I was making films about American society, and it is true that I never felt at home there, except perhaps when my wife and I lived on a farm in the San Fernando Valley.
I started 'Society's Child' on a bus in East Orange as I was going home from school. I saw a black and white couple sitting there and started thinking about it.
I hope my organization will not be around in 10 years, because at a national, state, and community level, we will have evolved into a society that cares about children and the need for play.
What we hope to achieve is a society that doesn't value a white man because he's a white man, but also doesn't value a woman because she's a woman, or a black because he's a black.
The industrial society... recognises nothing except the power to acquire... No other kind of hope or satisfaction or pleasure can any longer be envisaged within the culture of capitalism.
Happiness is a real, objective phenomenon, scientifically verifiable. That means people and whole societies can now be measured over time and compared accurately with one another. Causes and cures for unhappiness can be quantified.
The philosophical point is that our happiness and wellbeing is not based on incomes rising. This is not just the wisdom of sages but of ordinary people. Prosperity is more social and psychological: it's about identification, affiliation, participatio...
Poverty is not the simple result of bad geography, bad culture, bad history. It's the result of us: of the ways that people choose to organize their societies.
Marriage is a core institution of societies throughout the world and throughout history. It's something that has provided permanence and stability for our very social structure.
Terrorism takes us back to ages we thought were long gone if we allow it a free hand to corrupt democratic societies and destroy the basic rules of international life.
Nothing in our evolutionary history specifically prepared us to live in large societies. Almost everything about the way culture works does.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world - and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East - is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn't there. It has to do with history.
History shows, in my opinion, that no nation can survive the tension, conflict and antagonism of two competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; it is a curse for a society to be bilingual.
Indeed, one of the most successful and influential religious organizations in history, the Society of Jesus, was consciously modeled along military lines by its founder, Ignatius Loyola.
If history judges society for how it treats those in need, so markets judge economies by the incentives they provide for private investment, the infrastructure that supports growth, and the burdens placed on job creation.
I believe in the power of intention to change the landscape of our society - and it is my intention to live an authentic life of compassion and integrity and action. Jamey Rodemeyer's life changed mine.
A lot of journalists like to suck up to celebrities, and then as soon as they're a safe distance away at their computers, they take shots. But that's the way society has become, especially in pop culture.
We've become such a multitasking society that just paying attention to the road doesn't seem to be that important anymore. I have to remind my kids all the time that that's what you're supposed to be doing in the car.
In our racist, sexist society, Christmas is the 8 hours when we stop killing each other and gratutious over eating is encouraged so that the starving and other people in the world can die!
In our racist, sexist society, Christmas is the eight hours when we stop killing each other and gratuitous overeating is encouraged so that the starving and other people in the world can die!
