Quotes about Society

Women are supposed to be very calm generally, but women feel just as men feel.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

In a world flagrant with the failures of civilization, what is there particularly immortal about our own?

There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.

When you want a break from dogs, and you take them to the kennel to the stars, no one thinks you're a bad pet owner. But when you have kids, you can't drop them off for three weeks without someone calling Child Protective Services!

Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal?

Who ain't a slave?

It is further an admitted historical truth, which no one denies, that such an institution putting forth such a claim has been present among mankind for many centuries. Many through antagonism or lack of knowledge deny the identity of the Catholic Church today with the original Christian society.

Capitalism must be kept alive by non-capitalist methods.

Such was the transformation which had come over European society in the course of ten Christian centuries. Slavery had gone, and in its place had come that establishment of free possession which seemed so normal to men, and so consonant to a happy human life. No particular name was then found for it. To-day, and now that it has disappeared, we must construct an awkward one, and say that the Middle Ages had instinctively conceived and brought into existence the Distributive State.

Some Generations ago a man challenged to tell you why he forswore his manhood in any particular regard would have answered you that it was because he feared punishment at the hands of the law; to-day he will tell you that it is because he fears unemployment... In the Seventeenth Century a man feared to go to Mass lest the Judges should punish him. To-day a man fears to speak in favor of some social theory which he holds to be just and true lest his master should punish him.

Typically, preachers in our work-oriented society teach that God rested to provide humanity with a precedent for rest, an example for our good. Seldom have I heard mention of the other meaning for rest, the one used in musical notation. This meaning refers to cessation rather than recovery from weariness. Our enjoyment of music owes much to these brief pauses.