the name of the people.

It is hard to know how many people do, but given that the people are so docile towards the rulers, nowadays, very few Americans show the passion for freedom that our forefathers had.

It is amazing to think after all that has happened in this country in the last few years, the last few decades, that so many people have this blind faith that government is our friend and therefore, so we don't need protections against it.

the general public enjoys reading any book, of any kind, that is being read by the public generally, through much that herd instinct for doing what everybody else is doing, which exalts sane women upon three-inch heels, and attaches buttons to the sleeves and coat-tails of presumably intelligent men.

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.

If all that a stone is expected to be is the stone that it is, why isn't a man expected to be the kind of man that he is instead of someone's idea of what man he should be?

The People, though we think of a great entity when we use the word, means nothing more than so many millions of individual men.

In modern society, where most people live in cities, and where both needs and wishes are absolved through the same remote agency - money - the distinction between wishes and needs has altogether vanished.

Any new financial order for the world must tackle the three chief challenges of our age.

Money is normative. So pervasive is its influence on our lives that it makes less moneyed ages incomprehensible, consigning them to barbarism or folklore. Yet history is not inevitable: antiquity did not aspire to our present condition and might have generated a quite different present.

There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most domineering virtues of human society, are created, strengthened and maintained.

Whenever socialism has been tried, it has failed.

The Socialist dream is no longer Utopia but Queue-topia.

Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy.

The cultivation of a single staple grain was, in itself, an important step in legibility and hence, appropriation. Monoculture fosters uniformity at many different levels. . .A society shaped powerfully by monoculture was easier to monitor, assess, and tax than one shaped by agricultural diversity.

It is time someone put in a good word for the petite bourgeoise. Unlike the working class and capitalists, who have never lack for spokespersons, the petite bourgeoise rarely, if ever, speaks for itself.

Perhaps people, and kids especially, are spoiled today, because all the kids today have cars, it seems. When I was young you were lucky to have a bike.

The law may upset reason but reason may never upset the law, or our whole society will shred like an old tatami. The law may be used to confound reason, reason must certainly not be used to overthrow the law.

The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.

En la actual polémica, mientras nuestra sociedad se detiene en una ignorancia mojigata, haríamos bien en recordar lo mucho que hay en juego: la salud de los hambrientos y la conservación de nuestro legado más precioso, el medio ambiente.

From the vantage point of the Information Society, the spectacle of soldiers in the modern period traveling halfway around the world to entertain death out of loyalty to the nation-state will come to be seen as grotesque and silly. It will seem not far different from some of the extraordinary and exaggerated rites of chivalry, like walking about in leg irons, which otherwise sensible people took pride in doing during the feudal period.

Understanding the Agricultural Revolution is a first step toward understanding the Information Revolution. The introduction of tilling and harvesting provides a paradigm example of how an apparently simple shift in the character of work can radically alter the organization of society.

Stephenson's "metaverse" is a dense virtual community with its own laws.

Lane, "Economic Consequences of Organized Violence," op. cit.