Quotes About Societies

This tended to increase the size of societies because contests of violence more often than not were won by the larger group.

In general, risk-averse behavior has been common among all groups that operated along the margins of survival. The sheer challenge of survival in premodern societies always constrained the behavior of the poor.

The sheer challenge of survival in premodern societies always constrained the behavior of the poor.

The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.

There are some cherished values that resist being quantified or squeezed into monetary terms, but are no less real for that. Agents of democratic societies are responsible to the people, but we should remember that "the people" refers not only to

Societies that robbed humans of what they had rightfully earned by the sweat of their brows paid a steep price for this theft. They destroyed the individual's incentive to work, undermined the general prosperity, and thereby doomed themselves to poverty and famine.

If one of the reasons for uniting into commonwealths is the protection of property, and if property is to be protected less by power as such than by theater, then societies become acutely dependent on their artists-what Plato called poietai: the storytellers, the inventors, sculptors, poets, any original thinkers whatsoever.

War is not an act of unchecked ruthlessness but a declared contest between bounded societies, or states. If a state has no enemies it has no boundaries.

A 90 percent mortality rate is high enough: It does not just kill people; it annihilates societies; it destroys languages, religions, histories, and cultures. It chokes off the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next.

This inferno of contagion destroyed thousands of societies and millions of people, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, from California to New England, from the Amazon rainforest to the tundra of Hudson Bay. It is what destroyed T1, the City of the Jaguar, and the ancient people of Mosquitia.

complex farming societies were able to thrive in even the toughest rainforest areas. Human ingenuity is boundless.

The value of biodiversity is that it makes our ecosystems more resilient, which is a prerequisite for stable societies; its wanton destruction is akin to setting fire to our lifeboat.

Cities tend to be representations of societies: diversity and inequality find their extremes in urban settings. Yet, when war is added onto pre-existing inequalities, high levels of poverty, or even disaster, urban fragility increases exponentially, making it harder to absorb the shocks of warfare.

Reunion has been nicknamed the Rainbow Isle because it is considered one of the most integrated societies on the planet, and you feel that vibe wherever you go. There is joyousness, warmth and a sense of equality.

These books are so splendid, they frustrate readers conditioned to lesser historical fiction in which every Confederate officer was young, dashing, and raised with a free-black best friend on a progressive plantation, or that features a feisty, clandestinely educated, proto-liberated woman rebelling valiantly against the constricting patriarchal societies of bygone centuries (all the while wearing enthralling dresses). The first sort of novel romanticizes the past, the second euthanizes it. The

Except for professional athletes, dancers, cowboys, and a few other groups, most people in modern industrial societies have abnormally low energy expenditures. Workers sitting in swivel chairs or in driver's seats of cars or even pushing vacuum cleaners or electrically powered lawn mowers are being sedentary, and their leisure hours may be even more so.

The theory of "diffusion"—ideas spreading from top down, from the few to the many—still informs much of our telling of history. But that's not always the way history works. Except in totalitarian societies, people (even common people) tend to pursue, of their own volition, their personal interests and the interests of their communities. This was certainly true during the years leading up to the American Revolution.

As for the historical inspirations I drew on in writing The Snow Queen, I suppose I would call them more cross-cultural inspirations, though they frequently involve past societies as well as present day ones.

I think ageing is challenging, surprising, fun, and full of friendship, so that is the approach I'll take, objecting to the stigmatization of ageing in so many modern societies.

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

Religion enjoys astonishing privileges in our societies, privileges denied to almost any other special interest group one can think of-and certainly denied to individuals

The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.

The Good Book is the result of massive simulations of whole societies—what happens when billions of individual people follow various codes of conduct. It's simple: if most people use the rules in the Book most of the time, a pretty much utopian society emerges spontaneously on the macro level.

Coroners' inquests by learned societies can't make Shakespeare a dead man.