It takes all kinds of people to make the human race
And everyone fits in their own way
All men, no matter how confined to their habitat or surrounded by a dogmatic society will, unless being daily heavily indoctrinated, eventually discover the laws of physics. If only out of boredom.
It is a double-edged makeshift to entrust an individual or a group of individuals with the authority to resort to violence. The enticement implied is too tempting for a human being. The men who are to protect the community against violent aggression easily turn into the most dangerous aggressors. They transgress their mandate. They misuse their power for the oppression of those whom they were expected to defend against oppression. The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty. The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek πá½¹λις [city-state] down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders.
Call it the fault of civilization.God isn't compatible with macinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilizaition has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness. That's why I have to keep these books locked up in the safe. They're smut. People would be shocked if...
What is the best government? – That which teaches us to govern ourselves.
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success.
Of all the self-fulfilling prophecies in our culture, the assumption that aging means decline and poor health is probably the deadliest.
How do we serve society? We serve society by good jobs. We serve society by creating wealth for people. We also mostly serve society by creating great services and products for customers.
If you don't have a moral question in your governing process, then you don't have a process that's gonna survive.
All I know is, if you listen to society, you'll never get anywhere!
"Society is composed of two great classes: those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners."
School is indeed training for later life not because it teaches the 3 Rs (more or less), but because it instills the essential cultural nightmare of failure, envy of success, and absurdity.
We should learn from the war and welfare century that the greatest discovery in Western civilization was that liberty could be achieved only through the proper and effective limitation on the power of the state. It is this limitation on the power of the state which protects private property, a free-market economy, personal liberties and promotes a noninterventionist foreing policy, which, if coupled with a strong national defense, will bring peace and prosperity instead of war and welfare. It is not democracy per se which protects freedom.
Only a society based on fear needs money.
Retarded and infantile societies fear loss of possessions, status and cling to material advantage; whereas cultivated and advanced peoples fear loss of freedom, justice and peace.
The Kingdom of God is a Society of the best men and women, working for the best ends, according to the best methods. It's membership is a multitude whom no man can number; it's methods are as various as human nature; its field is the world. It is a commonwealth, yet it honors a King; it is a Social Brotherhood, but it acknowldeges the Fatherhood of God. Though not a philosophy the world turns to it for light; though not Political it is the incubator of all great laws. It is more human than the State, for it deals with deeper needs; more Catholic than the Church, for it inlcudes whom the Church rejects. It is a Propaganda, yet it works not by agitation of ideals. It is a Religion, yet it holds the worship of God to be mainly the service of man. Though not a Scientific Society its watchword is Evolution; though not an Ethic, it possesses the Sermon of the Mount. This mysterious Society owns no wealth but distributes fortunes. It has no minutes for history keeps them; no member's roll for no one could make it. It's entry-money is nothing; its subscription, all you have The Society never meets and it never adjourns. Its law is one word--loyalty; its Gospel one message -- love. Verily "Whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it."
In the Quest for greater states of Union with the Divine, Awareness is the first contract one has with the social whole.
All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.'
People speak of "the public interest." But what is the public interest? Strictly speaking, there is no such thing. There is only the interest of each individual human being. There are interests that many or all people share, but these are still the interests of individuals. When politicians say that something is "to the public interest," they usually mean it serves the interests of some people but goes against the interests of others -- and usually the interests of the people with the most political pull win out. Is it to the public interest for some to be forced to die so that others may be saved? Is it to the public interest for a hundred crazed men to lynch one man in the public square? Is it to the public interest for all the citizens of the nation to be taxed to pay for a federal dam in one section of it? In Sweden it takes a couple eight years on the average before they can obtain an apartment of their own (owned by the government, rented by them); but they are not supposed to complain, because "it's in the public interest." Just as there are only individual rights, so there are only individual interests.
"What we now want is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth... and the elimination of egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife."
It's a mystery to me;
We have a greed, with which we have agreed.
You think you have to want more than you need.
Until you have it all, you won't be free.
what good is society if it's of no use to me?
Susie didn't get very excited when I told her we were going to get rich. She either didn't care or didn't believe me - probably both, in fact. But to the extent we did amass wealth, we were totally in sync about what to do with it - and that was to give it back to society.
In that, we agreed with Andrew Carnegie, who said that huge fortunes that flow in large part from society should in large part be returned to society. In my case, the ability to allocate capital would have had little utility unless I lived in a rich, populous country in which enormous quantities of marketable securities were traded and were sometimes ridiculously mispriced. And fortunately for me, that describes the U.S. in the second half of the last century.
Society evolves not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.
When people don't understand the principles of government or understand the execution of the process of government, government suffers at the hand of popular misconception.
Indisputably we live in a shaped reality, an artificialism. Most people who grasp this are thinking only at a consumer-level, of the "things" they like and need and feel impelled to acquire. But our societal and political arrangements are just as much manipulations of game-pieces and rules as is any Atari or Sega product. The subliminal psychology that drives people to become addicted to games, not to be able to see over the edges of their labyrinths, is transferable to any field whatsoever.
"Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute."
As we grow older, we learn to pay attention to things that society considers more real and significant than the loving care of all those people. According to the social discourse around us, it seems much more important to identify those whom we should hate, fear, or compete with for affirmation, power, and wealth. Meanwhile, television news and magazines focus our communal attention each day on the horrible things that some people have done to others, as if that is all that happened throughout the entire world that day.
When individuals and groups do not experience being loved -- when whole communities lose hope that anyone cares -- fear and violence are often seized upon as seeming protectors in the form of gangs, mobs, and communal hostility.
