Quotes About Societies

I think, certainly in the more civilized societies, women's roles are growing in power all of the time.

In the infancy of societies, the chiefs of state shape its institutions; later the institutions shape the chiefs of state.

The relationship between experts and citizens is not "democratic." All people are not, and can never be, equally talented or intelligent. Democratic societies, however, are always tempted to this resentful insistence on equality, which becomes oppressive ignorance if given its head.

The reasons why institutions fail and societies change are complex, and simplistic explanations should evoke automatic suspicion. Sometimes external causes - droughts, plagues or foreign invasions - can unsettle a nation, or its leadership may prove inadequate because of personal factors. In every case, a society faces problems, and is solutions or lack of response set a course for the future.

Everything in this room is edible. Even I'm edible. But, that would be called canibalism. It is looked down upon in most societies.

Everything in this room is edible. Even I'm edible. But, that would be called canibalism. It is looked down upon in most societies.

What if the purpose of human charity wasn't to protect the weak -- which seems pretty anti-Darwinian anyway -- but to preserve the mad? Don't they get special treatment in most primitive societies? ( . . .) You have to be careful about who you do away with. It could be that some part of our understanding comes in vessels incapable of sustaining themselves. What do you think? Maybe you'd have to be crazy to think that.

This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation.

The dark side of our new information technology is not that it allows government repression of free speech but just the opposite: it permits anyone to spread, with little risk of being held accountable, any idea, conspiracy, lie, hatred, scam, or scheme, with the result that societies become less civil and governable.

The history of this nation up through the Civil War shows how difficult the establishment of a federal authority can be when there are profound differences in the values of the societies it attempts to integrate."3 Oppenheimer thus became the first of many postwar realists to disparage Einstein for being allegedly too idealistic.

We're on a journey to a heavenly home, and we need all the help we can get. Societies

Peñalosa's argument was that too many rich societies have used their wealth in ways that exacerbate urban problems rather than solve them. Could this help explain the happiness paradox?

Under this hypothesis, genetically-grounded personality differences widen in the most gender-egalitarian societies for the simplest of reasons: Both sexes become freer to do what comes naturally.

Highly familistic, consensual cultures have been the norm throughout history and the world. Modern Europe has been the oddball.

Biology is not going to put us out of business. The new knowledge that geneticists and neuroscientists are providing, conjoined with the kinds of analyses we do best, will enable us to take giant strides in understanding how societies, polities, and economies really function. We are like physicists at the outset of the nineteenth century, who were poised at a moment in history that would produce Ampères and Faradays.

What should have died along with communism is the belief that modern societies can be run on a single principle, whether that of planning under the general will or that of free-market allocations.

Societies that value excellence, innovation, entrepreneurship and integrity do well.

For the story — from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace — is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

I would go one step further and say that the willingness to challenge professional economists - and other experts - should be the foundation of democracy. When you think about it, if all we have to do is to listen to the experts, what is the point of having a democracy at all? Unless we want our societies to be run by a body of self-elected experts, we all have to learn economics and challenge professional economists

Morality, by promoting cooperative behavior, can change the whole population biology of a species, and it seems to be an important product of gene-culture coevolution in human societies.

There is simply no proof that warfare in small-scale societies was a rarer or less serious undertaking than among civilized societies. In general, warfare in prestate societies was both frequent and important. If anything, peace was a scarcer commodity for members of bands, tribes, and chiefdoms than for the average citizen of a civilized state.

Except in geographical scale, tribal warfare could be and often was total war in every modern sense. Like states and empires, smaller societies can make a desolation and call it peace. TERRITORIAL

As Benjamin Franklin put it, "No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies."48

Ironically, societies characterized by a complex division of labor are often marked by inequality and support large specialized armies. Precisely these "civilized" societies are likely to resort to savage violence in their attempts to conquer "primitive" societies.22