Quotes about Society

Science requires us to be freed of gross superstition and gross injustice both. Often, superstition and injustice are imposed by the same ecclesiastical and secular authorities, working hand in glove. It is no surprise that political revolutions, scepticism about religion, and the rise of science might go together.

However, in part for reasons of organizational convenience, modern societies are structured as if all humans had the same sleep requirements; and in many parts of the world there is a satisfying sense of moral rectitude in rising early. The amount of sleep required for buffer dumping would then depend on how much we have both thought and experienced since the last sleep period.

A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing

Taken together, the dramatic societal shifts — often in ten generations or less — provide a compelling refutation of the claim that we are condemned, without hope of reprieve, to live out our lives in a barely disguised chimpanzee social order.

If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can smile and blossom like a flower, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace.

Each of us is a product of our family, environment, friends, education, culture, and society. These conditions lead to a certain way of seeing things and a certain way of responding to things. When we see this, we have compassion for everyone, including ourselves. We see that if we want something to change, we also have to help change his or her family, environment, friends, education, culture, and society. We are responsible, directly or indirectly, for each person's consciousness attitudes.

We may have suffered a lot because of our attachment to those things, but we don't have the courage to release them; it doesn't feel safe to do so. But it may be that we continue to suffer because of our attachment to those things. It may be a person, a material object, or a position in society, anything. We think that without that person or thing we will not be safe, and that is why we're caught by it.

As a culture, we place great stock in external appearance. Our attachment to physical beauty is something that we need to let go of, yet it seems that the majority of people are racing toward it.

Each of us, for the most part, continues his daily life, contributing to the maintenance and consolidation of the machinery of production and consumption. We eat, drink, work, and divert ourselves, as if nothing is going to happen.

So many individuals, children, couples, and families have been destroyed by sexual misconduct. To practice the Third Precept is to heal ourselves and heal our society. This is mindful living.

Inquest juries frequently linked suicide to cheap literature. When a twelve-year-old servant boy hanged himself in Brighton in 1892, the jury delivered a verdict of 'suicide during temporary insanity, induced by reading trashy novels'. When a twenty-one-year-old farm labourer in Warwickshire shot himself in the head in 1894, the coroner suggested that the fifty penny dreadfuls found in his room had had 'an unhinging and mesmeric effect' upon his mind.