Quotes about Society
We should not seek immortality in reproduction. But if you contribute to the world`s culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a spark plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool.
We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.
The world isn`t run by the laws written on paper. It`s run by people. Some according to laws, others not. It depends on each individual how his world will be, how he makes it. And you also need a whole lot of luck, so that somebody else doesn`t make your life hell. And it ain`t as simple as they tell you in grade school. But it is good to have strong values and to maintain them. In marriage, in crime, in war, always and everywhere.
I believe in no God, no invisible man in the sky. But there is something more powerful than each of us, a combination of our efforts, a Great Chain of industry that unites us. But it is only when we struggle in our own interest that the chain pulls society in the right direction. The chain is too powerful and too mysterious for any government to guide. Any man who tells you different either has his hand in your pocket, or a pistol to your neck.
The more civilized we become, the more relatively ignorant must each individual be of the facts on which the working of his civilization depends.
What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.
It is only with true love and compassion that we can begin to mend what is broken in the world.
Imagine, a room, awash in gasoline. And there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has 9,000 matches. The other has 7,000 matches. Each of them is concerned about who`s ahead, who`s stronger. Well, that`s the kind of situation we are actually in.
When people don't have to worry about having their basic needs met, they care a lot more about having products and leaders that represent who they are.
Without connections and overlap between communities, subcultures that make up the city don't evolve. As a result, the ghettos breed stagnation and intolerance.
The measure of how free a society is is not how it treats its good, obedient, compliant citizens, but how it treats its dissidents and those who resist orthodoxy.
All of us (...) are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.