Quotes about society (5797 quotes, page 39)

“Bearing in mind that “the market” is not an invention of capitalism but that it has existed for thousands of years in many different societies, social justice logically requires that the profits resulting from the operation of markets and infrastructures created by society be equitably shared within societies and in a larger context within the human family.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Interim report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, Alfred Maurice de Zayas http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/IntOrder/A.67.277_en.pdf.
2012

Family , Justice

“…another cause of today’s instability is that we now have a society in America, Europe and much of the world which is totally dominated by the two elements of sovereignty that are not included in the state structure: control of credit and banking, and the corporation. These are free of political controls and social responsibility and have largely monopolized power in Western Civilization and in American society. They are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate land, labor, entrepreneurial-managerial skills, and everything else the economists once told us were the chief elements of production. The only element of production they are concerned with is the one they can control: capital.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

World

“Our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular interests as those of all sensible men. The political needs of society become individual needs and aspirations, their satisfaction promotes business and the commonweal, and the whole appeals to be the very embodiment of Reason.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. xli

Men , Business

“Great abilities are rare, and they are often accompanied by qualities which make the abilities useless to him who has them, and even injurious to society.”

George Long (1800–1879) English classical scholar

An Old Man's Thoughts on Many Things, Of Education I

“Justice is the end of Government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be pursued, until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Federalist No. 51 (6 February 1788)
1780s, Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

Justice

“The fate of the soil system depends on society's willingness to intervene in the market place, and to forego some of the short-term benefits that accrue from 'mining' the soil so that soil quality and fertility can be maintained over the longer term.”

Eugene P. Odum (1913–2002) mathematician, ecologist, natural philosopher, and systems ecologist

Eugene Odum (1993) Ecology and our endangered life-support systems. p. 143

Fate , Dependency

“Cover-ups and deception are the nature of this society. Without lies it won’t exist.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, Our Duty Is to Remember Sichuan, 2009

Nature

“If it corrupts a society for the government to take care of the poor by violating the principle of property rights, who will take care of the poor? The answer of those who built America seems to be: "Anybody but the federal government."”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

The 5,000 Year Leap (1981)

“The case of programs today is very different from that of books a hundred years ago. The fact that the easiest way to copy a program is from one neighbor to another, the fact that a program has both source code and object code which are distinct, and the fact that a program is used rather than read and enjoyed, combine to create a situation in which a person who enforces a copyright is harming society as a whole both materially and spiritually; in which a person should not do so regardless of whether the law enables him to.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

1980s, GNU Manifesto (1985)

Books , Law , Way , Reading

“However, the voice of the rationalist is a sound social reaction, it is an act of self-defense by society against the dangers of being dominated by uncontrollable forces such as a saint proclaiming a revelation or a madman affirming the products of his sick imagination, and finally a fraud who wants to convert others to his views for the sake of his egoistic and unworthy purposes. It is better to rely on the safe but modest nourishment of reason than, in fear of missing the voice of ‘Truth’, to let oneself be fed with all sorts of uncontrollable nourishment which may more often be poisonous than healthy and beneficial.”

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890–1963) Philosopher, logician

Source: Problems and theories of philosophy, 1949, p. 49, as cited in Łukasiewicz, 2016.

Truth , Fear , Imagination , Fraud

“America’s reign of optimism contributes to a culture in which negative feelings are often unwelcome. […] As I pondered the question Americans often posed to me—Why aren’t Finns more optimistic, despite their supposedly great society?—I began to turn it around into a different question, a question that seemed to me the more relevant one: How have Finns managed to build such a great society, despite all their negativity? Perhaps the answer is that Finns have built a great society because of their pessimism, not in spite of it. The volume of outrage and complaints that pour out of Finns whenever they perceive an injustice in their society can be annoying—especially when that injustice might be considered minor in other countries. Nevertheless, perhaps this capacity for negative response is part of the secret of Finnish success. Finns are quick to demand real changes that improve their external circumstances.”

Anu Partanen (1975) journalist

Source: The Nordic Theory of Everything, Chapter 9

Secret , Feeling , Optimism , Question

“In Proposals which I drew up for the formation of a Scottish Legal History Society [now the Stair Society] I said that it had long been a reproach to Scotland that no adequate history of Scots Law existed, though it would be difficult to imagine a more attractive field of study, for the legal system in Scotland was not only perhaps our most distinctive heritage, but was also of special interest because of its combination in theory and practice of the Roman Law and the Common Law.”

Hugh Macmillan, Baron Macmillan (1873–1952) British judge

Source: A Man of Law's Tale (1952), At the Scottish bar, p. 214

Law , Imagination , History , Study

“The history of this paper suggests that highly speculative investigations, especially by an unknown author, are best brought before the world through some other channel than a scientific society, which naturally hesitates to admit into its printed records matter of uncertain value. Perhaps one may go further, and say that a young author who believes himself capable of great things would usually do well to secure the favourable recognition of the scientific world by work whose scope is limited, and whose value is easily judged, before embarking upon higher flights.”

John Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh (1842–1919) English physicist

About John James Waterston's rejected paper about ideal gas kinetic energy. [Lord Rayleigh, Introduction to Waterston's Memoir "On the physics of media that are composed of free and perfectly elastic molecules in a state of motion", Philosophical Transactions, 183A, p. 1-5, Royal Society, 1892]

World , History , Nature

“For a long time now there has been a rising tide of rebellion against this Western paramountcy, and a desire to reassert Muslim values and restore Muslim greatness. The Muslim has suffered successive stages of defeat. The first was his loss of domination in the world, to the advancing power of Russia and the West. The second was the undermining of his authority in his own country, through an invasion of foreign ideas and laws and ways of life and sometimes even foreign rulers or settlers, and the enfranchisement of native non-Muslim elements. The third—the last straw—was the challenge to his mastery in his own house, from emancipated women and rebellious children. It was too much to endure, and the outbreak of rage against these alien, infidel, and incomprehensible forces that had subverted his dominance, disrupted his society, and finally violated the sanctuary of his home was inevitable. It was also natural that this rage should be directed primarily against the millennial enemy and should draw its strength from ancient beliefs and loyalties.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, The Roots of Muslim Rage (1990)

Life , Women , Children , World

“Now, given that picture of a rapid change of society, one would expect to see a rapid evolution of the institutions charged with preparing the young for it. We do not see this. We see a much slower rate of evolution of the school and that means we're seeing a bigger and bigger gap between school and society. This gap is what I believe is responsible for the deterioration of performance in our schools and our educational systems. Because the children can see this; they can see that school is irrelevant. They feel that the pace of school and the mood of the school culture is out of sync with the society in which they live. And so it becomes harder and harder to get them to buy into the idea that school is satisfying their needs, that school is a bridge to the 21st century, as our political leaders keep on reiterating.”

Seymour Papert (1928–2016) MIT mathematician, computer scientist, and educator

The 11th Colin Cherry Memorial Lecture on Communication http://www.connectedfamily.com/frame4/cf0413seymour/recent_essays/cf0413_cherry_3.html (1998)

Children , Education , School , Feeling

“Every democracy must involve civil society in the process of establishing budgets, and all sectors of society must be consulted to determine what the real priorities of the population are. Lobbies, including military contractors and other representatives of the military-industrial complex, must not be allowed to hijack these priorities to the detriment of the population’s real needs.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

United Nations expert urges states to cut military spending and invest more in human development http://www.unog.ch/80256EDD006B9C2E/(httpNewsByYear_en)/D5D061E9891363C1C1257CB7003055E0?OpenDocument.
2014

Democracy

“You can love ‘em till your well runs dry, Belford, but you can never love ‘em enough, and you know it. No matter how much others might love you, you can’t love yourself unless you’re in charge of your own actions, and you’ll never take charge as long as you can get away with blaming your shortcomings and misfortunes on your family or society or your race or gender or Satan or whatever…”

Tom Robbins Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994)

Love , Family

“An understandable hunger for … potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, … immune to the methods of factory farming.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), pp. 126-127.

Hunger , Truth , Literature , Understanding

“Few inventions have had so rapid and wide-ranging effects as the various machines which now process data and information by electronic energy. But I hope and believe that even these remarkable engines will not supersede the book as an instrument for the transfer of information. I remain sceptical, particularly when I see the advocates of the paperless society and the electronic library writing large books to support their case. I earnestly hope and believe also that libraries, as the records and memory of humanity, can form a fruitful partnership with the latest tools invented to ease the burden of our labour. Provided that these tools are efficiently operated by well-thought-out systems for organising and retrieving information, they offer the possibilities and opportunities for librarians and information specialists in all types of institution to meet the challenges of the new millennium.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Librarians and Information Systems (1995)

Books , Hope , Support , Memory

“Mr. Owen looked upon men through the spectacles of his own good-nature. He seldom took Lord Brougham's advice "to pick his men." He never acted on the maxim that the working class are as jealous of each other as the upper classes are of them. The resolution he displayed as a manufacturer he was wanting in as a founder of communities…. No leader ever took so little care as Mr, Owen in guarding his own reputation. He scarcely protested when others attached his name to schemes which were not his. The failure of Queenwood was not chargeable to him. When his advice was not followed he would say : "Well, gentlemen, I tell you what you ought to do. You differ from me. Carry out your own plans. Experience will show you who is right." When the affair went wrong then it was ascribed to him. Whatever failed under his name the public inferred failed through him. Mr. Owen was a general who never provided himself with a rear guard. While he was fighting in the front ranks priests might come up and cut off his commissariat. His own troops fell into pits against which he had warned them. Yet he would write his next dispatch without it occurring to him to mention his own defeat, and he would return to his camp without missing his army. Yet society is not so well served that it need hesitate to forgive the omissions of its generous friends. To Mr. Owen will be accorded the distinction of being a philosopher who devoted himself to founding a Science of Social Improvement and a philanthropist who gave his fortune to advance it. Association, which was but casual before his day, he converted into a policy and taught it as an art. He substituted Co-operation for coercion in the conduct ot industry and the willing co-operation of intelligence certain of its own reward, for sullen labour enforced by the necessity of subsistence, seldom to be relied on and never satisfied.”

George Holyoake (1817–1906) British secularist, co-operator, and newspaper editor

George Jacob Holyoake in The History of Co-operation in England (1875; 1902).

Men , Art , Intelligence , Communication

“The anti‐Semite understands nothing about modern society. He would be incapable of conceiving of a constructive plan; his action cannot reach the level of the methodical; it remains on the ground of passion. To a long‐term enterprise he prefers an explosion of rage analogous to the running amuck of the Malays. His intellectual activity is confined to interpretation; he seeks in historical events the signs of the presence of an evil power. Out of this spring those childish and elaborate fabrications which give him his resemblance to the extreme paranoiacs. In addition, anti‐Semitism channels evolutionary drives toward the destruction of certain men, not of institutions. An anti‐Semitic mob will consider it has done enough when it has massacred some Jews and burned a few synagogues. It represents, therefore, a safety valve for the owning classes, who encourage it and thus substitute for a dangerous hate against their regime a beneficent hate against particular people. Above all this naive dualism is eminently reassuring to he anti‐Semite himself. If all he has to do is to remove Evil, that means that the Good is already given. He has no need to seek it in anguish, to invent it, to scrutinize it patiently when he has found it, to prove it in action, to verify it by its consequences, or, finally, to shoulder he responsibilities of the moral choice be has made. It is not by chance that the great outbursts of anti‐Semitic rage conceal a basic optimism. The anti‐Semite as cast his lot for Evil so as not to have to cast his lot for Good. The more one is absorbed in fighting Evil, he less one is tempted to place the Good in question. One does not need to talk about it, yet it is always understood in the discourse of the anti‐Semite and it remains understood in his thought. When he has fulfilled his mission as holy destroyer, the Lost Paradise will reconstitute itself. For the moment so many tasks confront the anti‐Semite that he does not have time to think about it. He is in the breach, fighting, and each of his outbursts of rage is a pretext to avoid the anguished search for the Good.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Anti-Semite and Jew

Pages 31-32
Anti-Semite and Jew (1945)

Men , Hate , People , Search

“Labour freed up enormous amounts of money for third sector initiatives, which was magnificent. But it also became too statist. Charities became very reliant on state funding to pursue their agendas, so charities became distant from local communities. Despite all the funding, there was no transformation of the lives of excluded poor people. The greatest gift of the big society will be the renewal of the Labour Party. If it takes civil society and people power seriously, and listens to people who have a following in their own communities, it will find that it has reconnected with its own political traditions.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

Interview with Third Sector, 6 June 2011 http://www.thirdsector.co.uk/interview-lord-glasman/infrastructure/article/1073529

Money , People , Communication , Distant

“Society is basically not interested in art. Art has a purpose of its own.”

Donald Judd (1928–1994) artist

Chinati: Judd’s Concretes Re-open http://adobeairstream.com/art/chinati-judds-concretes-re-open, AdobeAirstream.com, 9 October 2009
Attributed from posthumous publications

Art

“For two years now, my office has had the honour and the privilege of sponsoring seminars on the functioning of government in this country for Eastern Europeans. These seminars and exchanges have brought together representatives from such nations as Bulgaria, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak Republic, Roumania, Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the Ukraine, all of them anxious to learn what makes a society as diverse as Canada work and how our institutions make it governable.”

John Allen Fraser (1931) Canadian politician

Afterword, p. 173
The House Of Commons At Work (1993)

Learning , Country

“What is needed then? Destroy poverty, that source of crime, by assuring to each the satisfaction of all needs! And how difficult is this to achieve? It would suffice to establish society on new bases where everything would be in common and each, producing according to their aptitudes and strengths, could consume according to their needs. Then we would no longer see people like the hermit of Notre-Dame-de-Grace and others crave a metal of which they become the slaves and the victims! We would no longer see women flaunt their charms, like a vulgar merchandise, in exchange for this same metal that so often prevents us from recognising if the affection is truly sincere.”

Ravachol (1859–1892) French anarchist

Que faut-il alors ? Détruire la misère, ce germe de crime, en assurant à chacun la satisfaction de tous les besoins ! Et combien cela est difficile à réaliser ! Il suffirait d'établir la société sur de nouvelles bases où tout serait en commun, et où chacun, produisant selon ses aptitudes et ses forces, pourrait consommer selon ses besoins. Alors on ne verra plus des gens comme l'ermite de Notre-Dame-de-Grâce et autres mendier un métal dont ils deviennent les esclaves et les victimes ! On ne verra plus les femmes céder leurs appâts, comme une vulgaire marchandise, en échange de ce même métal qui nous empêche bien souvent de reconnaître si l'affection est vraiment sincère.
Trial statement

Women , People , Sincerity

“The organism—in isolation nothing but a separate pole of "meaningless" subjective processes—becomes a Self by embarking with others upon the construction of an "objective" and moral universe of meaning. Thereby the organization transcends its biological nature.
It is in keeping with an elementary sense of the concept of religion to call the transcendence of biological nature by the human organism a religious phenomenon. As we have tried to show, this phenomenon rests upon the functional relation of Self and society. We may, therefore, regard the social processes that lead to the formation of Self as fundamentally religious.”

Thomas Luckmann (1927–2016) American-Austrian sociologist

Source: The invisible religion, 1967, p. 48

Religion , Nature , Sense , Universe

“It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so.”

Jane Jacobs book The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Source: The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), p. 71

People , Hope , Thinking

“The more complex our economy, the more we should rely on the miraculous, self-adapting processes of men acting freely. No mind of man nor any combination of minds can even envision, let alone intelligently control, the countless human energy exchanges in a simple society, to say nothing of a complex one.”

Leonard E. Read (1898–1983) American academic

The More Complex the Society, the More Government Control We Need https://books.google.com/books?id=W3MuCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT18&lpg=PT18&dq=The+more+complex+our+economy,+the+more+we+should+rely+on+the+miraculous,+self-adapting+processes+of+men+acting+freely.+No+mind+of+man+nor+any+combination+of+minds+can+even+envision,+let+alone+intelligently+control,+the+countless+human+energy+exchanges+in+a+simple+society,+to+say+nothing+of+a+complex+one.&source=bl&ots=OZxiANz5bm&sig=QP-xiNhoDNxDDMB1mcR25NuqEl4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiq04eE9_LTAhVMKyYKHWh_BGEQ6AEIKjAB#v=onepage&q=The%20more%20complex%20our%20economy%2C%20the%20more%20we%20should%20rely%20on%20the%20miraculous%2C%20self-adapting%20processes%20of%20men%20acting%20freely.%20No%20mind%20of%20man%20nor%20any%20combination%20of%20minds%20can%20even%20envision%2C%20let%20alone%20intelligently%20control%2C%20the%20countless%20human%20energy%20exchanges%20in%20a%20simple%20society%2C%20to%20say%20nothing%20of%20a%20complex%20one.&f=false
Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism

Men , Intelligence

“With regard to certain other fallacies with which the farmers have been beset, and latterly more so than ever; the farmer has been told that if there was a free trade in corn, wheat would be so cheap, that he would not be able to carry on his farm. He is directed only to look at Dantzic, where corn, he is told, was once selling at 15s. 11d. per quarter, and on this the Essex Protection Society put out their circulars, stating that Dantzic wheat is but 15s. 11d. per quarter, and how would the British farmer contend against this? …As far as I can obtain information from the books of merchants, the cost of transit from Dantzic, during an average of ten years, may be put down at 10s. 6d. a quarter, including in this, freight, landing, loading, insurance, and other items of every kind. This is the natural protection enjoyed by the farmers of this country.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1844/mar/12/protective-duties-the-agricultural in the House of Commons (12 March 1844).
1840s

Books , Nature , Country

“The philosopher … subjects experience to his critical judgment, and this contains a value judgment — namely, that freedom from toil is preferable to toil, and an intelligent life is preferable to a stupid life. It so happened that philosophy was born with these values. Scientific thought had to break this union of value judgment and analysis, for it became increasingly clear that the philosophic values did not guide the organisation of society.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 126

Life , Stupidity , Intelligence , Freedom

“The era of the masses, which follows the age of the republics, excites the feelings and dazzles the eyes. But even though the vision of this era denotes genuine freedom of the masses and their happy emancipation from the bonds of external authoritarian structures, it warns also of the dangers of a period of chaos and demagoguery, and the threat of a return to the authority of the individual, the sect and party, instead of the authority of the people. Theoretically, this is genuine democracy but, realistically, the strong always rules. That is, the stronger party in the society is the one that rules.”

Muammar Gaddafi book The Green Book

The Green Book (1975)
The Green Book (1975)

People , Age , Feeling , Democracy

“We want industry to be in the public sector, to change the power structure of our society…We have not yet carved out of public enterprise a wide enough area of management decision which ought properly to be brought within the ambit of the workers themselves.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

Speech in Brighton (6 October 1971)
1970s

Decision , Change

“We are all actors: being a citizen is not living in society, it is changing it.”

Augusto Boal (1931–2009) Brazilian writer

World Theater Day Message, Geneva, Switzerland (2009)

Change

“Conservatives believe that our identities and values are formed through our relations with other people, and not through our relation with the state. The state is not an end but a means. Civil society is the end, and the state is the means to protect it. The social world emerges through free association, rooted in friendship and community life. And the customs and institutions that we cherish have grown from below, by the ‘invisible hand’ of co-operation. They have rarely been imposed from above by the work of politics, the role of which, for a conservative, is to reconcile our many aims, and not to dictate or control them.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

"Stand up for the real meaning of freedom," http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/01/the-right-way/ The Spectator (January 2014).

Life , Friendship , People , World

“To speak of 'limits to growth' under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be 'persuaded' to limit growth than a human being can be 'persuaded' to stop breathing. Attempts to 'green' capitalism, to make it 'ecological', are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.”

Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher

Remaking Society (1990).

Nature

“Modernism began in the mid-nineteenth century as a response not only to the restrictions and hypocrisies of everyday life, but also as a reaction to the Enlightenment's emphasis on the rationality of human behavior. …The founders of the Royal Society thought of God as a mathematician who had designed the universe according to logical and mathematical principles. The role of the scientist—the natural philosopher was to… decipher the codebook that God had used in creating the cosmos.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

The Age of Insight (2012)

Life , God , Behavior , Mathematics

“Indo-European peoples and Semitic peoples are today still completely different… Jews almost everywhere form a special society… Muslims (the Semitic spirit is today represented mainly by Islam) and the Europeans stand face to face like two beings of different species, having nothing common in the way of thinking and feeling…”

A.C. Cuza (1857–1947) Romanian politician

From Naţionalitatea în artă ("Nationality in Art"), Bucureşti: Cartea Romaneasca, 1905.

People , Way , Feeling , Thinking

“One difference between libertarianism and socialism is that a socialist society can't tolerate groups of people practicing freedom, but a libertarian society can comfortably allow people to choose voluntary socialism. If a group of people — even a very large group — wanted to purchase land and own it in common, they would be free to do so. The libertarian legal order would require only that no one be coerced into joining or giving up his property.”

David Boaz (1953) libertarian, author and editor

"The Coming Libertarian Age" in Cato Policy Report (January/February 1997) http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-19n1-1.html

People , Freedom

“Our nation found its soul in honor on these fields of Gettysburg one hundred years ago. We must not lose that soul in dishonor now on the fields of hate. To ask for patience from the Negro is to ask him to give more of what he has already given enough. But to fail to ask of him — and of all Americans — perseverance within the processes of a free and responsible society would be to fail to ask what the national interest requires of all its citizens.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Memorial Day speech (1963)

Hate , Soul , Patience , Perseverance

“We can establish universally an education that recognizes in every child a tongue-tied prophet, and in the school the voice of the future, and that equips the mind to think beyond and against the established context of thought and of life as well as to move within it. We can develop a democratic politics that renders the structure of society open in fact to challenge and reconstruction, weakening the dependence of change on crisis and the power of the dead over the living. We can make the radical democratization of access to the resources and opportunities of production the touchstone of the institutional reorganization of the market economy, and prevent the market from remaining fastened to a single version of itself. We can create policies and arrangements favorable to the gradual supersession of economically dependent wage work as the predominant form of free labor, in favor of the combination of cooperation and self-employment. We can so arrange the relation between workers and machines that machines are used to save our time for the activities that we have not yet learned how to repeat and consequently to express in formulas. We can reshape the world political and economic order so that it ceases to make the global public goods of political security and economic openness depend upon submission to an enforced convergence to institutions and practices hostile to the experiments required to move, by many different paths, in such a direction.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger The Religion of the Future

Source: The Religion of the Future (2014), p. 29

Life , Hostility , World , Education

“By freedom he meant a condition in which men were not prevented from choosing both the object and the manner of their worship. For him only a society in which this condition was realised could be called fully human. Its realisation was an ideal which Mill regarded as more precious than life itself.”

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) Russo-British Jewish social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas

Five Essays on Liberty (2002), John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life (1959)

Life , Men , Freedom

“What shall it profit us to live in an affluent society if the things we produce and the ways in which we distribute them fail to contribute to the achievement of human dignity and social values?”

Stanley Knowles (1908–1997) Canadian politician

Source: The New Party - (1961), Chapter 7, Program, p. 81

Way

“The great end of all human industry, is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modelled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators.”

David Hume book Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary

Part I, Essay 16: The Stoic
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741-2; 1748)

Wisdom , Law , Art , Science

“A society will be judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members; and among the most vulnerable are surely the unborn and the dying.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Address to a new ambassador of New Zealand to the Holy See, 25 May 2000
Source: Libreria Editrice Vaticana http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/speeches/2000/apr-jun/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_20000525_ambassador-new-zealand_en.html

“Greed: a word commonly used by liberals, low achievers, anti-capitalists and society's losers to denigrate, shame and discredit those who have acquired superior job skills and decision making capabilities and who, through application of those job skills, achieve success.”

Neal Boortz (1945) American author, journalist, and radio host

Quoted, without citation, in O'Boyle's Quotes, Jokes & Anecdotes (2012), p. 25
Attributed

Decision , Success

“Unless we act anew, with dispatch and resolution, we shall sanction a sad and sorrowful course for the future. For if the Fifteenth Amendment is successfully flouted today, tomorrow the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment-the Sixth, the Eighth, indeed, all the provisions of the Constitution on which our system stands — will be subject to disregard and erosion. Our essential strength as a society governed by the rule of law will be crippled and corrupted and the unity of our system hollowed out and left meaningless.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Special message to Congress on the right to vote (1965)

Sadness , Law , Future

“It is utterly hypocritical for Congress to extol the virtues of a color-blind society while officially sanctioning caucuses that are based solely on race and restrict their membership based on race.”

Tom Tancredo (1945) American politician

Tom Tancredo to Juanita Millender-MacDonald http://tancredo.house.gov/media/2007.01.25%20Tancredo%20to%20House%20Administration.pdf. (January 25, 2007).

Color

“If a Martian were asked to pick the most efficient and humane economic systems on earth, it would certainly not choose the countries which rely most on markets. The United States is a stagnant economy in which real wages have been constant for more than a decade and the real income of the bottom 40 percent of the population declined. It is an inhumane society in which 11.5 percent of the population, some 32 million people, including 20 percent of all children, live in absolute poverty. It is the oldest democracy on earth but also one with the lowest voting rates among democracies and the highest per capita prison population in the world. The fastest developing countries in the world today are among those where the state pursues active industrial and trade policies; the few countries in the world in which almost no one is poor today are those in which the state has been engaged in massive social welfare and labor market policies.”

Adam Przeworski (1940) Polish-American academic

Source: Journal of Democracy. Vol. 3, Nr. 3 (1992), p. 46

Children , People , World , Democracy

“Our aim is to achieve a socialist system of society, which, by eliminating the division of mankind into classes, by eliminating all exploitation of man by man and nation by nation, will inevitably eliminate the very possibility of war.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 24, pp. 398–421.
Collected Works

War

“The common law, though not to be found in the written records of the realm, yet has been long well known. It is coeval with civilised society itself, and was formed from time to time by the wisdom of man. Good sense did not come with the Conquest, or at any other one time, but grew and increased from time to time with the wisdom of mankind.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

Rex v. Rusby (1800), Peake's N. P. Cases, 193.

Wisdom , Law , Sense , Time

“The top of modern American society is increasingly unified and often seems wilfully co-ordinated: at the top there has emerged an elite of power. The middle levels are a drifting set of stalemated balancing forces: the middle does not link the bottom with the top. The bottom of this society is fragmented, and even as a passive fact, increasingly powerless:at the bottom there is emerging a mass society.”

C. Wright Mills book The Power Elite

The Power Elite (1956)

“Whether some people like it or not, Fiji is already a multiracial society. We have different races, but that does not mean we should only work for the good of our own race. We have to truly understand one another, learn each other’s languages, and truly work together. There is huge potential in Fiji, and we would be amazed to see what we will achieve, if we work together.”

Epeli Ganilau (1951) Fijian politician

NAPF convention, 17 December 2005

People , Understanding , Learning

“When we first started, we were able to take our undercover video to 60 Minutes or 20/20, and they would fight over it and do these thought-provoking exposés. Now that society has become less interested in these programs and more interested in sensationalism and the tabloids, we have to reinvent ourselves to keep our issues on the front burner; we have had to do a lot of theatrical things. … Much of what we do is geared toward kids, who have a great sense of justice. This is the first generation in which kids have grown up with this issue. Twenty-five years ago, parents were petrified when their kids went vegetarian — some still are.”

Dan Mathews (1964) American activist

About PETA's activities. “Sir Paul McCartney and PETA VP Dan Mathews Reflect on Two Decades of Activism” (April 2005), in PETA.org http://www.peta.org/features/paul-mccartney-interview/.

Justice , Parent , Sense , Fight

“The thing about free speech and free expression is people that are interested in it are by their very nature always tending to explore the boundaries…In a society that prizes free expression and one that has a great premium upon the marketplace of ideas, it's hard to say that someone went too far in expressing themselves when really no harm was done.”

Jay Leiderman (1971) lawyer

As mentioned on Huffington Post article http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20121005/us-anonymous-man-arrested/

People , Idea , Nature

“Hindu society may like to forget the first phase of this history during which it suffered defeat after defeat in spite of a succession of great heroes who tried to blunt the sword of Islam, and block the path of Islamic invasion. But Hindu society cannot help taking pride in the phase which opened with the rise of Shivaji, and unfolded further under Chhatrasal, Banda Bairagi, Surajmal and Ranjit Singh.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Muslim Separatism – Causes and Consequences (1987)

History , Suffering , Success , Help

“Cusins: Call you poverty a crime?
Undershaft: The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill fed, ill clothed people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

1900s, Major Barbara (1905)

Life , People , Fear , Fools

“every now and then you see the arrogance of Cameron, and that comes through every so often. It is the Bullingdon Club. When they were sat down – him and Gideon [Osborne's birth name] – and he says: 'You know what we really want, Gideon? Every weekend, after we've roughed up one of those hotels, we need an army of volunteers to come in and clean it all up.' And Gideon says: 'Yeah, we could call it the Big Society" interview with, Decca Aitkenhead”

Dennis Skinner (1932) British politician

Dennis Skinner: 'I was formed in the pits and the war' http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jun/17/dennis-skinner-formed-pits-war The Guardian, 17 June 2012
2010s

Birth

“By the oath I have taken "to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," duty directs — and strong personal conviction impels — that I advise the Congress that action is necessary, and necessary now, if the Constitution is to be upheld and the rights of all citizens are not to be mocked, abused and denied. I must regretfully report to the Congress the following facts:
1. That the Fifteenth Amendment of our Constitution is today being systematically and willfully circumvented in certain State and local jurisdictions of our Nation.
2. That representatives of such State and local governments acting "under the color of law," are denying American citizens the right to vote on the sole basis of race or color.
3. That, as a result of these practices, in some areas of our country today no significant number of American citizens of the Negro race can be registered to vote except upon the intervention and order of a Federal Court.
4. That the remedies available under law to citizens thus denied their Constitutional rights — and the authority presently available to the Federal Government to act in their behalf — are clearly inadequate.
5. That the denial of these rights and the frustration of efforts to obtain meaningful relief from such denial without undue delay is contributing to the creation of conditions which are both inimical to our domestic order and tranquillity and incompatible with the standards of equal justice and individual dignity on which our society stands.
I am, therefore, calling upon the Congress to discharge the duty authorized in Section 2 of the Fifteenth Amendment "to enforce this Article by appropriate legislation."”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Special message to Congress on the right to vote (1965)

Justice , Law , Color , Effort

“Those societies which give their infants the greatest amount of physical affection were characterized by low theft, low infant physical pain, low religious activity, and negligible or absent killing, mutilating, or torturing of the enemy.”

James W. Prescott (1930) American psychologist

"Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence" (1975)

Pain

“An efficient telecommunications network is the foundation upon which an information society is built.”

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh (1938) Jordanian businesspeople

March 21, 2004, at the Arab ICT Regulators Forum, Movenpick Dead Sea, Jordan.

“It is imperative for many reasons that the appalling gap between public and computer insider be closed. As the saying goes, war is too important to be left to the generals. Guardianship of the computer can no longer be left to a priesthood. I see this as just one example of the creeping evil of Professionalism, the control of aspects of society by cliques of insiders. There may be some chance, though, that Professionalism can be turned around. Doctors, for example, are being told that they no longer own people’s bodies. And this book may suggest to some computer professionals that their position should not be as sacrosanct as they have thought, either.”

Ted Nelson (1937) American information technologist, philosopher, and sociologist; coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia"

Computer Lib
Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974, rev. 1987)

War , People , Books , Evil

“…[B]eing part of The L Word made me realize how much more television can be that what I had experienced in my lifetime in terms of being able to be of service to people. I had so many fans come up to me who were really deeply appreciative of the show and what it had meant for them and their own sense of identity and their own sense of inclusion in our society and in our culture.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

Interview with TV Drama Watch (4 February 2011) http://tvdramawatch.com/2011/02/04/the-chicago-code-interview-with-jennifer-beals/.

People , Sense , Parting

“The '80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.”

Lee Atwater (1951–1991) American political consultant and strategist

Source: Interview in Life (January 1991)

Truth , Family , Feeling , Soul

“The social game has a deeper double meaning—that it is played not only in a society as its outward bearer but that with its help people actually "play" "society."”

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) German sociologist, philosopher, and critic

"Sociability" (1910) in On Individuality and Social Forms (1971), p. 134

People , Game , Help

“If … we meet a man of acknowledged mental superiority, whether generally or in his special department, it is our social duty by intelligent questioning, by an anxiety to learn from him, to force him to condescend to our ignorance, or join in our fun, till his broader sympathies are awakened, and he plays with us as if we were children. Indeed this very metaphor points out one of the very remarkable instances of social equality asserted by an inferior—I mean the outspoken freedom of the child—which possesses a peculiar charm, and often thaws the dignity or dissipates the reserve of the great man and woman whose superiority is a perpetual obstacle to them in ordinary society.”

John Pentland Mahaffy (1839–1919) Irish classicist and polymathic scholar

Conversation (1896), p. 104 http://books.google.com/books?id=1yEVAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA104

Children , Intelligence , Question , Freedom

“Given the extensive involvement of state violence in the process by which the corporate elite not only achieved its wealth in the past but continues to maintain and augment it in the present, it is clear that the massive inequalities of wealth that characterise present-day “capitalist” society are radically inconsistent with any approach to justice in holdings that is even remotely Nozickian.”

Roderick Long (1964) American philosopher

Source: "Left-libertarianism, market anarchism, class conflict and historical theories of distributive justice" (2012), p. 425

Justice , Past , Wealth

“The criticism of ideology must therefore invert the linking of causality as perceived by the totalitarian gaze: far from being the positive cause of social antagonism, the Jew is just an embodiment of a certain blockage - of the impossibility which prevents the society from achieving its full identity as a closed, homogenous totality. Far from being the positive cause of social negativity, the Jew is a point at which social negativity as such assumes another formula of the basic procedure of the criticism of ideology, supplementing the one given above: to detect, in a given ideological edifice, the element which represents within it its own impossibility. Society is not prevented from achieving its full identity because of Jews: it is prevented by its own antagonistic nature, by its own immanent blockage, and it projects this internal negativity into the figure of the Jew. In other words, what is excluded from the Symbolic (from the frame of the corporalist socio-symbolic order) returns in the Real as a paranoid construction of the Jew.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

143
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Nature

“The most unfair things that could have happened in a society fell upon a blind man. This is something that no one can accept or explain away with any excuse. Everyone will ask: 'Do we actually have to exist in a society like this?”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, Ai Weiwei Says Blind Dissident’s Escape Will Inspire Chinese, 2012

“A society that trains us to specialize in making, doing, performing, and producing neglects to educate us in wonder and appreciation.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 102

Education , Training

“Public administration is the use of managerial, political, and legal theories and processes to fulfill legislative, executive, and judicial governmental mandates for the provision of regulatory and service functions for the society as a whole or for some segments of it.”

David H. Rosenbloom (1943) American academic

David H. Rosenbloom Public Administration, 2nd Edition, p. 6

“The domination inherent in the slave-owning system is not repressed, as with the bourgeois, but is conscious, and the illusion consists, not in supposing that no domination exists, but that society is in fact really determined solely by the will of the master, and does not in turn determine his will.”

Christopher Caudwell (1907–1937) British Marxist literary critic, journalist and writer

Further Studies in a Dying Culture (1949), Chapter IV: Consciousness: A Study in Bourgeois Psychology

“There is not in this country one rule by which the rich are governed, and another for the poor. No man has justice meted out to him by a different measure on account of his rank or fortune, from what would be done if he were destitute of both. Every invasion of property is judged of by the same rule; every injury is compensated in the same way; and every crime is restrained by the same punishment, be the condition of the offender what it may. It is in this alone that true equality can exist in society.”

Sir Francis Buller, 1st Baronet (1746–1800) British judge

Trial of O'Coigly and others (1798), 26 How. St. Tr. 1193.

Justice , Way , Country

“The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

Source: 2010s, Why Marx Was Right (2011), Chapter 5, p. 115

History , Sense , Time

“He who accepts the class struggle cannot fail to accept civil wars, which in every class society are the natural, and under certain conditions inevitable, continuation, development and intensification of the class struggle… To repudiate civil war, or to forget about it, is to fall into extreme opportunism and renounce the socialist revolution.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

As quoted in The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution, Collected Works, Vol. 23, pages 78-9.
Attributions

War , Nature , Forgetting

“In Brazil as in the United States, we find two voices of a New World promise of happinessː a promise to raise up human life to the exuberance of nature itself while breaking down the hierarchies and privileges that keep people distant from one another. A society of originals whose enhanced powers and self-possession enable them to accept one another more fully is the aim of this American and Brazilian dream. Translated into another, more universal vocabulary, this longing represents one form of the effort to reconcile a pagan ambition of greatness with a Christian idea of tenderness, purging the former of its impulse toward masterfulness and the latter of its knack for resentment. Thus, empowerment and solidarity can come more fully together.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Democracy Realizedː The Progressive Alternative (1998), p. 126

Life , People , World , Dreams

“I'm totally aware of how lucky I am. I have health, family, children. I do work that gives me total joy and allows me to make a living, and maybe, if I'm lucky enough, I'll feel I've fulfilled a little bit of service to society because I brought other people some laughter.”

Martin Short (1950) Canadian stand-up comedian

Parade Magazine; January 23rd, 2000

Children , People , Health , Family

“The spirit of the Knowledge Society is the spirit of Pluralism—a readiness to accept the Other, indeed to learn from him, to see difference as an opportunity rather than a threat.”

Aga Khan IV (1936) 49th and current Imam of Nizari Ismailism

Address by His Highness the Aga Khan to the 2006 Convocation of the Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan (2 December 2006)]

Knowledge , Learning

“A final argument for broad freedom of expression is its effect on the character of individuals in a society. Citizens in a free society must have courage — the courage to hear not only unwelcome political speech but novel and shocking ideas in science and the arts.”

Anthony Lewis book Freedom for the Thought That We Hate

[186, Anthony, Lewis, w:Anthony Lewis, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate; A Biography of the First Amendment, Basic Books, 2007, 0465039170]

Art , Idea , Courage , Freedom

“Progressive policies lead to a regressive society.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“Is it ‘Moran’ or ‘Moron’?” http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=552 WorldNetDaily.com, May 28, 2010.]
2010s, 2010

“While this bourgeois order found its rich—and even affirmative—representation in art and literature, … it remained an order which was over-shadowed, broken, refuted by another dimension which was irreconcilably antagonistic to the order of business, indicting it and denying it. And in the literature, this other dimension is represented not by the religious, spiritual, moral heroes (who often sustain the established order) but rather by such disruptive characters as the artist. the prostitute, the adulteress, the great criminal and outcast, the warrior, the rebel-poet, the devil, the fool—those who don't earn a living, at least not in an orderly and normal way. To be sure, these characters have not disappeared from the literature of advanced industrial society, but they … perform a function very different from and even contrary to that of their cultural predecessors. They are no longer images of another way of life but rather freaks or types of the same life, serving as an affirmation rather than negation of the established order.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 58-59

Life , Fools , Art , Way

“If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. […] For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time.
And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV. […]
And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.”

Clay Shirky (1964) American technology writer

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus (2008)

Way , Time

“I also am concerned about judges who imagine they see everything in society addressed in the Constitution. It is worth remembering that the Constitution is a very brief document. It defines the structure and authority of the federal government and protects a limited list of sacred rights. It does not, and was never intended to, address every legal issue that might arise in our nation’s history. Democracy is well-served when the Court says, in effect, "the Constitution simply does not comment on this issue." In contrast, constitutionalizing an issue takes it out of the democratic process. If the people disagree with a court decision based on the law, they have a remedy in the political process. Through their elected representatives, they can change the law. But once a court declares a law to be unconstitutional or prohibits some agency action on constitutional grounds, it is limiting the options of the people. Such a step should be taken only where it is clear that the Constitution has truly spoken on the issue and forbidden what the political branches have determined to do.”

Alberto Gonzales (1955) 80th United States Attorney General

Speech to American Enterprise Institute (January 17, 2007)

People , Law , Democracy , Imagination

“Via legislation, administrative measures and public policies with a rights-based perspective, we can reverse situations of inequity. The work is monumental, urgent and difficult because we are dealing with people who are in highly vulnerable situations. The work, however, is worth it because it brings us closer to having better democracies and better societies.”

Geovanny Vicente (1986) Political Strategist, lawyer, international consultant, columnist and university professor

[https://blogs.iadb.org/sostenibilidad/en/2016/05/18/four-natural-treasures-in-latin-america-and-the-caribbean-that-need-your-help/

People , Democracy

“Fascism denies that numbers, as such, can direct human society. It denies that numbers can govern by means of periodical consultations: It asserts the unavoidable fruitful and beneficent inequality of men who cannot be leveled by any such mechanical and extrinsic device as universal suffrage.”

Benito Mussolini book The Doctrine of Fascism

"The Doctrine of Fascism", June 1932. Quoted in Marco Piraino, Stefano Fiorito, Fascist identity : political project and doctrine of fascism. Lulu.com, 2009. (p. 107)
1930s

Men , Universe

“Hobbes’s understanding of the dangers of anarchy resonates powerfully today. Liberal thinkers still see the unchecked power of the state as the chief danger to human freedom. Hobbes knew better: freedom’s worst enemy is anarchy, which is at its most destructive when it is a battleground of rival faiths. The sectarian death squads roaming Baghdad show that fundamentalism is itself a type of anarchy in which each prophet claims divine authority to rule. In well-governed societies, the power of faith is curbed. The state and the churches temper the claims of revelation and enforce peace. Where this kind is impossible, tyranny is better than being ruled by warring prophets. Hobbes is a more reliable guide to the present than the liberal thinkers who followed. Yet his view of human beings was too simple, and overly rationalistic. Assuming that humans dread violent death more than anything, he left out the most intractable sources of conflict. It is not always because human beings act irrationally that they fail to achieve peace. Sometimes it is because they do not want peace. They may want the victory of the One True Faith – whether a traditional religion or a secular successor such as communism, democracy or universal human rights. Or – like the young people who joined far-Left terrorist groups in the 1970s, another generation of which is now joining Islamist networks – they may find in war a purpose that is lacking in peace. Nothing is more human than the readiness to kill and die in order to secure a meaning in life.”

John Gray book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

Post-Apocalypse: After Secularism (pp. 262-3)
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007)

Life , Death , War , People

“Dairying as Instrument of Change Kurien said. True development must be such that it brings the modernization process to the service of our majority, namely the rural poor. It must bring to these people not only the pittance which they need for their humble diet but also the means where by they can act together to obtain for themselves the benefits of modern science and organization and in that process the means whereby they can build for themselves, in every village, a society which is at peace with itself, concerned with its neighbours and able to see a bright for all its children.”

Verghese Kurien (1921–2012) Indian founder of dairy-cooperative Amul

In p. 81
Quote, Our Leaders

Children , People , Peace , Science

“If there is one thing more than another in this whole accursed tissue of false society, which makes me angry, it is the asinine stupidity which with the true phlegm of impenetrable dullness says, "Why don't the women leave!" Will you tell me where they will go and what they shall do? When the State, the legislators, has given to itself, the politicians, the utter and absolute control of the opportunity to live; when, through this precious monopoly, already the market of labor is so overstocked that workmen and workwomen are cutting each others' throats for the dear privilege of serving their lords; when girls are shipped from Boston to the south and north, shipped in carloads, like cattle, to fill the dives of New Orleans or the lumber-camp hells of my own state…”

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) American anarchist writer and feminist

Sex Slavery (1890)

Women , Stupidity , Girl , Hell

“That society exists to frustrate the individual may be seen from its attitude to work. It is only morally acceptable if you do not want to do it. If you want to, it becomes a personal pleasure.”

Celia Green (1935) British philosopher

The Decline and Fall of Science (1976)

Pleasure , Personality

“Most of us are aware and despairing on some level that our lives have become de-eroticized, that love and romance are not all around us but have to be hunted for with the kind of desperation that people used to bring when they went west looking for gold. But the answers that society gives us for this sexual desert are Viagra and Cialis and Levitra, products that allow us to stay hard for hours as we hump the indifferent mannequins we run into in bars. The country is lonely, self-obsessed and the individual members of the population are offered a thousand ways to improve their individual appearance and vigor. But there seems to be no solution on the horizon that anyone is offering to bring us more together, to give us the things we really need — love and acceptance and community.
We blame corporate America for this state of affairs because this ideology of individual acquisitiveness is the religion it naturally preaches. But it's our failure to come up with a competing ideology of getting along that's the real problem.”

Matt Taibbi (1970) author and journalist

"Finding Love in Electoral Politics", AlterNet (13 November 2004) http://web.archive.org/web/20041117195414/http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/20486/

Love , People , Religion , Way

“Thirkukkural was written to show a good path to the people to create values in life and to develop a good order in the society.”

Periyar E. V. Ramasamy (1879–1973) Tamil politician and social reformer

Veeramani, Collected Works of Periyar, p. 506.
Thirukkural

Life , People

“Hollywood movies of the Fifties, like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, with their epic clash of pagan and Judeo-Christian cultures, tell more about art and society than the French-infatuated ideologues who have made a travesty of the “best” American higher criticism.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 208

Art

“Why are you so concerned about society?' That is always the question. And my answer is simple: 'Because you are an artist, you have to associate yourself with freedom of expression.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, Truth to Power, 2009

Question , Freedom

“The collective fascination of the entire planet with action movies where the protagonists are the players in organized crime cannot be explained just by the repressed urge for violence in out psychological make up. It may well indicate the cultural breakdown of traditional moral order, and the implicit recognition of a new society, made up of communal identity and unruly competition, of which global crime is a condensed expression.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Rise of the Network Society, 1996, p. 211 as cited in: Jari Peltola (2006) " The Place of Politics in Manuel Castells’s Network Society http://www.edemocracy.uta.fi/eng/haefile.php?f=115"

Communication

“…but religion I think should be completely separated (from journalism). I have no grievance against people who believe in God, go to places of worship and waste a lot of time in prayer. It's their business, if they get something out of it, they are welcome. But institutionalised religion is a breeding ground for prejudice and hatred without exception and therefore I have very little use for it and I criticise insitutionalising religion and fatwas and hukumnamas and things like that. I think they should be banned if the government has the courage to say: mind your own business and don't stick your nose into things that don't concern you strictly. That is possible in the kind of society we have in India.”

Khushwant Singh (1915–2014) Indian novelist and journalist

I Don't Know One Editor In India Who Is Well-Read

God , People , Religion , Courage

“The Founders considered the whole foundation of a just society to be structured on the basis of God's revealed law. These laws constituted a moral code clearly distinguishing right from wrong. This concept was not new with the Founders. This was the entire foundation of all religious cultures world-wide.”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

The 5,000 Year Leap (1981)

God , World , Law

“The “animal rights movement” … is at once colossally powerful but ultimately hobbled by a weak spot both miniscule and fatal. … That colossal power emanates from hundreds of thousands of everyday activists who justifiably believe that conscientious consumers can, through a wide variety of measures, take gradual steps toward removing animal products from their diet. These true believers do the grunt work of activism: they hand out pamphlets, write books, blog, make documentaries, start campus veg societies, publish vegan recipes, open vegan food carts, work for animal sanctuaries, run veganic farms, and do basically anything they can to encourage consumers to contemplate the face on their plate. I consider myself a member of this noble tribe. The heel of the movement, by contrast, consists of a handful of radicals, mostly academics, who do little more than set an unrealistic benchmark of success … First, it seeks to eliminate all animal exploitation, in every realm of life, immediately, and without compromise or strategic capitulation; and second, it aims to eliminate all forms of oppression … The heel does not want the good, or even the better. It wants perfection.”

James E. McWilliams (1968) American historian

"Radical Activism and the Future of Animal Rights", in Pacific Standard (3 July 2013) https://psmag.com/social-justice/radical-activism-and-the-future-of-animal-rights-61789.

Life , Books , Food , Success

“Not all monotheisms are exactly the same, at the moment. They're all based on the same illusion, they're all plagiarisms of each other, but there is one in particular that at the moment is proposing a serious menace not just to freedom of speech and freedom of expression, but to quite a lot of other freedoms too. And this is the religion that exhibits the horrible trio of self-hatred, self-righteousness and self-pity. I am talking about militant Islam. Globally it's a gigantic power. It controls an enormous amount of oil wealth, several large countries and states, with an enormous fortune it's pumping the ideologies of wahhabism and salafism around the world, poisoning societies where it goes, ruining the minds of children, stultifying the young in its madrassas, training people in violence, making a cult of death and suicide and murder. That's what it does globally, it's quite strong. In our societies it poses as a cringing minority, whose faith you might offend, who deserves all the protection that a small and vulnerable group might need. Now, it makes quite large claims for itself, doesn't it? It says it's the Final Revelation. It says that God spoke to one illiterate businessman – in the Arabian Peninsula – three times through an archangel, and that the resulted material, which as you can see as you read it is largely plagiarized ineptly from the Old…and The New Testament, is to be accepted as the Final Revelation and as the final and unalterable one, and that those who do not accept this revelation are fit to be treated as cattle infidels, potential chattel, slaves and victims. Well I tell you what, I don't think Muhammad ever heard those voices. I don't believe it. And the likelihood that I am right – as opposed to the likelihood that a businessman who couldn't read, had bits of the Old and The New Testament re-dictated to him by an archangel, I think puts me much more near the position of being objectively correct. But who is the one under threat? The person who promulgates this and says I'd better listen because if I don't I'm in danger, or me who says "no, I think this is so silly you can even publish a cartoon about it"? And up go the placards and the yells and the howls and the screams – this is in London, this is in Toronto, this is in New York, it's right in our midst now – "Behead those who cartoon Islam". Do they get arrested for hate speech? No. Might I get in trouble for saying what I just said about the prophet Muhammad? Yes, I might. Where are your priorities ladies and gentlemen? You're giving away what is most precious in your own society, and you're giving it away without a fight, and you're even praising the people who want to deny you the right to resist it. Shame on you why you do this. Make the best use of the time you've got left. This is really serious. … Look anywhere you like for the warrant for slavery, for the subjection of women as chattel, for the burning and flogging of homosexuals, for ethnic cleansing, for antisemitism, for all of this, you look no further than a famous book that's on every pulpit in this city, and in every synagogue and in every mosque. And then just see whether you can square the fact that the force that is the main source of hatred, is also the main caller for censorship.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyoOfRog1EM&feature=youtu.be&t=16m36s
"Be It Resolved: Freedom of Speech Includes the Freedom to Hate", 15/11/2006.
2000s, 2006

Death , Women , God , Hate

“Mine is a very matter-of-fact approach to the problem. If you can select a population and they're educated and they're properly brought up, then you don't have to use too much of the stick because they would already have been trained. It's like with dogs. You train it in a proper way from small. It will know that it's got to leave, go outside to pee and to defecate. No, we are not that kind of society. We had to train adult dogs who even today deliberately urinate in the lifts.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

Lee Kuan Yew on Singapore society, The Man & His Ideas, 1997
1990s

Education , Dogs , Way , Problem

“What I don't like from the president's administration is this sort of, 'I'll put my boot heel on the throat of BP.' I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business. I've heard nothing from BP about not paying for the spill. And I think it's part of this sort of blame-game society in the sense that it's always got to be someone's fault instead of the fact that sometimes accidents happen. I mean, we had a mining accident that was very tragic and I've met a lot of these miners and their families. They're very brave people to do a dangerous job. But then we come in and it's always someone's fault. Maybe sometimes accidents happen.”

Rand Paul (1963) American politician, ophthalmologist, and United States Senator from Kentucky

on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and 2010-05-05 explosion at Massey's Upper Big Branch mine
reference to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar telling CNN on 2010-05-02, "Our job basically is to keep the boot on the neck of British Petroleum."
2010s

People , Family , Game , Business

“I am here to speak on freedom of speech. It is a great topic, and I am going to make my speech as free as possible. But you know that this cannot be done, for when anyone announces that he is going to speak his mind freely, everyone is frightened. This shows that there is no such thing as true freedom of speech. No one can afford to let his neighbors know what he is thinking about them. Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.”

Lin Yutang (1895–1976) Chinese writer

" Of Freedom of Speech http://books.google.com/books?id=OM4eT2epYzwC&q="Society+can+exist+only+on+the+basis+that+there+is+some+amount+of+polished+lying+and+that+no+one+says+exactly+what+he+thinks"&pg=PA95#v=onepage", lecture given in China (4 March 1933)

Lying , Thinking , Freedom

Quotes about society page 39

Quotes about society
page 39