Quotes About Societies

Even though I knew pretty early that I was going to be a scientist, it wasn't the science that interested me in science fiction; it was the vision of future societies that, for better or worse, would be radically different from our own.

My main message is that I have a problem with the Islamicisation of our societies.

Societies are being interconnected and we have to adjust to that fact.

Historically, we've attached a lot of shame to women and their bodies - probably since biblical times. It's a way that patriarchal societies have perpetuated.

I speak at various events, including student societies, several times a week.

The degradation of natural resources such as forests and freshwater has removed much of the resilience that societies formerly enjoyed.

When people write about secret societies, there is a desire to demystify them. I wanted to hyper-mystify them.

Ive lived and worked in developing countries so Im particularly interested in helping women in oppressive societies. Our problems can pale in comparison to theirs, the more we can do to empower them, the better off all women will be.

Primate and elephant and even pig societies show considerable evidence of care for others, parent-child bonding, solidarity in the face of danger, and so on.

Without conscious rituals of loss and renewal, individuals and societies lose the capacity to experience the sorrows and joy that are essential for feeling fully human. Without them life flattens out, and meaning drains from both living and dying. Soon there is a death of meaning and an increase in meaningless deaths.

For primitives as for the man of all pre modern societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and, in the last analysis, to reality. The polarity sacred – profane is often expressed as a opposition between real The Sacred and the Profane and unreal or pseudoreal. Thus it is easy to understand that religious man deeply desires to be, to participate in reality, to be saturated with power.

For primitives as for the man of all premodern societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and to reality. The polarity sacred – profane is often expressed as an opposition between real The Sacred and the Profane and unreal or pseudoreal. Thus it is easy to understand that religious man deeply desires to be, to participate in reality, to be saturated with power.

We allow that violence is done to the body among "primitive" cultures or that it was done by ancient societies, but we have yet to realize that beauty brings out the primitive in every person.

And with policymakers still locked in the vise grip of austerity logic, these rising emergency expenditures are being offset with cuts to everyday public spending, which will make societies even more vulnerable during the next disaster—a classic vicious cycle.

Societies tell themselves necessary fictions in the same way that individuals and families do. Henrik Ibsen called them "vital lies," and psychologist Daniel Goleman describes them working the same way on the social level that they do within families: "The collusion is maintained by directing attention away from the fearsome fact, or by repackaging its meaning in an acceptable format." The costs of these social blind spots, he writes, are destructive communal illusions.

most of the great religions were either born or reached their apogee at a time when the societies that adopted them had a younger and poorer demographic base. Societies in which 70 per cent of the population was under the age of eighteen - half of them men with their veins bursting with violence and the urge to procreate

Men have differed in opinion, and been divided into parties by these opinions, from the first origin of societies; and in all governments where they have been permitted freely to think and to speak. the same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have existed through all time. Whether the power of the people, or that of the (best men; nobles) should prevail, were questions which kept the states of Greece and rome in eternal convulsions...

I am convinced that those societies which live without government enjoy in their gen'l mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness.

People can be very motivated to become very control experts because an inability to predict behavior is absolutely intolerable for human beings and every other social animal. The fact that most people act predictably is literally is what holds human societies together.

Wars are times of intense technological transformation, because societies invest – sometimes with extensive borrowing – when and where matters of life and death are at stake.

Very few societies on Earth developed science as we know it today. On the other hand, the number is not zero - the Greeks, the Chinese, and the Maya did, among others. Once invented, science proved so useful that it spread like mold on a petri dish.

At rare moments in history, by a series of accidents never to be repeated, arise flower societies in which the cult of happiness is paramount, hedonistic, mindless, intent upon the glorious physical instant.

Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister.

The main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia. We turn on the TV and see what blew up in Iraq or we see conditions in Afghanistan.