Rationality And Society Quotes

A Christian society is not going to arrive until most of us really want it: and we are not going to want it until we become fully Christian. I may repeat "Do as you would be done by" till I am black in the fact, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbour as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbour as myself till I learn to love God: and I cannot learn to love God except by learning to obey Him. And so, as I warned you, we are driven on to something more inward - driven on from social matters to religious matters. ~ C.S. Lewis

When the basic structure of society is publicly known to satisfy its principles for an extended period of time, those subject to these arrangements tend to develop a desire to act in accordance with these principles and to do their part in institutions which exemplify them ~ John Rawls

Contentment is the virtue that contrasts with restlessness, ambition, avarice. It means realizing, once again, that we are not our own - as pastors or parishioners, parents or children, employers or employees. It is the Lord's to give and to take away. He is building his church. It is his ministry that is saving and building up his body. Even our common callings in the world are not really our own, but they are God's work of supplying others - including ourselves - with what the whole society needs. There is a lot of work to be done, but it is his work that he is doing through us in daily and mostly ordinary ways. ~ Michael S. Horton

I fear that we are living in a society, living in a world where forgiving people is becoming more and more difficult to do. ~ Tavis Smiley

We must put an end to both economic freeloading and economic exploitation in America. There must be no place for parasites who draw their sustenance from society without giving anything in return. ~ George Lincoln Rockwell

One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man's life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that day, and far more still on what he reads during it. ~ Matthew Arnold

The bottom line is clear: harboring racist feelings in a multicultural society causes daily stress; this kind of stress can lead to chronic problems like cancer, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes. But interracial interactions are not inherently stressful. Less prejudiced people show markedly different physiological responses during interracial interactions. In all three of these studies, people who had positive attitudes about people of other races responded to interracial interactions in ways that were happy, healthy, and adaptive. ~ Jeremy A. Smith

No one can violently attack something without taking it seriously in some way. No one attacks belief in Zeus anymore. No one gets emotional over the Flat Earth Society. Yet Christianity calls forth the deepest emotions
even and especially in the ones who most reject it. ~ Gene Edward Veith Jr.

If you truly believe in the value of life, you care about all of the weakest and most vulnerable members of society. ~ Joni Eareckson Tada

The restoration of property would be a complicated, arduous and presumably a lengthy business; the transformation of a Capitalist Society into a Communist one needs nothing but the extension of existing conditions. ~ Hilaire Belloc

Without morality and virtue most things in a free society fall apart. But with them, anything is possible. ~ Glenn Beck

Put into words by this selfish, well-fed, and supremely indifferent old man it suddenly became the Pharisaic voice of a society wholly absorbed in barricading itself against the unpleasant. ~ Edith Wharton

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die. ~ Sharon Olds

Devices like iPhones and BlackBerries invite (demand!) constant use. They are like packets of cigarettes that ask us never to leave them alone or bottles of pills that seek to change our minds and punish us when we try to withdraw from them. We think cellphones are connecting us, but they are turning us into a society of rude, impatient, narrow-minded, stressed-out, aggressive, and isolated individuals. They invite reaction rather than reflection. ~ Richard Watson

The crown and glory of life is character. It is the noblest possession of a man, constituting a rank in itself, and an estate in the general good-will; dignifying every station, and exalting every position in society. It exercises a greater power than wealth, and secures all the honor without the jealousies of fame. It carries with it an influence which always tell; for it is the result of proved honor, rectitude, and consistency-qualities which, perhaps more than any other, command the general confidence and respect of mankind. ~ Samuel Smiles

Our pluralist society must provide its citizens with the tools to understand religions, their symbols and their practices. ~ Tariq Ramadan

Within our own society, we jail more prisoners than any other country in the world, 85 percent of them people of nonwhite races - red, black, brown, and yellow. We are one of the few nations that still indulge in the death penalty for increasing numbers of these prisoners. We must become mindful of these negative things, since we need not support these actions of our nation to be affected negatively by their evolutionary impact, unless we mentally, verbally, and ultimately physically, disassociate ourselves from them. ~ Robert Thurman

Discomfort levels in our societies are rising, or so it would seem. In theory, we invoke diversity and tolerance. But in real life, we raise our hackles and withdraw into ourselves. ~ Tariq Ramadan

1883 ... The teaching of the Church has elaborated the principle of subsidiarity, according to which a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good. ~ The Catholic Church

The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic ... power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age. ~ Russell Baker

We are shocked by thieves taking pride in their clever touch, prostitutes in their depravity and murderers in their callousness. But it is shocking only because the atmosphere of the circles they move in is restricted, and - what matters most - we are on the outside. But isn't the same thing happening when rich men take pride in their wealth (which is theft), military commanders in their victories (which are murder) and rulers in their power (which is violence)? We do not see them as people who corrupt the concept of life, or good and evil, in order to justify their own situation, but only because the circles of people who share these corrupt concepts are wider, and we belong to them. ~ Leo Tolstoy

The Golden Bough captured the imagination of many artists in the early twentieth century. Eliot, certainly, was immersed in it, discussing it familiarly in his graduate school papers and book reviews and constantly alluding to it in his art. The most straightforward advice he offers to readers of The Waste Land (given in the notes to the poem) is, in paraphrase, that any serious reader of the poem must take into consideration modern scholarship in myth and anthropology, especially Frazer Golden Bough and Jessie Weston From Ritual to Romance. The poet says that he is indebted to this scholarship for his title, his plan, his symbolism, and many of his references to ancient religion and society. His claim about the title, taken from the monomyth of Frazer and Weston, his claim about the symbolism, associated with the birth-death-rebirth cycles of the myths, and his claim about the miscellaneous undergirding references have been discussed by Grover Smith and other scholars. We wish to focus more on Eliot's claim about being indebted to Frazer for the plan of the poem. We believe it refers, at least in part, to Frazer's use of the comparative method and to his practice of assembling many perspectives and allowing these perspectives to make his point.

It must be noted at once that Eliot was quite selective in his admiration of Frazer. For example, he did not admire Frazer's positivism. Frazer put his faith in science and celebrated what he called the evolution from magic ~ Jewel Spears Brooker

A pandemic will lead to permanent social, economic, and cultural changes. The key is to create good from a bad situation. ~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

The only differences between a cult and a religion are the numbers of adherents and the degree to which they are marginalized by the rest of society. ~ Sam Harris

Each and every child in this country is valuable because they are our future as a society. We cannot afford to lose a single child to ill-health, under-education, abuse, addiction, jail, or gun violence. America's highest goal should be for every child to grow up to be a successful young adult
healthy, educated, free, secure, and a good citizen. ~ John F. Kerry

Our survival as a human community may depend as much upon our nurture of love in infancy and childhood as upon the protection of our society from external threats. ~ Selma Fraiberg

If mindfulness is the cure to wayward thought, which can be responsible for a lot of the stress, depression and anxiety in society, then this mindfulness needs to be constant. ~ Brittany Hallison

The are two kinds of people in this modern society. First and the majority are those fools who think they are wise, and second are the few wise individuals who know that they are fools. ~ Abhijit Naskar

The metabolism of a consumer society requires it continually to eat and excrete, every day throwing itself away in plastic bags. ~ Shana Alexander

Yosemite Park is a place of rest, a refuge from the roar and dust and weary, nervous, wasting work of the lowlands, in which one gains the advantages of both solitude and society ... ~ John Muir

Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time. ~ J.J. Abrams

Certainly I was a bully. I'm not ashamed of it at all. The hostility of the establishment to what you were able to do in the Forties and Fifties was very strong. Sometimes you have to fight against your society. ~ Pierre Boulez

We shall have to stop looking askance on trends in relation to sex merely as a reproductive capability, i.e. that it is normal to make babies. Society will have to change in its assessment of what the proclivities of humanity may be. Our viewpoints on homosexuality, for example, may have to be reconsidered and more wisely adjusted. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

The love of husband and wife is the force that welds society together. ~ Saint John Chrysostom

Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men ... One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him. This is what our society needs - not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can "be", that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves. ~ Rollo May

Religion, society and state - from none of these do women get their proper honor. It is religion, which has created an unparalleled disparity between men and women. ~ Taslima Nasrin

Naked greed has been the moving spirit of civilization from the first day of its existence to the present time; wealth, more wealth, and wealth again; wealth not of society, but of this shabby individual was its sole and determining aim. ~ Friedrich Engels

Isn't the whole idea behind the massive regulation and regimentation of American industry and society the notion that individuals should be forced to behave in ways defined by a small governmental elite? ~ Thomas DiLorenzo

It [childbearing] was never intended to be as time-consuming and self-conscious a process as it is. One of the deepest evils in our society is tyrannical nurturance. ~ Germaine Greer

Venus of Willendorf carries her cave with her. She is blind, masked. Her ropes of corn-row hair look forward to the invention agriculture. She has a furrowed brow. Her facelessness is the impersonality of primitive sex and religion. There is no psychology or identity yet, because there is no society, no cohesion. Men cower and scatter at the blast of the elements. Venus of Willendorf is eyeless because nature can be seen but not known. She is remote even as she kills and creates. The statuette, so overflowing and protuberant, is ritually invisible. She stifles the eye. She is the cloud of archaic night. ~ Camille Paglia

I believe in what I believe, and I think after all these years I've heard a lot of arguments, and I'm convinced by the superiority of the arguments that are made on the conservative side. I think that's a better way to run a society. ~ Charles Krauthammer

There is a wildness in us, something magnificent, ancient and connect to each other. Though it's been nearly beaten out of us by society and this toxic demand on little girls to be good, nice, pretty and quiet, it's still very much alive in us ~ Scarlett Curtis

The reductionist measure of yield is to agriculture systems, what GDP is to economic systems. It is time to move from measuring yield of commodities, to health and well-being of ecosystems and communities. Industrial agriculture has its roots in war. Ecological agriculture allows us to make peace with the earth, soil and the society. ~ Vandana Shiva

The function of treatment was to bridge the gulf, translate the sufferer from his own pernicious little private dungheap to the glorious world of discrete particles, where it would be his inestimable prerogative once again to wonder, love, hate, desire, rejoice and howl in a reasonable balanced manner, and comfort himself with the society of others in the same predicament. ~ Samuel Beckett

IN OUR SOCIETY, MARCUS, the most admired men are those who build bridges, skyscrapers, and empires. But in reality, the proudest and most admirable are those who manage to build love. Because there is no greater or more difficult undertaking. ~ Joel Dicker

Science and religion, then, are competitors in the business of finding out what is true about our universe. In this goal religion has failed miserably, for its tools for discerning "truth" are useless. These areas are incompatible in precisely the same way, and in the same sense, that rationality is incompatible with irrationality. ~ Jerry A. Coyne

Children are 25 percent of the population but 100 percent of the future. If we wish to renew society, we must raise up a generation of children who have strong moral character. And if we wish to do that, we have two responsibilities: first, to model good character in our own lives, and second, to intentionally foster character development in our young. ~ Thomas Lickona

My take on the various components of Maoist politics varies, depending on the philosophical, theoretical, strategic, or methodological element in question. In general, I consider Maoism to be an internal critique of Stalinism that fails to break with Stalinism. Over many years, Mao developed a critical understanding of Soviet society, and of the negative symptoms it displayed. But at the same time, he failed to locate the cause of these symptoms in the capitalist social relations of the USSR and so retained many shared assumptions with the Stalinist model in his own thinking. ~ Elliott Liu