The environment that we call society is created by past generations; we accept it, as it helps us to maintain our greed, possessiveness, illusion.

We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.

The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we’re not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced.

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

It’s about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness – sonic goodies.

The public is a ferocious beast; one must either chain it or flee from it.

The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

If you look at the history of our country over the last 100 years, there have been periods where science and research have been celebrated. They were really kind of held up as heroes in society, which encouraged a generation of people to go into these fields.

Regardless of what society says, we can’t go on much longer in the sea of immorality without judgment coming.

The problem is when that fun stuff becomes the habit. And I think that’s what’s happened in our culture. Fast food has become the everyday meal.

What you’re seeing with Occupy Wall Street and the others are people who are unhappy and they’re directing their unhappiness now toward Wall Street and toward those they think are doing too well in our society.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.

We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.

I find myself hoping a total end of all the unhappy divisions of mankind by party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.

Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country’s scared.

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.

The upward course of a nation’s history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its average men and women.

Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have.

It’s rare for anyone to value the opinions of a teenage girl.

This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.

The more people smoke herb, the more Babylon fall.

All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

Let’s not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

We are not to give credit to the many, who say that none ought to be educated but the free; but rather to the philosophers, who say that the well-educated alone are free.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

I think one of the great things about the United States has been our ability to maintain a distinction between our military and domestic law enforcement.

You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

This world of ours… must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

Governments don’t control people like they used to.

The present condition of fame is merely fashion.

It is not possible for civilization to flow backwards while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong, but it will advance it allotted length.

Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

Money is kind of a base subject. Like water, food, air and housing, it affects everything yet for some reason the world of academics thinks it’s a subject below their social standing.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.

Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression.

I would probably have more in common with a whale than with a bourgeois married couple employed at worthy institutions that I would wipe from the face of the earth if it was given to me to do so.

Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.

The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.

When humor goes, there goes civilization.

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

All the United States, it is a society that is split like to the bottom, that had very poor people in the country that is one of the wealthiest countries.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.

We live in ugly times.

There is no room for military people, including our veterans, to see themselves as victims, even if so many of our countrymen are prone to relish that role.

We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet.