Although images of perfection in people's personal lives can cause unhappiness, images of perfect societies - utopian images - can cause monstrous evil. In fact, forcefully changing society to conform to societal images was the greatest cause of evil in the twentieth century.
Happiness is dependent on self-discipline. We are the biggest obstacles to our own happiness. It is much easier to do battle with society and with others than to fight our own nature.
I think if I hadn't been born in a pit village I'd have been part of a dramatic society.
All the United States, it is a society that is split like to the bottom, that had very poor people in the country that is one of the wealthiest countries.
In many ways, when you're a Nobel peace laureate, you have an obligation to humankind, to society.
The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.
I think falling in love with an older woman is not abnormal. It happens a lot in our society, but it's just that it is not accepted with open arms.
I think we are all interested in end-times ideas and also in the current climate that we are all living in, where money is a little harder to come by, things continue to get expensive; gas prices are not too far from people's heads. There are more and more people. Human society's going to have real problems.
The 'Bohemian Manifesto' represents those that actually have to step out of society because they cannot join, but then they become the saviors of society because they create the actual possibilities of change.
Before we were born, a whole society of storytellers was already here. The storytellers who were here before us taught us how to be human.
The man in our society is the breadwinner; the woman has enough to do as the homemaker, wife and mother.
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
The stage of the development of the productive forces determines the political and ideological superstructure of society which are crystallized into a system of social organization.
Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never forgives preaching of a new gospel.
Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.
Far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents.
Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.
The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama.
Good governance takes behavior that is negative or not helpful to the greater good of society, whether it's polluting behaviour, plastics, or whatever, and taxes the behaviour.
No system of mass surveillance has existed in any society that we know of to this point that has not been abused.
There's a popular concept of 'intelligence' as book smarts, like calculus or chess, as opposed to, say, social skills. So people say that 'it takes more than intelligence to succeed in human society.' But social skills reside in the brain, not the kidneys.
Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.
I was actually quite surprised how many more mythologies there are about mermaids than the ones our society knows. I was so pleasantly surprised for 'Siren' to add quite an original idea to that: One that is a predator. One that is very intelligent but still has to survive in the ocean with all of its challenges.
It is difficult to accept death in this society because it is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, we never see it.
In reality, victims of human trafficking are often left voiceless and completely unseen by society.
Natural disasters are terrifying - that loss of control, this feeling that something is just going to randomly end your life for absolutely no reason is terrifying. But, what scares me is the human reaction to it and how people behave when the rules of civility and society are obliterated.
The women's movement was always going to work in two parts. With one part, we'd break open the doors that were closed to women, and with the other part, we'd walk through, transforming society for men and women. Turns out it was a lot easier to open the doors.
A society whose members are united by the fact that they think in the same way in regard to the sacred world and its relations with the profane world, and by the fact that they translate these common ideas into common practices, is what is called a Church. In all history, we do not find a single religion without a Church.
The individual can maintain himself in a society definitely organized only through possessing an equally definite mental and moral constitution. This is what the neuropath lacks. His state of disturbance causes him to be constantly taken by surprise by circumstances.
Man seeks to learn, and man kills himself because of the loss of cohesion in his religious society; he does not kill himself because of his learning. It is certainly not the learning he acquires that disorganizes religion; but the desire for knowledge wakens because religion becomes disorganized.
I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
I say what I want to say and do what I want to do. There's no in between. People will either love you for it or hate you for it.
The most violent element in society is ignorance.
The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.
I am constantly interested in people who society calls 'bad' because I don't like to just buy into something that everybody's going to say. I want to investigate that for myself. With a character, you get to fully investigate that emotionally and understand the parts of them that are in pain and scared and are good. That's human.
Anti-Semitism is not just a problem for Jews; it is a problem for all of our society.
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.
There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.
It has always been my understanding that the brave men and women who fought and died for our country did so to ensure that we could live in a fair and free society, which includes the right to speak out in protest.
I told our employees several times, 'Let's focus on the end user, let's focus on committing to society, and focus on the crisis and doing the right thing, show our corporate social responsibility.' Don't focus on marketing and sales. That's horrible culture.
I want to make sure I do the right thing for society.
Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.
We have hardly an adequate idea how all-powerful law is in forming public opinion, in giving tone and character to the mass of society.
No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
The Senate is the last primitive society in the world. We still worship the elders of the tribe and honor the territorial imperative.
A vibrant civil society can challenge those in power by documenting corruption or uncovering activities like the murder of political enemies. In democracies, this function is mostly performed by the media, NGOs or opposition parties.
The false prophets of Communism predict a utopian society.
The most important impact on society and the world is the cell phone. Cell phones have actually been one of the primary drivers in productivity improvements.
Women are builders of civil society. We are the ones who are going to build it. You know why? We have no choice. Either you shut up, and you are humiliated, or you do what I'm doing. You scream.