Quotes about Society

A similar cycle has recurred throughout church history. Christians present an attractive counterculture until they become the dominant culture. Then they divert from their mission, join the power structure, and in the process turn society against them. Rejected, they retreat into a minority subculture, only to start the cycle all over again.

No society in history has attempted to live without a belief in the sacred, not until the modern West.

For a society that seems adrift, without moorings, I know of no better place to drop an anchor of faith.

The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings

Compromise, while at times morally necessary or at least justifiable, is more often only the first permission for a person (or society) to begin a long downhill descent.

A society can survive bad donkey drivers. But it cannot survive contempt for truth—whether inside or outside a courtroom.

If we are to save a society in deep trouble, many changes are necessary. In terms of rights, two changes are mandatory. First, far more Americans need to ask what is good for society? before asking what is good for my group? Second, we need people to speak up on behalf of the one truly helpless group—children. For this to happen, people must start to think of children as human beings, not as property.

The Ten Commandments are there to warn all of us that, with very few exceptions, such as the immediate saving of innocent life, no cause is more important than truth-telling. The Ten Commandments are the greatest list of instructions ever devised for creating a good society. But such a society cannot be created or maintained if it is not based on truth.

Good societies can survive people doing immoral things. But a good society can not survive if it calls immoral things moral.

I dream of a day when governments and societies no longer value blood and race over children, and the millions of unwanted children are freed at birth for adoption by people of every race. Aside from all its other benefits, massive adoption is the best assurance that people will never again slaughter the other. When members of every family are one of those others, such hatreds will become, finally, impossible.

If you build a society in which children honor their parents, your society will long survive. And the corollary is: a society in which children do not honor their parents is doomed to self-destruction. In our time, this connection between honoring parents and maintaining civilization is not widely recognized.

In 2008, then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama told an audience, "Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools, and twenty times more likely to end up in prison.