Quotes about Society

Let us concede at the outset that, in a free society, freedom will frequently be used badly. Freedom, by definition, includes freedom to do good or evil, to act nobly or basely. Thus we should not be surprised that there is a considerable amount of vice, licentiousness, and vulgarity in a free society. Given the warped timber of humanity, freedom is simply an expression of human flaws and weaknesses. But if freedom brings out the worst in people, it also brings out the best.

When you build a city near no mountains and no ocean, you get materialism and traditional religion. People have too much time and lack inspiration.

Jesus had no regard for the lifeboat politics you and I live within every day.

The problem with Christian belief—-I mean real christian belief, the belief that there is a God and a devil and a heaven and a hell--is that it is not a fashionable thing to believe.

When you know how a nation deals with the Bible you may generally know what a nation is.

Heaven is a prepared place, and those who go to heaven must be a prepared people. Our hearts must be in tune for the business of heaven, or else we would find heaven itself a miserable place to live. Our minds must be in harmony with those of the inhabitants of heaven, or else the society of heaven would soon be unbearable to us.

We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.

Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.

There is no horizontal stratification of society in this country like the rocks in the earth, that hold one class down below forevermore, and let another come to the surface to stay there forever. Our stratification is like the ocean, where every individual drop is free to move, and where from the sternest depths of the mighty deep any drop may come up to glitter on the highest wave that rolls.

Our society is illuminated by the spiritual insights of the Hebrew prophets. America and Israel have a common love of human freedom, and they have a common faith in a democratic way of life.

Organized crime constitutes nothing less than a guerilla war against society.

The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.