No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable.
I hate society’s notion that there is something wrong with sex. Something wrong with a woman who loves sex.
Politics I conceive to be nothing more than the science of the ordered progress of society along the lines of greatest usefulness and convenience to itself.
Society does not judge those it admires, they are deified. Yet it so eagerly burn those it fails to understand
No system that implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended any other way but collapse
That which we want less of in society should rarely be privatized and that which we want more of often should be.
The Native American cultures on this continent, most of them, were matrilineal, and some women were the chiefs. Societies were about balance.
Thus the great civilizer sends out its emissaries, sooner or later, to every sandy cape and light-house of the New World which the census-taker visits, and summons the savage there to surrender.
It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.
Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.
The bacteriologist, often risking his life to find cures for lethal afflictions, was another kind of imperial hero, as brave in his way as the soldier-explorer.
After 1968 the restored communist regime required all Czech rock musicians to sit a written exam in Marxism Leninism
Who killed Christianity in Europe? Was it, as (Max) Weber himself predicted, that the spirit of capitalism was bound to destroy the Protestant ethic parents, as materialism corrupted the original aestheticism of the godly?
The real social contract, (Edmund Burke) argued, was not Rousseau's social contract between the noble savage and the General Will, but a "partnership" between the present generation and future generations.
The aristocrats had to force them to do their jobs. After all, human beings are not badgers. We aren't molded to stoop.
This was our language: half-truths, obvious lies, accusations neither one of us would ever make. It was a system eery bit as complicated as Morse code or the dancing of bees. Don't ask, don't tell, stay civil.
Modernity gone wrong has isolated humanity and made human reason autonomous of (and dismissive toward) revelation.
In a massive, long-term study of 17,000 civil servants, an almost unbelievable conclusion emerged: the status of a person's job was more likely to predict their likelihood of a heart attack than obesity, smoking or high blood pressure.
Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because the time is short. Civilization is another word for respect for life...
Every human generation has its own illusions with regard to civilization; some believe they are taking part in its upsurge, others that they are witnesses of its extinction. In fact, it always both flames and smolders and is extinguished, according t...
Leadership must come from all of us -- the private, public, and civil sectors.
