Quotes About Society

There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society with a large segment of people in that society who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that that have nothing to lose. People who have stake in their society, protect that society, but when they don't have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it.

Our society values alert, problem-solving consciousness, and it devalues all other states of consciousness. Any kind of consciousness that is not related to the production or consumption of material goods is stigmatized in our society today. Of course we accept drunkenness. We allow people some brief respite from the material grind. A society that subscribes to that model is a society that is going to condemn the states of consciousness that have nothing to do with the alert problem-solving mentality.

I'm not interested in the wellbeing of society because society is a big lie. Where is society? I only see individual beings and only the individual can grow. Each one is enormous and tremendous in his own way-each one is unique.

Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.

Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe: And if a member of Civil Society, do it with a saving of his allegiance to the Universal Sovereign. We maintain therefore that in matters of Religion, no man's right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society and that Religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance.

There is the specter of "realism" that is still haunting Chinese contemporary art - that art is only an instrument, an instrument to reflect society, that it must be useful for society. Also, I have noticed many Western media outlets are very insistent on understanding contemporary art in China through this kind of realist approach. Sometimes I even sense that they are intent on, as we say in China, "picking bones of politics out of an egg of art." Or perhaps they see art as merely an instrument to reflect society.

The danger to a free society is not the guns owned by the citizens but an unconstrained government.... An armed society is a self-governing society, just as a disarmed people are vulnerable to arbitrary power of every kind.

Turkish society is divided not only culturally but also politically. You're either conservative or progressive. Islamist or secular. Right wing or left wing. This kind of division can be seen in any society, but in Turkey, the problem is that we are losing any kind of connection between groups and any kind of desire to understand one another. The groups hate each other and they are demolishing all bridges between themselves. So society is divided strictly.

Start doing the things you think should be done, and start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in free speech? Then speak freely. Do you love the truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in an open society? Then act in the open. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then behave decently and humanely.

Since Western society is deteriorating, it has become overrun with immorality, and God is going to judge it, and destroy it. And the only way the black people caught up in this society can be saved is not to integrate into this corrupt society, but to separate from it, to a land of our own, where we can reform ourselves, lift up our moral standards and try to be godly.

The idea that each individual has intrinsic, God-given value and is of infinite worth quite apart from any social contribution - an idea most pagans would have rejected as absurd - persists today as the ethical basis of western law and politics. Our secularized western idea of democratic society owes much to that early Christian vision of a new society - a society no longer formed by the natural bonds of family, tribe, or nation but by the voluntary choice of its members.

To revolt within society in order to make it a little better, to bring about certain reforms, is like the revolt of prisoners to improve their life within the prison walls; and such revolt is no revolt at all, it is just mutiny. Do you see the difference? Revolt within society is like the mutiny of prisoners who want better food, better treatment within the prison; but revolt born of understanding is an individual breaking away from society, and that is creative revolution.

Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups or between groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to be run. If you look back, you will see that warfare was an invention, just as ways of handling government or taxes are inventions. You will see, too, that once people use an invention they go on using it until they find another which they think is superior.

If you cannot bear these stories then the society is unbearable. Who am I to remove the clothes of this society, which itself is naked. I don't even try to cover it, because it is not my job, that's the job of dressmakers.

Anarchism is a definite intellectual current in the life of our times, whose adherents advocate the abolition of economic monopolies and of all political and social coercive institutions within society. In place of the present capitalistic economic order Anarchists would have a free association of all productive forces based upon co-operative labour, which would have as its sole purpose the satisfying of the necessary requirements of every member of society, and would no longer have in view the special interest of privileged minorities within the social union.

The endeavor of being a foreign correspondent means that you will never be their equal. And that has its pros and cons. Were you to be an insider in a particular society, then you would be one of them, and the way you would write about that society would be very different. When you're brought up in a certain way, you have certain blind spots to the things going on in your culture. There is an illumination the outsider brings to a place or a situation that cannot be duplicated.

We think that we have to do so many things and it's unfortunate, entire modern society is besotted with the do-ables, we have to do this, we have to have a half-hour of yoga, an hour of meditation, 2 hours of this, and then 12 hours of work and non-stop electronic gadgets, gizmos etc. etc., and then go home and take care of the family, and then take the children to wherever, and what tends to happen is we do way too much. The society does way too much. One of the greatest things in healing is try for just one day to do nothing. Very difficult.

We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.

The regeneration of society is the regeneration of society by individual education.

Society is a more level surface than we imagine. Wise men or absolute fools are hard to be met with, as there are few giants or dwarfs. The heaviest charge we can bring against the general texture of society is that it is commonplace. Our fancied superiority to others is in some one thing which we think most of because we excel in it, or have paid most attention to it; whilst we overlook their superiority to us in something else which they set equal and exclusive store by.

If you say one gets influenced watching a character, I think its foolish. Cinema reflects society; society rarely reflects cinema.

Society needs people who...know how to be compassionate and honest...Societ y needs all kinds of skills that are not just cognitive; they're emotional, they're affectional. You can't run the society on data and computers alone.

The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.

Civil liberty is only natural liberty, modified and secured by the sanctions of civil society. It is not a thing, in its own nature, precarious and dependent on human will and caprice; but it is conformable to the constitution of man, as well as necessary to the well-being of society.

I ask that you offer to the political arena, and to the critical problems of our society which are decided therein, the benefit of the talents which society has helped to develop in you. I ask you to decide, as Goethe put it, whether you will be an anvilor a hammer. The question is whether you are to be a hammerwhether you are to give to the world in which you were reared and educated the broadest possible benefits of that education.

When the function of libraries is put in terms of their contributions to the community, people see their centrality. The challenge to us is to continue to help them see it in those terms to describe our larger purposes. We must assert that libraries are central to the quality of life in our society; that libraries have a direct role in preserving democratic freedoms. Free access to information and the opportunity of every individual to improve his or her mind, employment prospects, and lifestyle are fundamental rights in our society.

Congress is the most powerful branch. It can expand a progressive society, or it can block a progressive society.

Any decent society has to be built on trust and love and the intelligent use of information and feelings. Education involves being able to practice those things as you struggle to build a decent society that can be nonviolent.

One problem with our current society is that we have an attitude towards education as if it is there to simply make you more clever, make you more ingenious... Even though our society does not emphasize this, the most important use of knowledge and education is to help us understand the importance of engaging in more wholesome actions and bringing about discipline within our minds. The proper utilization of our intelligence and knowledge is to effect changes from within to develop a good heart.

True compassion is more than throwing a coin to a beggar. It demands of our humanity that if we live in a society that produces beggars, we are morally commanded to restructure that society.

I'm just lucky to have been in the right place at the right time. Another place, another time, I wouldn't have been as successful. Society enabled me to make my money and my money should go to society.

I think we have moved from a shareholder society to a stakeholder society, and that has massive implications.

Women are one half of society which gives birth to the other half so it is as if they are the entire society.

In a society that almost demands life at double time, speed and addictions numb us to our own experience. In such a society, it is almost impossible to settle into our bodies or stay connected with our hearts, let alone connect with one another or the earth where we live.

Dissonance between family and school, therefore, is not only inevitable in a changing society; it also helps to make children moremalleable and responsive to a changing world. By the same token, one could say that absolute homogeneity between family and school would reflect a static, authoritarian society and discourage creative, adaptive development in children.

The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society, which is nature's proper steward and society's only hope.

No society that places the individual above itself will survive; but neither will any society that places the individual below itself.

By that time this society is going to be completely different for one thing. Your own son or your own son's son is not going to have the needs for money that you feel you have now. The society itself will be less dependent on money and currency to get along.

The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.

Freedom is necessary for two reasons. It's necessary for the individual, because the individual, no matter how good the society is, every individual has hopes, fears, ambitions, creative urges, that transcend the purposes of his society. Therefore we have a long history of freedom, where people try to extricate themselves from tyranny for the sake of art, for the sake of science, for the sake of religion, for the sake of the conscience of the individual - this freedom is necessary for the individual.

Any society that you build will have its limits. And outside the limits of any society the unruly and heroic tramps will wander with their wild and virgin thoughts…planning ever new and dreadful outbursts of rebellion.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

This supposed idyllic society we have is the most confused, warped, addicted society in the history of the world. We are addicted to power, we're addicted to our own image of ourselves, to violence, divorce, abortion, and sex.

The difference of the degrees in which the individuals of a great community enjoy the good things of life has been a theme of declaration and discontent in all ages; and it is doubtless our paramount duty, in every state of society, to alleviate the pressure of the purely evil part of this distribution, as much as possible, and, by all the means we can devise, secure the lower links in the chain of society from dragging in dishonor and wretchedness.

We must beware of trying to build a society in which nobody counts for anything except a politician or an official, a society where enterprise gains no reward and thrift no privileges

A lesbian woman came up to me and said, ‘why are you denying me my right?’ I said, ‘well, because it’s not a right.’ It’s a privilege that society recognizes because society sees intrinsic value to that relationship over any other relationship.

The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role in society is to make money.

I love America because it is a confused, chaotic mess - and I hope we can keep it this way for at least another thousand years. The permissive society is the free society.