Society Quotations | Page 4

Our essential differences from the norm are both huge and deeply offensive to those among us who wish to be quietly integrated into society without particular reference to our nature.

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.

Muslim communities themselves, as they expect mainstream society to stand down racists, must do more to also stand down the Islamist extremists.

Going into hospitals and being able to meet kids that are in similar situations to those that the characters are facing in the 'Red Band Society' allows us to see the truth of these real humans' lives.

As a society, we've evolved, and we've recognized that the American family structure has undergone enormous changes. Divorce is all around us, and who among us doesn't know someone who is divorced or has been impacted by divorce. It's not as scandalous as it was.

People think that human beings have gotten worse, that because of the pressures that modern society puts on us, we've gotten worse, and we've gotten capable of doing more terrible things. I don't know if I necessarily think that that's true.

My life has been that of someone who has moved from the countryside to the society. To make that transition, I have had to learn a lot.

To overcome poverty and the flaws of the economic crisis in our society, we need to envision our social life. We have to free our mind, imagine what has never happened before and write social fiction. We need to imagine things to make them happen. If you don't imagine, it will never happen.

Foreign journalists writing about Turkey like to focus on the most fundamental divide in Turkish society: the rift between religious conservatives and secularists.

Once a refugee, always a refugee. I can't ever remember not being all right wherever I was, but you don't give your whole allegiance to a place or want to be entirely identified with the society you're living in.

We as artists are actively encouraged - by other authors, your agent, publisher, and society - not to think about money, strategy, how to manage your career, how to create a brand, because we're supposed to focus on the art.

We're building what I call 'software apartheid.' We're in the process of creating a divided society: those who can use technology on one side, and those who can't on the other. And it happens to divide neatly along economic lines.

Basically, an artist should be a mirror, or a reflection of society or his or her environment. What you see is what you can articulate.

Our struggle was political, ideological and economic, and we felt we couldn't make something of ourselves unless we bettered society. We saw the two together.

Why should we build very large spaces when they are not necessary? We can design halls spanning several kilometres and covering a whole city, but we have to ask, what does it really make? What does society really need?

The PGA Tour has a lot of interaction with our military, and I've grown to have an incredible respect for our troops who are coming home with these horrific injuries, as well as any organization that can not only help them get healed up, but help them get integrated back into society.

Being a person who has had plastic surgery and goes to the gym five days a week to work my muscles up so they don't look atrophied as a 60-year-old, I don't disparage people who want to maintain their appearance. But what I don't want is a society that tells me I have to.

Russians clearly perceive America's global influence as being in irreversible decline and American society shattered by major political, economic and ideological crises.

I would say that no film is apolitical. There are politics in all films. Any film that is anchored in a society, any film that deals with humanity is necessarily political.

I don't think the western world is questioning capitalism. Capitalism as a concept is not something that society has written off. But today, there is degree of caution around capitalism. We believe in compassionate capitalism. Growth for growth's sake can never be an end in itself.

'Menace II Society' itself was a groundbreaking film. It's definitely going to go in the vaults of classics in all of cinema. The Hughes Brothers created an incredible project. Just gave the world something a little different than what we had seen in previous films in that same genre.

'Unbroken' was published as a help to society.

We live in a society and a culture and an economic model that tries to make everything look right.

With others, I feel betrayed that those who had the authority in the Church to stop Brendan Smyth failed to act on the evidence I gave them. However, I also accept that I was part of an unhelpful culture of deference and silence in society and the Church, which thankfully is now a thing of the past.

In my personal belief, the big problem with climate change is getting people to understand the magnitude and scale that we're dealing with. If you buy a vehicle that gets 35 miles to the gallon, that means nothing; it's not enough. We need to make changes across society and in every piece of the energy pie.

The gradual decline of a society is often a self-induced process of trying to meet ever-expanding appetites, rather than a physical inability to produce past levels of food and fuel, or to maintain adequate defense.

Through the 'It's About Ability' campaign and with parents and other members of society, we have created a social family for children with disabilities.

I think the ideology of the Congress is closest to mine. Congress is a party where I should be. I have joined politics to bring change in society. The Congress gave me a chance with the Aadhaar project. It's a party that will allow me to bring change.

Dating, like almost every other male-female interaction in present-day society, is based on outmoded and unequal social roles and expectations.

'Hunger Games' is a tried-and-true tale about a totalitarian society. It's more similar to China than America, but it's also similar to Nazi Germany and anywhere where the populace gets semi-brainwashed into serving the agenda of a very few.

If we don't change from a world society that worships money and power to one that worships compassion and generosity, I think we'll be extinct by mid-century. I don't say that as an alarmist or as a pessimist.

People of all political persuasions - conservatives, moderates, and liberals alike - need to dedicate themselves once again to preserving the moral foundation of our society.

One of the things I regret is that too often in our society a person's whole identity is shaped by their sexuality, or by their sexual orientation. In good Catholic eyes, a person's sexual orientation does not matter.

Certainly another Brad Sherman might be annoying, but it isn't something society doesn't know how to deal with. But a new level of human being is something else.

He has the obligation to society that any human being has. I don't think a satirist has any greater obligation to society than a bricklayer or anybody else.

I don't look at our society today too much. My focus is still in the past, and part of the reason is because what I do - the wellspring of art, or what I do - l get from the blues. So I listen to the music of a particular period that I'm working on, and I think inside the music is clues to what is happening with the people.

Our society is intertwined with the economy that we've built, which is a fantastically complex system. I hope that my writing about it might do some good, but that's not why I do it.

My wife and I, we started a foundation about companion animal rescue, but there's a group called Performing Animal Welfare Society just outside of Sacramento... and they offered me a job as an elephant keeper.

We need a mobilized and active civil society using its purchasing power to demand sustainable products and practices. It is also essential that governments commit to the future, creating fiscal and regulatory conditions for sustainable policies to thrive.

It is incumbent upon each of us to improve spending and savings practices to ensure our own individual financial security and preserve the collective economic well-being of our great society.

For many centuries Chinese society has been free of class distinctions such as are found even in advanced democracies.

It did not occur to us that the Marxists' solution was fraudulent or that their vision was distorted, that whatever the wrongs in our society it was not the ideology of theirs that will cure them.

The idea is, we're still a society where we recognize and see and even sometimes seek members of our own tribe, whatever that tribe is. It could be ethnic, religious, geographic, political.

Sweden is a great country. What is not so great is that we have a society that, in a way, says it's great if you don't look right, if you don't look left, if you just look straight forward.

A radical inner transformation and rise to a new level of consciousness might be the only real hope we have in the current global crisis brought on by the dominance of the Western mechanistic paradigm.

Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.

An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.

I am absolutely opposed to a national ID card. This is a total contradiction of what a free society is all about. The purpose of government is to protect the secrecy and the privacy of all individuals, not the secrecy of government. We don't need a national ID card.

I don't know if anybody thought about how much impact the iPhone could have on society.

There are a lot of different ways of building a prosperous society, and some of them use much less energy than others. And it is possible and more practical to talk about rebuilding systems to use much less energy than it is to think about trying to meet greater demands of energy through clean energy alone.

You go down to Skid Row and you see literally hundreds of people and not just men, but women and children as well. It's really a tragedy that our society has come to that.

Why are fanatics so terrified of girls' education? Because there's no force more powerful to transform a society. The greatest threat to extremism isn't drones firing missiles, but girls reading books.

The British system denied any role for human creativity, and instead argued, that if man merely followed his hedonistic desires, pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, objective laws would naturally guide society to achieve the best allocation of wealth.

The Society of American Civil Engineers, someone who's going to come in and say to the public, we've looked at, we've examined, we've reviewed the repairs and we think they're strong enough to withstand the type of hurricane that - that could hit the city this season.

I've read crime fiction all my life. A thing that's bothered me about crime fiction is that it's generally about one or two people, but there's not much about society. I want to get away from that particular pattern: a lead, a supporting role and backdrop characters.

By simply capitalizing on core strengths and knowledge, companies and entrepreneurs can engage in an emerging business model that will enable them to create - and demonstrate - real, sustainable social impact in society.

I use the term 'disabled people' quite deliberately, because I subscribe to what's called the social model of disability, which tells us that we are more disabled by the society that we live in than by our bodies and our diagnoses.

America still has the right stuff to thrive. We still have the most creative, diverse, innovative culture and open society - in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage.

The reality is that Israel is a multi-ethnic, multireligious society, and it makes no sense to insist as a precondition for peace that its neighbors recognize it as 'the Jewish state.'

A painter, a sculptor, a writer, they can express freely. They don't affect society as a whole. We build buildings that have a purpose, that stay there for hundreds of years or decades.

The poverty one still sees in America today is more shocking to me than anything I have seen in Ethiopia or Calcutta or Manila, and has made me, as someone living in a society of great wealth and someone who's never had to worry about the next meal, think seriously about what universal responsibility really means.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

A museum is like a valuing machine. Museums and the industrial society started at the same moment, and they're really tied into each other. They've been all about displaying objects and the kind of wealth that can be derived from objects and promoting that point.

Our failure as a society to properly acknowledge and confront the psychological, social, and political effects of white privilege has perpetuated racial inequality and race-based political resentments.

There is no Constitutional right to prey on others. The Internet is just a piece of technology, like the telephone. Society has the right to modify its uses.

I'm always looking for a cover subject that reflects the magazine, an interest in fashion, in culture, in society. We're trying to bring the world into the pages of 'Vogue.' We do that by tapping into the zeitgeists with our cover subjects.

To be compassionate is not a joke. It's not that simple. One has to discover a certain bigness in oneself. That bigness should be centered on oneself, not in terms of money, not in terms of power you wield, not in terms of any status that you can command in the society, but it should be centered on oneself.

Some boys accepted me, some didn't. And my family had comments made to them. Brazil is still a very macho society, and sports are mainly for boys, so people would say to them: 'What is this girl doing? Why is she always out there in the soccer games with the boys?'

Unless technology itself is drastically repressed, the idea of the dystopian monoculture like Orwell's 1984 gets harder to believe. But the danger of a solipsistic society will grow, of a disconnected society of mirror-watchers and navel-gazers.

If we were in India now, there would be servants standing in the corners of this room and I wouldn't notice them. That is what my society is like, that is what the divide is like.

Any atrocity that's committed against one person affects us all, and we are becoming more of one society, of a global society, so something that happens in the Middle East or something that happens in Africa, something that happens in Asia, affects all of us.

The biggest abuses in society happen when people are not able to communicate and not able to connect.

The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.

I believe we need more culturally diverse books - about disabled characters, though not about their disability, about people with different sexual orientations, or a boy who is a cross-dresser. We need to reflect the diversity of our society.

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'll never understand how destroying families through deportation benefits our society. How we treat the undocumented says a great deal about us as a people and whether or not we'll continue to fulfill the fundamental American promise of equality and opportunity for all.

There is no better gift a society can give children than the opportunity to grow up safe and free - the chance to pursue whatever dreams they may have.

When I grew up in the Bronx, we always had everyone telling us, 'Watch out for the system, watch out for child welfare, watch out, they'll get you,' and I grew up with this feeling of, 'Society is over there and they're dangerous and not safe.'

Much of the misgiving that Muslims feel for the West stems from our strong emphasis on freedom, always a risky enterprise. I've heard some say they would rather rear their children in a closely guarded Islamic society than in the United States, where freedom so often leads to decadence.

There are contradictory tendencies in American society. There's a huge range of activities that one can engage in that mark it as a quite free society. It's also true to say that the powers that be have so much control over how people think that there are fewer and fewer people who make use of the rights and information available to them.

I think science fiction helps us think about possibilities, to speculate - it helps us look at our society from a different perspective. It lets us look at our mores, using science as the backdrop, as the game changer.

We've organized ourselves as cultures, to a large degree, around what we agree we know. And when you have multiple ways of knowing, multiple ways of organizing, the society loses one of its deepest organizational principles.

When our bodies are sick and people extend their sympathy, bring us soup, offer up solutions. When our minds are sick, people tend to shy away from you, be afraid, or call you outright crazy. I'm fascinated by the way society and individuals view mental illness, and most of my shorts comment on that.

The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of diminution of personality.

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 events as possible to help keep this in focus.

The outstanding truths of life, the great and unquestioned phenomena of society, are not to be argued away as myths and vagaries when they do not fit within our little moulds. If necessary, we must remake the moulds.

I am no historian, but Hungary is a country which has never known democracy - and by that, I mean not a democratic political system, but an organic process which has mobilised the entire country's society. In the case of Hungary, this development was blocked by the growth of the Ottoman empire in the 16th century.

'Illustrado' is not an autobiography. Only the ideas are autobiographical; the ideas of bitterness, frustration, unchanging society, an individual lost, social awkwardness... The book satirises archetypes from across Filipino society, and I felt that the least I could do was offer myself up, too.

The danger is not so much in the economic structure of a society but in its intellectual structure.

Imagine a society in which there were neither rich nor poor. What evils, afflictions, sorrows, disorders, catastrophes, disasters, tribulations, misfortunes, agonies, calamities, despair, desolation and ruin would be unknown to man!

You should be watching 'Red Band Society' because it's a show that inspires us to live. I feel like you'll get connected to these characters, and they teach you something that you can apply to your daily life.

I get to teach my daughter what I've learned. I don't want her to feel she has to be a certain way to impress society. If she wants to spit or go play some ball, I'll be so proud, because that's who I am, and that's a real person.

We need to walk into the future, no matter how unnerving, with open eyes if society is to keep pace with technology.

I'm an artist with a message, and my message is more for society, casting the mirror onto them and saying, 'Hey, this is what we look like, what are we going to do about it, how are we going to use what we've been through to aid where we're going.'

I've got a soft spot for Theatr Colwyn because my granddad used to run the Colwyn amateur dramatic society in the 1930s.

When public figures remain silent about depression, there is a cost to the rest of society. Silence contributes to the misperception that successful people do not get depressed, and it keeps the public from seeing that treatment allows many individuals to return to competitive professional lives.

Financial inclusion helps lift people out of poverty and can help speed economic development. It can draw more women into the mainstream of economic activity, harnessing their contributions to society.

I believe there is a relationship between having an interest in the arts and the behaviour of society as a whole. Some politicians find it difficult that the arts is a weapon of happiness... Politics is often about deprivation rather than the opening up of ideas and nourishing creative endeavour.

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.

Sectarian divide has created a schism in our society that is a major challenge. As monarch of all Bahrainis, it pains me to see many harmed by the actions of a few. And yet I am optimistic and have faith in our people. We all realize that now is the time to strike a balance between stability and gradual reform.