Reintegration Into Society Quotes

It rests on the attempt since the 1970s to translate a pathological degeneration of the principle of laissez-faire into economic reality by the systematic retreat of states from any regulation or control of the activities of profit-making enterprise. This attempt to hand over human society to the (allegedly) self-controlling and wealth- or even welfare-maximising market, populated (allegedly) by actors in rational pursuit of their interests, had no precedent in any earlier phase of capitalist development in any developed economy, not even the USA. It was a reductio ad absurdum of what its ideologists read into Adam Smith, as the correspondingly extremist 100% state-planned command economy of the USSR was of what the Bolsheviks read into Marx. ~ Eric Hobsbawm

It is in the interests of society to put the Pill into slot machines and to place cigarettes on prescription. ~ Malcolm Potts

What I want to know is whether or not I can expect a repetition of it, if I were to agree with what Alexandra wants."
Drowning in angry mortification, Elizabeth nevertheless managed not to flinch or drop her gaze, and although her voice shook slightly, she managed to say calmly and clearly, "I have no control over wagging tongues, your grace. If I had, I would not have been the topic of scandal two years ago. However, I have no desire whatever to reenter your society. I still have scars enough from my last sortie among the Quality." Having deliberately injected a liberal amount of derision into the word "Quality," Elizabeth closed her mouth and braced herself to be verbally filleted by the old woman whose white brows had snapped together over the bridge of her thin nose. An instant later, however, the pale hazel eyes registered something that might have been approval, then they shifted to Alexandra. With a curt nod the dowager said, "I quite agree, Alexandra. She has spirit enough to endure what they will put her through. Amazing, is it not," continued the dowager to Elizabeth with a gruff smile, "that on the one hand we of the ton pride ourselves on our civilized manners, and yet many of us will dine on one another's reputations in preference to the most sumptuous meal." Leaving Elizabeth to sink slowly and dazedly into a chair she'd shot out of but moments before, the dowager then walked over to the sofa and seated herself, her eyes narrowed in thought. "The Willington ~ Judith McNaught

Edmund Burke in his critique of the French Revolution. Any society, he wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, which destroys the fabric of its state, must soon be "disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality". ~ Tony Judt

I believe that if an individual is not on the path to transcending his society and seeing in what way it furthers or impedes the development of human potential, he cannot enter into intimate contact with his humanity. ~ Erich Fromm

The world has entered a new era, evolving from an industrial into a knowledge-based society, and into a society that wants to live in harmony with nature. ~ Minoru Mori

Protesters are still on the fringes like satellites, revolving around the system. But prophets and poets lead us into a new world, beyond simply yelling at the old one. ~ Shane Claiborne

[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job ... into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen. ~ Milan Kundera

In a free society we're supposed to know the truth.. In a society where truth becomes treason, then we're in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it.. This is media, isn't it? I mean, why don't we prosecute The New York Times or anybody that releases this? ~ Ron Paul

My conflicts of conscience are about the only battles I'm fighting these days, and I'm willing to fight until the end. There is something freeing
about this life, about living out of a single backpack and disappearing into the night. About smelling terrible and never remembering people's names. About never having to say you're sorry. We exist outside of society. We stay up late and sleep even later. We
are bandits, pirates, serial killers. The dregs. Someone should lock us up and never let us out again. But instead, they give us their money, they offer us their beds. We are not
going to pay for the beer. We are not going to be back here for a good, long while. We have prior engagements. We have the money in a duffel bag. We have no shame. Fuck guilt. Back to life. ~ Pete Wentz

Having the Mass in one's native language is no guarantee that a person will understand the mystery of the Mass. On the contrary, if the vesture of the ceremony is too familiar, the participants too easily thinks he has mastered what it's all about. The familiar becomes the routine, the routine becomes ignored. Our own language is a comfort zone that insulates us form the shock of the Gospel, the scandal of the Cross, the lure of the unknown. I would rather have a huge dose of foreignness, of music that is not current, words that are strange, language that is archaic, hieratic gestures that are grandly incongruous to a democratic society. A person thrown into this situation knows at least that he is dealing with something utterly different and possibly far deeper than his day-to-day occupations. ~ Peter Kwasniewski

Political society wants things simple. Political scientists know them to be complex ... One could argue that, in part, the leftist impulse is so conspicuous among the educated and well-to-do precisely because they are exposed to more information, and are accordingly forced to choose between living with the strains of complexity, or lapsing into simplism. ~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Our "increasing mental sickness" may find expres­sion in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are con­spicuous and extremely distressing. But "let us beware," says Dr. Fromm, "of defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are symp­toms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting." The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been si­lenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their per­fect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish "the illusion of indi­viduality," but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But "uniformity and free­dom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too. . . . Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becom ~ Aldous Huxley

There exists in society a very special class of persons that I have always referred to as the Believers. These are folks who have chosen to accept a certain religion, philosophy, theory, idea or notion and cling to that belief regardless of any evidence that might, for anyone else, bring it into doubt. They are the ones who encourage and support the fanatics and the frauds of any given age. No amount of evidence, no matter how strong, will bring them any enlightenment. They are the sheep who beg to be fleeced and butchered, and who will battle fiercely to preserve their right to be victimized… patent offices handle an endless succession of inventors who still produce perpetual-motion machines that don't work, but no number of idle flywheels will convince these zealots of their folly; dozens of these patent applications flow in every year. In ashrams all over the world, hopping devotees of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi will never abandon their goal of blissful levitation of their bodies by mind power, despite bruises and sprains aplenty suffered as they bounce about on gym mats like demented (though smiling) frogs, trying to get airborne. Absolutely nothing will discourage them. ~ James Randi

And we also recognize this dance-like spirit, this ethos of grace: societal conduct, the control not only of written and established conventions, the virtuous mastery of forms of play where persons come close to each other without meeting and where they establish distance without damaging each other through indifference; amiability and not insistence is the atmosphere of this ethos of grace - its ethical law is the game and its observation, not seriousness. Forced distance between persons becomes ennobled into reserve. The offensive indifference, coldness, and rudeness of living past each other is made ineffective through the forms of politeness, respectfulness, and attentiveness. Reserve counteracts a too great intimacy. ~ Helmuth Plessner

If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up. ~ Adrienne Rich

There is great freedom in simplicity of living, and after I began to feel this, I found harmony in my life between inner and outer well-being. There is a great deal to be said about such harmony, not only for an individual life but also for the life of a society. It's because as a world we have gotten ourselves so far out of harmony, so way off on the material side, that when we discover something like nuclear energy we are still capable of putting it into a bomb and using it to kill people! This is because our inner well-being lags so far behind our outer well-being. ~ Peace Pilgrim

If Enlightenment in a technical sense is the programmatic word for progress in the awareness of explicitness, one can say without fear of grand formulas that rendering the implicit explicit is the cognitive form of fate. Were this not the case, one would never have had cause to believe that later knowledge would necessarily be better knowledge - for, as we know, everything that has been termed 'research' in the last centuries has rested on this assumption. Only when the inward-folded 'things' or facts are by their nature subject to a tendency to unfold themselves and become more comprehensible for us can one - provided the unfolding succeeds - speak of a true increase in knowledge. Only if the 'matters' are spontaneously prepared (or can be forced by imposed examination) to come to light in magnified and better-illuminated areas can one seriously - which here means with ontological emphasis - state that there is science in progress, there are real knowledge gains, there are expeditions in which we, the epistemically committed collective, advance to hidden continents of knowledge by making thematic what was previously unthematic, bringing to light what is yet unknown, and transforming vague cognizance into definite knowledge. In this manner we increase the cognitive capital of our society - the latter word without quotation marks in this case. ~ Peter Sloterdijk

Nobody in Colonial America, to be sure, believed that society owed every child the ultimate in education, but intelligence, industry, and thrift combined with ambition got many a poor man's son into the colonial colleges. ~ Louis B. Wright

Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. ~ Karl Polanyi

One reason for the primacy of the market in shaping the modern world is that it forces a reorganization of society in order to make the market work properly . When a market comes into existence, as Marx fully appreciated, it becomes a potent force driving social change. ~ Robert Gilpin

In short, one who loves the illusion of the good is eventually won over to actually loving the good. But how can love of the illusion of the good lead to love of the good itself? If one loves the illusion of the good and enacts this illusion in social intercourse, one might come to appreciate its worth and to love the good itself for its own sake. Correlatively, from the point of view of the spectator, loving the illusion of the good in others may make us act politely in order to become lovable, which leads us to exercise our self-mastery, control our passions, and, eventually, to love the good for its own sake. In this sense, paradoxically, by deceiving others through politeness and social pretence, we in fact deceive ourselves and transform our pragmatic, polite behavior into virtuous behavior: by deceiving others through the pretence of virtue, we foster civil society, and in doing so, deceive ourselves by transforming our pretense of virtue into a disposition for virtue itself. Does not this line of thought recall Pascal's advice to non-believers who would like to believe, but cannot bring themselves to accomplish the leap of faith? "Kneel down, pray, act as if you believe, and belief will come by itself. ~ Slavoj Zizek

Do not presume to judge the Qui, Mr. President. Your society aspires to an ideal that exists only at levels like the United Regions. Analyze your world's history and you find pockets of feudal life that continue to exist today. Cultures where rape victims are killed so as not to dishonor their family; countries where the male of your species has so little self-control, the female is obliged to hide behind cloth for fear they will tempt them into carnal acts; regions where children are slaughtered for no reason. And this was all before our invasion. ~ Kayla Stonor

Humans are similar to plasticine. Society is the pattern, but a pattern has the characteristics of being inflexible, hard, and unbreakable, while plasticine has the characteristics of being pliable, soft, metamorphic, and expandable. The current situation clearly shows us how the mass of plasticine no longer fits into that narrow social pattern. ~ Paola Sanjinez

Inequality hardens society into a class system. Inequality divides us from one another ... Inequality undermines democracy. ~ George Packer

If we are only interested in changing the AS person so that they can better meld themselves into society - a tenuous and nebulous concept to begin with - then perhaps we are misguided. The AS community gives us much cause to celebrate. Never, I think, should we expect or want them to be carbon copies of the most socially adept among us. We should only suggest whatever help they need to insure they have every opportunity of leading productive, rewarding and self-sufficient lives. We would lose too much and they would lose even more, if our goals were anything more, or less. ~ Liane Holliday Willey

We must examine the ways in which we have attempted to turn our own ministries, workplaces, and mission fields into the playgrounds of our own personal struggles. We must search our hearts for the ways in which our own insecurities and wounded egos sabotage the gospel message that we have been entrusted with. We must become leaders who are deep in a society of the spectacle that produces shallowness. ~ Mark Sayers

When you've got a society that is diverse, what happens is for a time, the issue is integrating your minorities into that society. ~ Gordon Brown

As universities have turned into businesses, so students have turned into consumers. ~ Kenan Malik

He told us that nations of men fell into disorder, so nations of law were set up instead. He told us that nations of law then forgot justice and let the law become a Game, a Game in which the moves and the winning were more important than truth. He told us to seek justice rather than the Game. ~ Sheri S. Tepper

I have spoken of analogy as a constructive method. This, however, should be used only for suggestion, for it is most dangerous. Often we use an analogy and are quite unaware of it. Thus many social and political thinkers have called society an "organism," and have proceeded to deal with it as if it were a large animal. They have thought not in terms of the actual phenomena under consideration, but in terms of the analogy. In so far as the terms of the analogy were more concrete than those of the phenomena, their thinking has been made easier. But no analogy will ever hold good throughout, and consequently these thinkers have often fallen into error. ~ Henry Hazlitt

I'm making a lot of money. I should be paying a lot more taxes. I'm not paying taxes at a rate that is even close to what people were paying under Eisenhower. Do people think America wasn't ascendant and wasn't an upwardly mobile society under Eisenhower in the '50s? Nobody was looking at the country then and thinking to themselves, "We're taxing ourselves into oblivion." Yet there isn't a politician with balls enough to tell that truth because the whole system has been muddied by the rich. It's been purchased. ~ David Simon

Historians, and even common sense, may inform us, that, however specious these ideas of perfect equality may seem, they are really, at bottom, impracticable; and were they not so, would be extremely pernicious to human society. Render possessions ever so equal, men's different degrees of art, care, and industry will immediately break that equality. Or if you check these virtues, you reduce society to the most extreme indigence; and instead of preventing want and beggary in a few, render it unavoidable to the whole community. The most rigorous inquisition too is requisite to watch every inequality on its first appearance; and the most severe jurisdiction, to punish and redress it. But besides, that so much authority must soon degenerate into tyranny, and be exerted with great partialities; who can possibly be possessed of it, in such a situation as is here supposed? Perfect equality of possessions, destroying all subordination, weakens extremely the authority of magistracy, and must reduce all power nearly to a level, as well as property.
We may conclude, therefore, that in order to establish laws for the regulation of property, we must be acquainted with the nature and situation of man; must reject appearances, which may be false, though specious; and must search for those rules, which are, on the whole, most useful and beneficial. ~ David Hume

Government is nothing more than the combined force of society or the united power of the multitude for the peace, order, safety, good, and happiness of the people ... There is no king or queen bee distinguished from all the others by size or figure or beauty and variety of colors in the human hive. No man has yet produced any revelation from heaven in his favor, any divine communication to govern his fellow men. Nature throws us all into the world equal and alike ...
The preservation of liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the people. As long as knowledge and virtue are diffused generally among the body of a nation it is impossible they should be enslaved.
Ambition is one of the more ungovernable passions of the human heart. The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable ...
There is a danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living wth power to endanger public liberty. ~ David McCullough

(As Plato There is nothing superstitious about forcing bad consequences for the hubris of paternalistic utopianism. Humanity should never be frozen into a vision of the best. A creative society must be willing to tolerate some degree of instability because creativity is inherently unstable. ~ Rebecca Goldstein

All the books I liked were basically about the same topic. White Niggers by Ingvar Ambjørnsen, Beatles and Lead by Lars Saabye Christensen, Jack by Alf Lundell, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr., Novel with Cocaine by M. Agayev, Colossus by Finn Alnaes, Lasso Round the Moon by Agnar Mykle, The History of Bestiality trilogy by Jens Bjørneboe, Gentlemen by Klas Östergren, Icarus by Axel Jensen, The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, Humlehjertene by Ola Bauer and Post Office by Charles Bukowski.

Books about young men who struggled to fit into society, who wanted more from life than routines, more from life than a family, in short, young men who hated middle-class values and sought freedom. They travelled, they got drunk, they read and they dreamed about their life's Great Passion or writing the Great Novel.

Everything they wanted I wanted too. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard