Quotes About Society

Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, the Comte de Mirabeau, the man who had defied Louis XVI by opening the National Assembly, said, "In the final analysis, the people will judge the revolution by this fact alone—does it take more or less money? Are they better off? Do they have more work? And is that work better paid?

By the time the war ended, Iceland was a changed country. Not least among the changes, in 1944 it had negotiated full independence from Denmark. Now it was free to negotiate its own relations with the rest of the world. Because of cod, it had moved in one generation from a fifteenth-century colonial society to a modern postwar nation.

In Middle English, cod meant a bag or a sack, or by inference, a scrotum, which is why the outrageous purse that sixteenth-century men wore at their crotch to give the appearance of enormous and decorative genitals was called a codpiece.

There is a big difference between living in a society that hunts whales and living in one that views them. Nature is being reduced to precious demonstrations for entertainment and education, something far less natural than hunting. Are we headed for a world where nothing is left of nature but parks?

It was one thing to talk of using technology to topple the authority of the aristocracy and the Church, but who or what would replace them? Diderot and the French revolutionaries had assumed it would be "the people." But as the nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet once wryly observed, "The people, in its highest ideal, is difficult to find in the people." As

THE ROMANS PAID homage to democracy, the rights of the common citizen and, for a time, republicanism. But

the dissemination of information alone does not set people free, and a new information technology creates a new ruling class.

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. —MARSHALL MCLUHAN AND QUENTIN FIORE, The Medium Is the Massage, 1967

If Joan Rivers had gone to the electric chair instead of Ethel Rosenberg, this is the book she would have written.

Without the sense that individuals are responsible for their own actions, and that there are appropriate consequences to violating society's most basic values, the concepts of morality and right and wrong become meaningless. And then you have no society.

Multicultural societies are so invested in "tolerance" that they'll tolerate the explicitly intolerant (and avowedly unicultural) before they'll tolerate anyone pointing out that intolerance.

In his book Men to boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity, Gary Cross asks simply: Where have all the men gone? Like George Will, Victor David Hanson, and others who've posed that question, Professor Cross is no doubt aware that he sounds old and square. But in a land of middle-aged teenagers somebody has to.

Big Government means small citizens: it corrodes the integrity of a people, catastrophically.

Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it's a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. Atheistic humanism became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumanism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction.

Demographically and psychologically, Europeans have chosen to commit societal suicide, and their principal heir and beneficiary will be Islam.

In his book Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift, Paul Rahe writes, Human dignity is bound up with taking responsibility for conducting one's own affairs. But today the state cocoons one's own affairs so thoroughly as to remove almost all responsibility from modern life, and much of human dignity with it. And, if personal consequences have been all but abolished, societal consequences are harder to dodge...A society of children cannot survive, no matter how all-embracing the government nanny.

At bottom, today's Democrats from Baucus to Waters are united in only two beliefs, and they demand that American citizens believe in only two things: diversity and rights.

When the desirable jobs are spending other people's money, reporting on spending other people's money and lobbying to spend other people's money then you know that the society is f***ed.

You can live as free men, but if you choose not to, your society will surely die.

But that's Islam in the third millennium: they want the certainties of seventh-century society with the conveniences of the twenty-first century.

the nationalization of the family proceeds apace, and America is as well advanced on that path as anywhere else. "The west has nationalized families over the last 60 years," writes Vaidyanathan. "Old age, ill health, single motherhood—everything is the responsibility of the state.

Once it's no longer accepted that something is wrong, all the laws in the world will avail you naught. The law functions as a formal embodiment of a moral code, not as a free-standing substitute for it.

You can't help noticing that since abandoning its faith in the unseen world Europe seems also to have lost its faith in the seen one. Consider this poll taken in 2002 for the first anniversary of September 11: 61 percent of Americans said they were optimistic about the future, as opposed to 43 percent of Canadians, 42 percent of Britons, 29 percent of the French, 23 percent of Russians, and 15 percent of Germans. I wouldn't reckon those numbers will get any cheerier over the years.

Having done an impressive job of demolishing the basic societal building block of the family, the ambitious liberal is now moving on to demolishing the basic building block of the sexes.