I've worked in the prison system, on death row and maximum security. I did that work for six years. I've worked with some of the most difficult people in our society. Buddhism was accessible and helpful for these individuals.
Look at our society. Everyone wants to be thin, but nobody wants to diet. Everyone wants to live long, but few will exercise. Everybody wants money, yet seldom will anyone budget or control their spending.
Our society's strong emphasis on dieting and self-image can sometimes lead to eating disorders. We know that more than 5 million Americans suffer from eating disorders, most of them young women.
I think that every child grows up with the ideas that what we are given, is our society. Your education, and your mother and father, they tell you this is how it is, but then you hit adolescence and you think, 'Is it? Why? Why is it like that?' Somet...
The popular story is that America was built by immigrants and that, therefore, everything about immigration is good and leads to a more successful society. This narrative is so devoid of historical context that it should embarrass anyone beyond a sec...
Many thousands of youth have been deprived of the benefit of education thereby, their morals ruined, and talents irretrievably lost to society, for want of cultivation: while two parties have been idly contending who should bestow it.
I'm a latecomer to the environmental issue, which for years seemed to me like an excuse for more government regulation. But I can see that in rich societies, voters are paying less attention to economic issues and more to issues of the spirit, includ...
I think it is important that you have people from all different vanguards, from all different walks of society and different viewpoints to be focused on the struggle for equality and democracy. We need as many champions for the cause and as many even...
The disturbed individual who believes himself to be Christ, or to receive messages from God, is something of a cliche in our society. Ever since Sigmund Freud, many people have associated religiosity with neurosis and mental illness.
In the 1990s, it's OK to do comedy about the Chernobyl disaster or the Space Shuttle blowing up. It's acceptable to ridicule the Pope or the President of the United States, but God forbid you do a joke... about gays. The gay community is the last sac...
When I got out of acting school, I was lucky to have gotten any job at all. A lot of people hiring African American actresses - it was right after 'Roots,' and for society, not me, it was great. Nice richly dark-skinned people was the fashion, and I ...
We're a diverse society, and I think the TV is doing a great job in showing that we're all human beings, that we can all get along, that we can all be together, and I think that's a marvelous thing.
I think it's great that we have organisations like Greenpeace. In a pluralistic society, we want to have people who point out all the problems that the Earth could encounter. But we need to understand that they are not presenting a full and rounded v...
Our society has changed in unforeseeable ways since Social Security was created. For example, we are living longer, healthier, and more productive lives and while this is all great news, this has also placed added pressure on America's retirement sys...
If liberalism discredited itself, Obama woulda never gotten elected, and the New Deal woulda gone by the wayside, and LBJ woulda never gotten the Great Society. Liberalism does not discredit itself. It has to be explained and beaten back.
In a world of democracies, in a world where the great projects that have set humanity on fire are the projects of the emancipation of individuals from entrenched social division and hierarchy; in such a world individuals must never be puppets or pris...
It may sound too good to be true, but once you've seen the happiest people in your life who have nothing, you really start rethinking what the world, and society, tells us that we need to be happy.
What I work hard at doing is staying on a path of being kind and showing and proving that I'm a good person to society. That's hard. The talent, that's a gift. I just came here like that.
All of us in society are supposed to believe that cruelty to animals is wrong and that it is a good thing to prevent needless suffering. So if that is true, how can meat be acceptable under any but the most extraordinary circumstances, such as perhap...
I believe that communal admiration of individuals is healthy for society. It facilitates, in one way, the base of our universal standard, morals, but also publicly espouses the virtue of certain practices that are kind of like 'inherently good' in so...
People, for reasons of their own, often fail to do things that would be good for them or good for society. Those failures - joined with the similar failures of others - can readily have a substantial effect on interstate commerce.
