society quotes

I have this feeling that the world is not in balance. And people are afraid, but we’re also starting to be really brave.

The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot – and it’s only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid, impotent fear.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

People do not make wars; governments do.

Songs don’t have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I’ve done is about alienation… about where you fit in society.

The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.

If you’re too free, you’re like the way Hong Kong is now. It’s very chaotic.

Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of our society.

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists – to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost.

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.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

I think that society has to be careful not to shift all of its resources to the elderly versus the young.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.

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.

First, how do we give everyone a fair shot at opportunity and security in this new economy? Second, how do we make technology work for us, and not against us – especially when it comes to solving urgent challenges like climate change? Third, how do we keep America safe and lead the world without becoming its policeman?

Our society strives to avoid any possibility of offending anyone – except God.

I can’t imagine what it is like to be raised in a society where their only statues that exist are to you and your father.

I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be.

Poverty is a veil that obscures the face of greatness. An appeal is a mask covering the face of tribulation.

No country can really develop unless its citizens are educated.

We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood.

We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

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

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

I never leaf through a copy of National Geographic without realizing how lucky we are to live in a society where it is traditional to wear clothes.

There is too much government today. We’ve got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people, and for the people.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Although the big word on the left is ‚compassion,‘ the big agenda on the left is dependency.

We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.

That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.

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

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

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.

What we have found in this country, and maybe we’re more aware of it now, is one problem that we’ve had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, by choice.

When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.

Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.

Someday, the capitalist system will disappear in the United States, because no social class system has been eternal. One day, class societies will disappear.

Humanity I love you because when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old struggle: the roar of the crowd on the one side, and the voice of your conscience on the other.

I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government other than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.

Civilization is the making of civil persons.

The love of the family, the love of one person can heal. It heals the scars left by a larger society. A massive, powerful society.

Too many of us now tend to worship self indulgence and consumption.

As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.

We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.

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

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

Drones overall will be more impactful than I think people recognize, in positive ways to help society.

On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

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 more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don’t think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.

When there is a lack of honor in government, the morals of the whole people are poisoned.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.

Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.