Quotes About Societies

I believe in freedom of expression, and I believe that societies thrive when they permit freedom of expression.

But the depth of the crisis is also suggested by the multitude of reforming voices, societies, and movements that arose within the Catholic Church during the same period that Protestants began to move away from the church. Such movements are the concern of our next chapter, but it is important to note them now in order to indicate the magnitude of crisis brought about by the failure of Catholic leadership to expend as much energy in the care of souls as in the pursuit of power.

In i86o the income of the nation's churches and religious voluntary societies came quite close to matching the total receipts of the federal government. Today the ratio of annual federal income to annual religion-related giving is about twenty-five to one.

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

Many societies have educated their male children on the simple device of teaching them not to be women.

Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!

Is enough to look at the Middle Ages, at the Inquisition and on the ultra religious societies that, through their fanaticism, make an enemy of and have to eliminate everything that goes against them.

It is necessary to mankind in general, that there should be religion in the world, absolutely necessary for the preservation of the honour of the human nature, and no less so for the preservation of the order of human societies.

One finds societies which do not have an Oedipus complex (cf. Malinowski). The Oedipus complex might be an 'institutiton' tied to the structure of our society.

Allied powers provided for their own peoples levels of nourishment which they denied to others, including societies notionally under their protection.

The cross is a crisis point for all societies which seek to produce me in and women of quiescence, men and women who are trained to give unquestioning, uncritical obedience to worldly powers and not to Christ.

But let it be clear that I consider human cities as a fully natural phenomenon, on a par with the mega-structures that other ecosystem engineers build for their societies—the only difference being that whereas ants, termites, corals, and beavers have been maintaining their roles at a stably modest level for millions of years, the scale of human ecosystem engineering has grown by several orders of magnitude over just a few thousand years.

One thing that is clear is that we do not always want to relive the experience of the Romans; although sometimes what they did is entirely to be admired and envied, in other respects they were detestable. Most of what they achieved was based upon the use of force. The culture that has given us their unequaled masterpieces was created and maintained, in the last resort, by violent means that modern societies could not, or should not, tolerate today…

Traditional societies tend to have more diverse gut flora in general, and the key is thought to be their extraordinary fiber intakes, which can reach 120 grams a day,2104 nearly eight times the American average.

The United States, we tell ourselves, can afford to worry less about inequality than the class-bound societies of Europe because here, it is possible to rise. Seventy percent of Americans believe the poor can make it out of poverty on their own, while only 35 percent of Europeans think so. This faith in mobility may explain why the U.S. has a less-generous welfare state than most major European countries.

American influence in the world is certainly considerable, but the United States does not control, directly or indirectly, the politics and economics of other societies, as empires have always done, save for a few special cases that turn out to be the exceptions that prove the rule.

According to the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, in 2006, one out of six people or 43.1 million Americans suffered foot ailments. Among cultures that don't wear shoes, approximately 2 percent of the population has foot-related injuries, compared to 70 percent among shoe-wearing societies.

In civilized societies, if you are offended by a cartoon, you do not burn flags, take up guns and raid buildings, chant death to your opponents, or threaten suicide bombings. You write a letter to the editor.

Unless consumed in highly skilled ritual contexts, as is practiced in many traditional societies, what drugs in fact do is reduce our perception of both what can be accomplished and what we as individuals are able to accomplish, until the two are in balance. This

Poverty is a disease that must be diagnosed and then completely avoided in all societies.

It was an article of faith in eighteenth-century British thought that civilized societies usually formed out of the fundamental human need for security to ensure survival, but the same societies were gradually corrupted by a preoccupation with luxuries, which resulted in decadence.

In my day, secret societies were exactly that, secret. None of this showing up on the front page of the newspaper looking drunk and disorderly.

But consider this: are patriarchies peaceful because men are peaceful? Or do more peaceful societies tend to allow men to rise to the top because they place less value on the capacity for violence? Just asking the question.

When we are unwilling to draw clear moral lines between free societies and fear societies, when we are unwilling to call the former good and the latter evil, we will not be able to advance the cause of peace because peace cannot be disconnected from freedom.