Western Society Quotes

It's a mistake to assume that Islamists always come from the slums. Indeed, many come from affluent families but for some reason just couldn't manage to integrate into Western society, even though they had good opportunities for advancement. ~ Otto Schily

They placed their lives on hold for a group of strangers and asked for nothing in return. They affirmed the basic goodness of man at a time when it was easy to doubt such humanity still existed. If the terrorists had hoped their attacks would reveal the weaknesses in western society, the events in Gander proved its strength. ~ Jim DeFede

Political correctness is a code to silence dissent as western society is razed. The culture wars will erupt into violence, pitting those who defend western values vs. leftists, their 'allies', and the rulers who want to consign western civilization to oblivion. ~ Michael Rectenwald

The divides are not Islam and western society, the divide is between people who have different values. We must promote connections between people who want to contribute to human values. People who share that commitment can collaborate across cultural divides. ~ Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im

I think our Western society is very much about, 'Tuck your head in; make sure you're safe. Don't rock the boat.' ~ Cate Blanchett

White people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview because it is the bedrock of our society and its institutions. Regardless of whether a parent told you that everyone was equal, or the poster in the hall of your white suburban school proclaimed the value of diversity, or you have traveled abroad, or you have people of color in your workplace or family, the ubiquitous socializing power of white supremacy cannot be avoided. The messages circulate 24-7 and have little or nothing to do with intentions, awareness, or agreement. Entering the conversation with this understanding is freeing because it allows us to focus on how--rather than if--our racism is manifest. When we move beyond the good/bad binary, we can become eager to identify our racist patterns because interrupting those patterns becomes more important than managing how we think we look to others.

I repeat: stopping our racist patterns must be more important than working to convince others that we don't have them. We do have them, and people of color already know we have them; our efforts to prove otherwise are not convincing. An honest accounting of these patterns is no small task given the power of white fragility and white solidarity, but it is necessary. ~ Robin DiAngelo

Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West. ~ Walter Lippmann

Western society is so unappealing. On a material level, it is clearly more comfortable and protected from the hardships of the natural world. But, as societies become more affluent they tend to require more, rather than less, time and commitment by the individual, and it's possible that many people feel that affluence and safety simply aren't a good trade for freedom. ~ Sebastian Junger

To have the United States suddenly come up with a peace proposal after a whole series of terrorist attacks is going to show to the world that this sort of method is something that western societies can't stand. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

At the heart of western freedom and democracy is the belief that the individual man ... is the touchstone of value, and all society, groups, the state, exist for his benefit. Therefore the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and abiding practice of any western society. ~ Robert Kennedy

I think forgiveness plays a very important part in Western society and it comes from the Judeo Christian heritage. ~ Ibn Warraq

Any person who considers himself, and intends to remain, a member of Western society inherits the Western past from Athens and Jerusalem to Runnymede and Valley Forge, as well as to Watts and Chicago of August 1968. He may ignore it or deny it, but that does not alter the fact. The past sits back and smiles and knows it owns him anyway. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

There is a lingering pain that comes with some people's LGBT identity, especially in a society that has shamed their desires and forced them to fight for an opportunity to declare pride. Some of this shame can be deeply internalized, even if it's overcome in practice (and mostly so in attitude). LGBT people may believe the asexual people who want their support have never fought this type of shame and may not accept that "your orientation doesn't exist" can be as damaging as "your orientation means you're bad." Asexual people are usually perceived as sexually conservative or sexually abstinent, and LGBT people may have been attacked for the sex they may desire, so it could be very difficult for them to accept that someone who embodies a supposedly "ideal state" they've been pressured to emulate could possibly have comparable problems in Western society. ~ Julie Sondra Decker

Western society has many flaws, and it is good for an educated person to have thought some of these through, even at the expense of losing a lecture or two to tear gas. ~ Robert B. Laughlin

Sociologists argue that in contemporary Western society the marketplace has become so dominant that the consumer model increasingly characterizes most relationships that historically were covenantal, including marriage. Today we stay connected to people only as long as they are meeting our particular needs at an acceptable cost to us. When we cease to make a profit - that is, when the relationship appears to require more love and affirmation from us than we are getting back - then we "cut our loses" and drop the relationship. This has also been called "commodification," a process by which social relationships are reduced to economic exchange relationships, and so the very idea of "covenant" is disappearing in our culture. Covenant is therefore a concept increasingly foreign to us, and yet the Bible says it is the essence of marriage. ~ Timothy Keller

In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint. ~ Jonathan Sacks

As Shweder points out, not only is moral responsibility virtually never assigned to sufferers but to even hint at it is considered "blaming the victim," one of the main heresies within our Western society. The responses to suffering, then, are always provided by experts, whether pain management, psychological or medical treatment, or changes in law or public policy. In ~ Timothy Keller

The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society. ~ Albert Camus

What was peculiar about the West was not that it participated in the worldwide evil of slavery, but that it later abolished that evil, not only in Western societies but also in other societies subject to Western control or influence. This was possible only because the anti-slavery movement coincided with an era in which Western power and hegemony were at their zenith, so that it was essentially European imperialism which ended slavery. This idea might seem shocking, not because it does not fit the facts, but because it does not fit the prevailing vision of our time. ~ Thomas Sowell

The advent of postmodernism, the enshrinement of Darwinian orthodoxy in the educational systems of Western society, and the rise of blatant humanism as the religion-by-default of large subcultures have brought no end of new challenges to biblical sufficiency. ~ James R. White

The sacrifices of time and money that Chinese friends will make for one another often go far beyond what is expected or accepted in Western society. ~ Larry Herzberg

An effective proclamation of the Gospel in contemporary Western society will need to confront directly the widespread spirit of agnosticism and relativism which has cast doubt on reason's ability to know the truth, which alone satisfies the human heart's restless quest for meaning. ~ Pope John Paul II

A society which believes in a worthwhile future saves in the present so as to invest in the future. Contemporary Western society spends in the present and piles up debts for the future, ravages the environment, and leaves its grandchildren to cope with the results as best they can. ~ Lesslie Newbigin

If a man prefers nothing I can give him nothing. But nearly all people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable. It is this achievement of my creed that I shall chiefly pursue in these pages. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Even the staunchest atheist growing up in Western society cannot avoid having absorbed the basic tenets of Christian morality. Our societies are steeped in it: everything we have accomplished over the centuries, even science, developed either hand in hand with or in opposition to religion, but never separately. It is impossible to know what morality would look like without religion. It would require a visit to a human culture that is not now and never was religious. That such cultures do not exist should give us pause. ~ Frans De Waal

To increase desires to an unbearable level whilst making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based. ~ Michel Houellebecq

In our society (that is, advanced western society) we have lost even the pretence of a common culture. Persons educated with the greatest intensity we know can no longer communicate with each other on the plane of their major intellectual concern. This is serious for our creative, intellectual and, above all, normal life. It is leading us to interpret the past wrongly, to misjudge the "present, and to deny our hopes of the future. It is making it difficult or impossible for us to take good action. ~ C.P. Snow

In Western society, and particularly in American society, imagination is stulified from infancy. The imaginative child is discouraged and upbraided. He is told that the process is mere dreaming, that it wastes time and leads nowhere. It is said to be "impractical." As the child grows and its imagination inevitably leads it to express unconventional ideas and to try new behavior, it is chided and even viciously punished for such signs of unorthodoxy. ~ Philip Wylie

Islam takes advantage of two structural flaws that exist in the Western society. One is political correctness and other is the decline of morality. ~ Ali Sina

Family life in Western society since the time of the Old Testament has been a struggle to maintain patriarchy, male domination, and double standards in the face of a natural drift towards monogamous bonding. Young men have been called upon to prove their masculinity by their willingness to die in warfare, and young women have been called upon to prove their femininity by their willingness to die for their man. Women have been asked to appear small, dumb, and helpless so men would feel big and strong, brave, and clever. It's been a trick. ~ Frank Pittman

The freedom enjoyed in Western society under the rule of law and constitutional government explains both the quality of its civilization and its wealth. ~ Paul Johnson

Studies show that the healthiest people in Western society are single women and married men - marriage, it seems, suits men more than women. ~ Emma Haughton

The paradigm that is now receding has dominated our culture for several hundred years, during which it has shaped our modern Western society and has significantly influenced the rest of the world. This paradigm consists of a number of entrenched ideas and values, among them the view of the universe as a mechanical system composed of elementary building-blocks, the view of the human body as a machine, the view of life in society as a competitive struggle for existence, the belief in unlimited material progress to be achieved through economic and technological growth, and - last, not least - the belief that a society in which the female is everywhere subsumed under the male is one that follows a basic law of nature. ~ Fritjof Capra

AS A HUNTER I am looked down upon in Western society. I am portrayed as a brute. I am denigrated and spat upon, and thought of as a slow-witted anachronism, the dregs of a discredited culture. This happened quickly when one looks at human history. The skills I possess - the ability to track, hunt, kill, and dress out my prey so it can be served at a table to feed others - were prized for tens of thousands of years. Hunters fed those in the tribe and family who could not hunt well or did not hunt because they weren't physically able to. The success of the hunter produced not only healthy food and clothing, tools, medicine, and amenities, but a direct hot-blooded connection with God and the natural world. The hunter was the provider, and exalted as such. ~ C.J. Box

I believe in free will. Of those that, like us, are in a privileged situation at least. For you, for me: people who are living in western society, people who are not repressed, who are free. We can choose. The things go largely like you want them to go. You control your own life. Your own will is extremely powerful. ~ J.K. Rowling

Since Western society is deteriorating, it has become overrun with immorality, and God is going to judge it, and destroy it. And the only way the black people caught up in this society can be saved is not to integrate into this corrupt society, but to separate from it, to a land of our own, where we can reform ourselves, lift up our moral standards and try to be godly. ~ Malcolm X

More recently, studies by social scientists have emphasized that most people in modern Western society go through life with strong positive beliefs that the world is basically a nice place in which to live, that life is mostly fair, and that they are good people who deserve to have good things happen to them. Moreover, these beliefs are a valuable aid to happy, healthy functioning. But suffering and victimization undermine these beliefs and make it hard to go on living happily or effectively in society. Indeed, the direct and practical effects of some trauma or crime are often relatively minor, whereas the psychological effects go on indefinitely. The body may recover from rape or robbery rather quickly, but the psychological scars can last for many years. A characteristic of these scars is that the victims lose faith in their basic beliefs about the world as fair and benevolent or even in themselves as good people. Thus, evil strikes at people's fundamental beliefs. ~ Roy F. Baumeister

So far has Western society departed from the ancient taboos against murder, theft, and rape that we are now faced with juvenile delinquents who have no inner check against wantonly assaulting other human beings at random 'for kicks' while we have adult delinquents capable of deliberately planning the extermination of tens of millions of human beings, in carrying out, also doubtless for kicks, a mathematical theory of games. Today our civilization is relapsing into a state far more primitive, far more irrational, than any taboo-ridden society now known-for lack of any effective taboos. If Western man could establish an inviolate taboo against random extermination, our society would enjoy a far more effective safeguard against both private violence and still impending collective nuclear horrors than the United Nations or the fallible mechanisms of Fail-Safe. ~ Lewis Mumford

The last western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete. And significantly, that fell and did not rise again. ~ Camille Paglia

Our conceptual maps tend to lack a way to conceive the immanence of violence and power in the ideals and practices that have become dominant in the Western tradition. Mass death has tended to be conceived as something accidental, something outside the ordinary run of events. I think the difficulty in coming to terms with the peculiarities of the Western will to power has to do with the absence of a central metaphor capable of describing the link between consumption and death. The consumptive mentality has in many respects been normalized, as has the violence that underpins and is the effect of systems of universal judgment. Certainly the aestheticization of difference is coextensive with the romance with violence that has become so characteristic of contemporary Western society. ~ Deborah Root

The Liberty Principle: It is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone else's liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to someone else's loss of liberty through force or fraud. The Liberty Principle is an extrapolation from the fundamental principle of all liberty as practiced in Western society: The freedom to believe and act as we choose so long as our beliefs and actions do not infringe on the equal freedom of others. ~ Michael Shermer

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society. ~ Octavio Paz

Whether [new Protestant church movements] place their emphasis on new worship styles, expressions of the Holy Spirit's power, evangelism to seekers, or Bible teaching, these so-called new movements still operate out of the fallacious assumption that the church belongs firmly in the town square, that is, at the heart of Western culture. And if they begin with this mistaken belief about their position in Western society, all their church planting, all their reproduction will simply mirror this misapprehension. ~ Alan Hirsch

I actually attack the concept of happiness. The idea that - I don't mind people being happy - but the idea that everything we do is part of the pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness. It's a really odd thing that we're now seeing people saying "write down three things that made you happy today before you go to sleep" and "cheer up" and "happiness is our birthright" and so on. We're kind of teaching our kids that happiness is the default position. It's rubbish. Wholeness is what we ought to be striving for and part of that is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure; all of those things which make us who we are. Happiness and victory and fulfillment are nice little things that also happen to us, but they don't teach us much. Everyone says we grow through pain and then as soon as they experience pain they say, "Quick! Move on! Cheer up!" I'd like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word "happiness" and to replace it with the word "wholeness." Ask yourself, "Is this contributing to my wholeness?" and if you're having a bad day, it is. ~ Hugh Mackay

The point of mythology or myth is to point to the horizon and to point back to ourselves: This is who we are; this is where we came from; and this is where we're going. And a lot of Western society over the last hundred years - the last 50 years really - has lost that. We have become rather aimless and wandering. ~ J. Michael Straczynski

The story of women in antiquity should be told now, not only because it is a legitimate aspect of social history, but because the past illuminates contemporary problems in relationships between men and women. ... It is most significant to note the consistency with which some attitudes toward women and the roles women play in Western society have endured through the centuries. ~ Sarah B. Pomeroy

The great principle of Western society is that competition rules here as it rules in everything else. The best man - that is to say, the strongest and cleverest - is likely to get the best woman, in the sense of the most beautiful person. ~ Lafcadio Hearn

We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society. ~ Audre Lorde

The hope for the twentieth century rests on recognition that war and depression are man-made, and needless. They can be avoided in the future by turning from the nineteenth-century characteristics just mentioned (materialism, selfishness, false values, hypocrisy, and secret vices) and going back to other characteristics that our Western Society has always regarded as virtues: generosity, compassion, cooperation, rationality, and foresight, and finding a increased role in human life for love, spirituality, charity, and self discipline. ~ Carroll Quigley

The rule of law does not guarantee freedom, since general law as well as personal edicts can be tyrannical. But increasing reliance on the rule of law clearly played a major role in transforming Western society from a world in which the ordinary citizen was literally subject to the arbitrary will of his master to a world in which the ordinary citizen could regard himself as his own master ~ Milton Friedman

It is understandable if you are struggling to reconcile images of a smooth moving Justin Timberlake singing, "I'm bringing sexy back…" with the experience of working in aged care! Sexy is often everything that aged care is not. But by using the word "sexy" I am not referring to the high octane experience of being intimate with someone. Who knows though, your older adult clients may well want to talk about such things! How senior friendly to encourage this? What I am referring to is bringing the spice or pizzazz associated with respect back to our Western society that appears to have lost its way in valuing seniors. ~ Felicity Chapman

If we recognize the power of entheogenic substances to open us to the universal truth and full dimension of human experience, and if we accept the role of the shaman as hierophant and psychopomp into this realm, as enacted for example by the Huichol mara'akame, we have to conclude that today in Western society we are deprived of two key resources for complete human growth. Young people, in their hunger for meaning, will still gravitate toward entheogens. The more experienced among us may try to ease their journey, but in the absence of qualified guides not all will benefit from their experience. ~ Rick Doblin

There was a time when only specialized Christian missionaries needed to be able to defend the gospel of Jesus Christ against the attacks of Islam. Today every Christian has an opportunity and obligation to present the gospel effectively and in Christian love to the Muslims who have permeated our Western society. When your neighbor, your mechanic, your favorite basketball player, your employer or employee, or even your children's friends could very well be Muslims, the need for proper understanding and an effective Christian witness is abundantly clear. ~ Josh McDowell

In contemporary Western society, death is like white noise to a man in good health; it fills his mind when his dreams and plans fade. With age, the noise becomes increasingly insistent, like a dull roar with the occasional screech. In another age the sound meant waiting for the kingdom of God; it is now an anticipation of death. Such is life. ~ Michel Houellebecq

When I turn on the news in Paris, the way Syria is covered is different from the way it is covered in Washington, D.C., or London. Even in Western society, where we hold all the values of democracy and freedom of speech, as soon as you point a camera in a particular direction, there is an angle - literally and figuratively. ~ Natalie Dormer

I like the analogy that the way that we live in Western Society, the energy that we consume in the form of fossil fuels, is the energy equivalent in pre-fossil fuel terms of having 500 slaves. ~ John Lindsay

i have been told many times by family, friends, colleagues and strangers that I, a black African Muslim lesbian, am not included in this vision; that my dreams are a reflection of my upbringing in a decadent, amoral Western society that has corrupted who I really am. But who am I, really? Am I allowed to speak for myself or must my desires form the battleground for causes I do not care about? My answer to that is simple: 'no one allows anyone anything.' By rejecting that notion you discover that only you can give yourself permission on how to lead your life, naysayers be damned. In the end something gives way. The earth doesn't move but something shifts. That shift is change and change is the layman's lingo for that elusive state that lovers, dreamers, prophets and politicians call 'freedom'. ~ Diriye Osman

Religiosity distinguishes America from most other Western societies. Americans are also overwhelmingly Christian, which distinguishes them from many non-Western peoples. Their religiosity leads Americans to see the world in terms of good and evil to a much greater extent than most other peoples. ~ Samuel P. Huntington

The anxiety prevalent in our day and the succession of economic and political catastrophes our world has been going through are both symptoms of the same underlying cause, namely the traumatic changes occurring in Western society. Fascist and Nazi totalitarianism, for example, do not occur because a Hitler or Mussolini decides to seize power. When a nation, rather, is prey to insupportable economic want and is psychologically and spiritually empty, totalitarianism comes in to fill the vacuum; and the people sell their freedom as a necessity for getting rid of the anxiety which is too great for them to bear any longer. ~ Rollo May

There's a lot of wealth in the world. For the most part in Western society, we've removed the threat of starvation an other life and death issues. Everything should be rosy. But it's not. As I've already noted, there is a rise in the incidence of depression in the Western world that threatens to become an epidemic. Freudian psychology says, 'Analyze them and find out what went wrong in their upbringing, then find a solution and fix them.' Other scientists look at the chemicals in the brain and say, 'Aha, it seems that they are depressed because they do not have enough x. Give them this pill and they will be fine in an hour or so.'

That sort of thinking is like fixing a machine. Find out what's wrong, make the repairs and put it back into service. If it's human, analyze it, decide what's wrong, put it back into the economic machine, keep it going, keep it desiring, keep it working to fulfill it's desires. When it does it will be happy.

NO. Doesn't work.

I know people who have been taking antidepressant medication for years. There's nothing wrong with taking medication to correct an imbalance. The problem occurs if that's all you do. You need to take action to move things forward and change who you are being. ~ A.C. Ping

An economy where advertisers thrive while journalists and artists struggle, reflects the values of a society more interested in deception and manipulation than in truth and beauty ~ Jaron Lanier

The central premise of this book is that the Western psychological notion of what it means to have a self is flawed. ~ Mark Epstein

I'm against unanswerable concentrations of power, whether that be government or private industry or religious figures - anybody who is not accountable to the larger social climate or society for the power they wield, that concerns me. I'm very pro-democracy. ~ Daniel Suarez

There's always a need for new superheroes. As society changes, the types of superheroes will probably change as well. ~ Matt Bomer

Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things. ~ Norman Borlaug

Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

You are an educated man, Old One.'
'What is education besides a conditioning of the mind to a society and a way of life? There are many kinds of education, and often education closes as many doors as it opens for to believe implies disbelief. One accepts one kind of belief but closes the mind to all that is, or seems to be contradictory. ~ Louis L'Amour

The divine science of government is the science of social happiness, and the blessings of society depend entirely on the constitutions of government. ~ John Adams

Politics means implementation of the best ideas for the society in the path of wellbeing and progress. This is the approach that gave the world, leaders of glorious characters such as Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Subhas Chandra Bose (the actual man behind India's Independence), Vasil Levski (the man who liberated Bulgaria from the Ottoman oppression), Nelson Mandela and many more. These people were technically politicians too, but unlike the majority of the politicians of
modern society, their approach to politics was what it should be in a real system of politics. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Democratic societies can't force people. Therefore they have to control what they think. ~ Noam Chomsky

Compassion, acceptance and LOVE is the cure to MOST of the issues that plague this world. ~ Yvonne Pierre

Unlike abortion nobody gets hurt when gays marry but it does have deep implications for what kind of society we want to be. Therefore, individual states should decide the question. ~ Bill O'Reilly

The plain working truth is that it is not only good for people to be shocked occasionally, but absolutely necessary to the progress of society that they should be shocked pretty often. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Those who believe [in Christ] are expected to be different from the world ... they are members of a new society. ~ Billy Graham

Pirates are humans. Just misunderstood humans. ~ Kyleigh Williamson

Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society. ~ John Dewey

My basic position is that the more mixed the society and the more mobility there is in it, the better. That's what makes things interesting. When you get a homogenous society, it's very, very dull, whether that's all working class or all upper class, because everybody thinks the same, everybody looks the same. ~ Jarvis Cocker

A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such. ~ Henry David Thoreau

As we'll see, the greatest shortage in our society is an instinct to produce. ~ Seth Godin

Above all, translators must be native speakers. It's not because they speak the language better
I understand that sometimes a foreigner can learn a language better than native speakers. It has more to do with having an intimate knowledge of the society for which the book is being translated. ~ Sergei Lukyanenko

Thanks to you, Gabs, we just figured out a half dozen ways not to rob the Henley. ~ Ally Carter

I begin with the respect that the anarch shows towards the rules. Respectare as an intensive of respicere means: 'to look back, to think over, to take into account.' These are traffic rules. The anarchist resembles a pedestrian who refuses to acknowledge them and is promptly run down. Even a passport check is disastrous for him.
'I never saw a cheerful end,' as far back as I can look into history. In contrast, I would assume that men who were blessed with happiness – Sulla, for example – were anarchs in disguise. ~ Ernst Junger

Also during this era, writing was considered superior to reading in society. Readers during this time were considered passive citizens, simply because they did not produce a product. Michel de Certeau argued that the elites of the Age of Enlightenment were responsible for this general belief. Michel de Certeau believed that reading required venturing into an author's land, but taking away what the reader wanted specifically. Writing was viewed as a superior art to reading during this period, due to the hierarchical constraints the era initiated. ~ Leo Tolstoy

The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former ... [T]he historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire. ~ Karl Marx

I see much less of an ambition gap and much more of a workplace and society that isn't allowing us to use the talent that is multiplied well beyond this room ... There are millions of women out there who ... need more than, Honey, you can do it if you try hard enough. ~ Anne-Marie Slaughter

Bare-faced covetousness was the moving spirit of civilization from its first dawn to the present day; wealth, and again wealth, and for the third time wealth; wealth, not of society, but of the puny individual, was its only and final aim. ~ Friedrich Engels

In a liberal scientific society, to claim that you are above error is the height of irresponsibility. ~ Jonathan Rauch

Many of the people who consented to talk about their private lives in front of millions of television viewers would say that they were sharing their stories as a way to give comfort [to] fellow sufferers, to raise public awareness, to give a voice to their pain. None of them would ever admit that it was all about ratings and voyeurism and lurid, grotesque curiosity. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

I thought Clint Eastwood was cool in all the western movies, but I'm not gonna drive somewhere he's at and stand in line to see him. I told Missy, my wife, 'The only person I'd stand in line for is God Almighty. You made the universe? All right, I'll get in line!' ~ Jase Robertson

But it (serial television) doesn't remain in the mind. It doesn't produce positive effects in political terms, in ideological terms. My impression is that this extraordinary digital revolution is producing also an extraordinary confusion. ~ Mario Vargas-Llosa

If one has been blessed or have been fortunate enough to have got much more than normal wealth, it is but natural that one expects a certain fiduciary responsibility in terms of how that wealth is applied, used and leveraged for purposes of society. ~ Azim Premji

I hate computers. My hatred is entrenched, and I nourish it daily. I'm comfortable with it, and no community outreach program will change my mind. I hate computers for getting their own section in the New York Times and for lengthening commercials with the mention of a Web site address. Who really wants to find out more about Procter & Gamble? Just buy the toothpaste or laundry detergent, and get on with it. I hate them for creating the word org and I hate them for e-mail, which isn't real mail but a variation of the pointless notes people used to pass in class. I hate computers for replacing the card catalog in the New York Public Library and I hate the way they've invaded the movies. I'm not talking about their contribution to the world of special effects. I have nothing against a well-defined mutant or full-scale alien invasion - that's good technology. I'm talking about their actual presence in any given movie. They've become like horses in a western - they may not be the main focus, but everybody seems to have one. ~ David Sedaris

In principle as a philosophy, a model of organising society, Communism has to be respected. As regards the use of certain methods to advance social justice and greater regulation by the state, there are certain methods that are useful. What we need is a new society, a new civilization and convergence of all that is best in both [Communism and Capitalism] ~ Mikhail Gorbachev

The onus of Connecting rightly, Conceiving brightly, Conveying quietly, and Concluding wisely are the capatencies (capacity and competence) of man ~ Priyavrat Thareja

In the Western standards of modesty, there are different guidelines. ~ Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

The extremists had declared jihad against anyone and anything that challenged their vision of a pure Islamic society, and these artifacts - treatises about logic, astrology, and medicine, paeans to music, poems idealizing romantic love - represented five hundred years of human joy. They celebrated the sensual and the secular, and they bore the explicit message that humanity, as well as God, was capable of creating beauty. They were monumentally subversive. ~ Joshua Hammer

Know then that the arbitrary appropriation by the government of men's property results in the loss of all incentive to gain, when men realize that what they have accumulated will be taken away firom them. A loss of incentive will lead to a slackening in enterprise, the slackening being proportional to the extent and degree of confiscation. Thus if confiscation is widespread, covering all forms of economic activity, there will be a general slackening, owing to the feeling that no branch offers any longer any hope of gain. If however confiscation be mild, there will be only a relatively slight falling off in economic activity.

Now the state of a society and the prosperity of business depend on the intensity of human efforts and the search for gain; should, therefore, men slacken in their economic activity the markets would slump and the state of society deteriorate. People would forsake that country and migrate elsewhere in search of gain, the result being a general depopulation and the desertion of cities. And this deterioration in society would be followed by a weakening of the State, for the State is as the Form whose condition follows that of its Matter, Society. . .

Oppression ruins society, while the ruin of society leads to the weakening and destruction of the State. ~ Ibn Khaldun

I am never long, even in the society of her I love, without yearning for the company of my lamp and my library. ~ Lord Byron

If you're in doubt as to whether or not a question is inappropriate, here's a helpful tip. Ask yourself if you would feel comfortable asking that question to a cisgender person. Generally speaking we as a society don't around asking people about their private parts. They're called private for a reason. ~ Ian Thomas Malone