1950s, The First and Last Freedom (1954)
“A frightened society still recognizes the existence of the problem; an adapted society begins to incorporate it as part of normality.”
Source: Cuando una ciudad aprende a convivir con sus desaparecidos Mundial, memoria y desaparición en la Guadalajara de 2026. (2026, 10 junio). Zona Docs. https://www.zonadocs.mx/2026/06/10/cuando-una-ciudad-aprende-a-convivir-con-sus-desaparecidos-mundial-memoria-y-desaparicion-en-la-guadalajara-de-2026/
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José Baroja 199
Chilean author and editor 1983Related quotes
“Man's society is an ecology that forces adaptation to it.”
"The Variable Man" (1952), The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, v.1: The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford (1987)
Context: Can any of us fix anything? No. None of us can do that. We're specialized. Each one of us has his own line, his own work. I understand my work, you understand yours. The tendency in evolution is toward greater and greater specialization. Man's society is an ecology that forces adaptation to it. Continued complexity makes it impossible for us to know anything outside our own personal field — I can't follow the work of the man sitting at the next desk over from me. Too much knowledge has piled up in each field. And there are too many fields.
“The normal state of a free society is a state of famine.”
Source: Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters (1857), p. 335
Source: The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilisation, (1933), p. 147
“A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.”
The Last Page, p. 7.
A History of Reading (1996)
“Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.”
Source: Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)
Source: Multi-Secularism: A New Agenda, (2014), p. 1
"A Call for Prayer – and Action -- Against Violence in America" (2012)
Context: What, we wonder, can be done to prevent such unpredictable outbreaks of violence? No, we can’t always pinpoint when a specific individual will erupt in a spree of deadly violence. But it is just possible that we can begin to create a less violent society, a society in which nonviolent conflict reconciliation is a more widely-held value, a society in which individuals with serious mental health problems are more likely to be identified and more likely to receive needed treatment and care.