Our Society Quotes - Page 20

• One problem with our current society is that we have an attitude towards education as if it is there to simply make you more clever, make you more ingenious... Even though our society does not emphasize this, the most important use of knowledge and education is to help us understand the importance of engaging in more wholesome actions and bringing about discipline within our minds. The proper utilization of our intelligence and knowledge is to effect changes from within to develop a good heart.

  Dalai Lama

  Inspirational, Attitude, Clever

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• At the moment our human world is based on the suffering and destruction of millions of non-humans. To perceive this and to do something to change it in personal and public ways is to undergo a change of perception akin to a religious conversion. Nothing can ever be seen in quite the same way again because once you have admitted the terror and pain of other species you will, unless you resist conversion, be always aware of the endless permutations of suffering that support our society.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Religious, Pain, Support

  Attributed to Arthur Conan Doyle in "The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food" by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, 2009.

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• Human life is something that comes to us from beyond this world, and the purpose of our society is to cherish it and to enable the individual to attain the highest achievement of which he is capable

  Harry S. Truman

  Achievement, World, Purpose

  United States. President (1945-1953 : Truman), Harry S. Truman (1961). “Harry S. Truman: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, 1945-53”

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• People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power. The only thing we should respect in a person’s faith is his desire for a better life in this world; we need never have respected his certainty that one awaits him in the next.

  Sam Harris

  Strong, People, Desire

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.225, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I am inviting you to go deeper, to learn and to practice so that you become someone who has a great capacity for being solid, calm, and without fear, because our society needs people like you who have these qualities, and your children, our children, need people like you, in order to go on, in order to become solid, and calm, and without fear.

  Nhat Hanh

  Children, Order, Practice

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• The more I write, the more I've come to realize that books have a different place in our society than other media. Books are different from television or film because they ask you to finish the project. You have to be actively engaged to read a book. It's more like a blueprint. What it really is, is an opportunity... A book is a place where you're forced to use your imagination. I find it disappointing that you're not being asked to imagine more.

  Joe Meno

  Book, Writing, Opportunity

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• Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if we're ever going to be at peace with each other...the good that flows from it will shape our societies in an unprogrammed, unforeseen way, under the control of no single group of people or set of ideas.

  Ian Mcewan

  Ideas, People, Design

  "Black Dogs". Book by Ian McEwan, December 29, 1998.

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• a revolutionary in every bedroom cannot fail to shake up the status quo. And if it is your wife that is revolting, you can't just split to the suburbs. Feminism, when it truly achieves it's goals, will crack through the most basic structures of our society.

  Shulamith Firestone

  Goal, Wife, Feminism

  SHULAMITH FIRESTONE (1970). “THE DIALECTIC OF SEX: THE CASE FOR FEMINIST REVOLUTION”

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• There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. That one of the biggest transformations we have seen in human life in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. That we must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.

  Philip K. Dick

  Secret, Important, Modern Life

  "Philip K. Dick: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations".

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• There is a strange taboo in our society against ending something merely because it is not pleasant-- life, love, a conversation, you name it, the etiquette is that you must begin in ignorance & persevere in the face of knowledge, & though I naturally believe that this is profoundly wrong it's not nice to go around constantly offending people.

  Helen DeWitt

  Nice, Believe, Love Life

  Helen DeWitt (2016). “The Last Samurai”, p.136, New Directions Publishing

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• What I am suggesting is that each of us turn from the negativism that permeates our society and look for the remarkable good among those with whom we associate, that we speak of one another’s virtues more than we speak of one another’s faults, that optimism replace pessimism, that our faith exceed our fears. When I was a young man and was prone to speak critically, my father would say: “Cynics do not contribute, skeptics do not create, doubters do not achieve.

  Gordon B. Hinckley

  Happiness, Father, Positive Thinking

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• I know it's not good to be weak and helpless. But I don't think it's good to be too strong either. In our society, they talk about survival of the fittest. But we're not animals. We're human.

  Natsuki Takaya

  Strong, Thinking, Animal

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• Average is very acceptable in our society but I don't think the angels are applauding. If you are determined to be excellent, to not back out of it, you will reap a harvest in your life.

  Joyce Meyer

  Angel, Thinking, Average

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• ...the greatest shortage in our society is an instinct to produce. To create solutions and hustle them out the door. To touch the humanity inside and connect to the humans in the marketplace.

  Seth Godin

  Doors, Humanity, Hustle

  Seth Godin (2010). “Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?”, p.89, Penguin

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• [There] are people who make a complete and utter mockery of 'democracy' and 'equality' - they're the casualties of the primitive rules of competition which run our society, and the welfare state just keeps them alive. That's all.

  Michael Palin

  Running, People, Competition

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• Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. ... One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him. This is what our society needs - not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can be, that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves.

  Rollo May

  Running, Exercise, Men

  "Man's Search for Himself" by Rollo May, (p. 56), 1953.

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• ....I understood why those who had lived through war or economic disasters, and who had built for themselves a good life and a high standard of living, were rightly proud to be able to provide for their children those things which they themselves had not had. And why their children, inevitably, took those things for granted. It meant that new values and new expectations had crept into our societies along with new standards of living. Hence the materialistic and often greedy and selfish lifestyle of so many young people in the Western world, especially in the United States.

  Jane Goodall

  Children, Good Life, Selfish

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• The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Facts, Poor, Philanthropist

  Barbara Ehrenreich (2010). “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America”, p.221, Macmillan

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• The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Latin, School

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• We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing.

  Natalie Goldberg

  Writing, Self, Ego

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• It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I'm worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Atheist, Civilization

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• We now have the liberal playbook and we know what they are doing, and we are using it against them. Unlike the Democrats though, we aren't out to destroy our society, we are out to save it.

  Mark Levin

  Democrat, Playbooks, Knows

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• What I am trying to do when I use symbols is to awaken in your unconscious some reaction. I am very conscious of what I am using because symbols can be very dangerous. When we use normal language we can defend ourselves because our society is a linguistic society, a semantic society. But when you start to speak, not with words, but only with images, the people cannot defend themselves.

  Alejandro Jodorowsky

  People, Trying, Use

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• The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time; our sense of that, not a disinterested love of science, and certainly not wisdom, is why we devote such a huge proportion of the ingenuity and income of our societies to finding faster ways of doing things - as if the final aim of mankind was to grow closer not to a perfect humanity, but to a perfect lightning-flash.

  John Fowles

  Time, Perfect, Humanity

  JOHN FOWLES (1969). “THE FRENCH LIEUTENTANT'S WOMAN”

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• I feel about Photoshop the way some people feel about abortion. It is appalling and a tragic reflection on the moral decay of our society…unless I need it, in which case, everybody be cool.

  Tina Fey

  Reflection, People, Abortion

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