Quotes & Sayings About Social Ills

Medicine and society have entered into a folie a deaux regarding medicine's importance in gigantic population ills. We believe that genetics and pills and enzymes bring us health. We wait for the dementia cure (the obesity cure, the diabetes cure) rather than changing our society to decrease incidence and severity. We slash social welfare programs and access to GPs and ignore the downstream effect this will have on future generations.
To reduce non-communicable disease, the actions we need to take are societal: make it easier for people to move and eat well, strengthen education, promote community participation and meaningful work. Our collective delusion is that we can have all the benefits such a society would bring without the structural supports necessary to bring it into being, that we can attain health by inventing and buying drugs.
It is hard to know which is the more utopian vision: magic pills or a society serious about prevention. — Karen Hitchcock

Social ills: teenage pregnancy, gangs, children with behavioral problems. All these things can be alleviated if kids got more physical activity for starters. — Edwin Moses

It appears fashionable these days, and almost politically correct, to blame hard-working immigrants, especially those from Mexico and Central America, for the social and economic ills of our state and nation. — Roger Mahony

Too many members of Congress believe they can solve all economic problems, cure all social ills, and bring about worldwide peace and prosperity simply by creating new federal programs. — Ron Paul

The church that preaches the gospel in all of its fullness, except as it applies to the great social ills of the day, is failing to preach the gospel. — Martin Luther

But she did inject a new term and new degree of frankness into the debate on what was coming to be called the sexual revolution. Also, by this time she saw birth control as the panacea for all social ills: disease, poverty, child labor, poor wages, infant mortality, the oppression of women, drunkenness, prostitution, abortion, feeblemindedness, physical handicaps, unwanted children, war, etc. "If we are to develop in America a new [human] race with a racial soul, we must keep the birth rate within the scope of our ability to understand as well as to educate. We must not encourage reproduction beyond our capacity to assimilate our numbers so as to make the coming generation into such physically fit, mentally capable, socially alert individuals as are the ideal of a democracy" (Sanger, 1920). — David B. McCoy

I've never understood the need people have to dictate morality to other people. I really don't know what it is. I don't know if it's fear or the belief that they know the only right way. Or maybe they see a lot of social ills and social decline, and they really think they have the elixir for it. — Stephen Chbosky

Most of the social and political ills from which you suffer are under your control, given only the will and courage to change them. You can live in another and a wiser fashion if you choose to think it out and work it out. You are not awake to your own power. — H.G.Wells

Like almost every major infrastructure, the Internet can be abused and its users harmed. We must, however, take great care that the cure for these ills does not do more harm than good. The benefits of the open and accessible Internet are nearly incalculable, and their loss would wreak significant social and economic damage. — Vint Cerf

How could anyone believe that a political system could provide all of the goods and services a people needed without cost? A daily gratification that would eliminate greed, selfishness, miserliness, and infidelity. A place where man could become noble, strong, and courageous. Crime, violence, and social ills would vanish. It's absurd. The experiment called the Soviet Union only proved that none of that is possible. — Steve Berry

A child with minimal video and TV exposure ... might be more naive about social ills but at the same time more sophisticated in inner direction, self-discipline, and the realities of her actual physical world. — Diane Medved

A system that warehouses people is not the cure for social ills — Amiri Baraka

I truly believe that our major social ills would disappear if we just spent our lives perfecting the art of connecting with each other. — Sean Stephenson

Tea is still believed, by English people of all classes, to have miraculous properties. A cup of tea can cure, or at least significantly alleviate, almost all minor physical ailments and indispositions, from a headache to a scraped knee. Tea is also an essential remedy for all social and psychological ills, from a bruised ego to the trauma of a divorce or bereavement. This magical drink can be used equally effectively as a sedative or stimulant, to calm and soothe or to revive and invigorate. Whatever your mental or physical state, what you need is 'a nice cup of tea'. — Kate Fox

All the social ills that
law presumes to correct exist because people are not free to
learn and grow. — Jeremy Locke

The only cure for all social ills in our world today is the discovery and creation of more and more ordinary everyday heroes. — Jeroninio Almeida

Everybody complains about pork, but members of Congress keep spending because voters do not throw them out of office for doing so. The rotten system in Congress will change only when the American people change their beliefs about the proper role of government in our society. Too many members of Congress believe they can solve all economic problems, cure all social ills, and bring about worldwide peace and prosperity simply by creating new federal programs. We must reject unlimited government and reassert the constitutional rule of law if we hope to halt the spending orgy. — Ron Paul

In a true democracy is the cure for most of our social and political ills, but a few of them must remain to keep us going. — Ameen Rihani

In accordance with the prevailing tendency of consciousness to seek the source of all ills in the outside world, the cry goes up for political and social changes which, it is supposed, would automatically solve the much deeper problem of split personality. Hence it is that whenever this demand is fulfilled, political and social conditions arise which bring the same ills back again in altered form. — C. G. Jung

Our age gives the more receptive among the young such a sense of social responsibility that one is inclined at times to fear that social interests may encroach upon individual development, that a knowledge of all the ills affecting the community may act as too powerful a damper on the joys of youth. — Ellen Key

The alleged music preached of the wrongs democracy had perpetrated on the people and how to protest against the causes of their pain, which would be, according to the fascist propagandists, the police, the military, the rich and the current American government. His ballads were to call for youth and the downtrodden to unite and fight against poverty, injustice and social ills - by destroying the American way of life. Radio — Louis L'Amour

But of all the instances of error arising from this physical fancy, the worst is that we have before us: the habit of exhaustively describing a social sickness, and then propounding a social drug. — G.K. Chesterton

It is not enough for the Church to be engaged with the State in healing social ills, though this is important at times. But when the world can turn around and see a group of God's people exhibiting substantial healing in the area of human relationships in their present life, then the world will take notice. Each group of Christians is, as it were, a pilot plant, showing that something can be done in the present situation, if only we begin in the right way. — Francis Schaeffer

The popular books are the novels, dealing with life under all possible conditions, and they are widely read not only because they are entertaining, but also because they in a measure satisfy an unformulated belief that to see farther, to know all sorts of men, in an indefinite way, is a preparation for better social adjustment
for the remedying of social ills. — Jane Addams

Over-population is the 'cause of drive-by shootings' and other social ills, but the root of the problem is Christianity, which posits that people are more important than sea otters and elephants. — Ted Turner

Just because I publish pornography does not mean that I am not concerned about the social ills that all of us are — Larry Flynt

I believe in solving social ills with business skills. — Richie Norton

One cannot be too extreme in dealing with social ills; the extreme thing is generally the true thing. — Emma Goldman

If one purges all subsequent additions from the original teachings of the Prophets and Christianity, especially those of the priests, one is left with a doctrine that is capable of curing all the social ills of humankind. Statement — Albert Einstein

All of us are subject to being passive to the social ills around us. It's a struggle not to become, by staying silent, an accomplice. — Mary Travers

There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness. Had we been placed on earth by a malign creator for the exclusive purpose of suffering, we would have good reason to congratulate ourselves on our enthusiastic response to the task. Reasons to be inconsolable abound: the frailty of our bodies, the fickleness of love, the insincerities of social life, the compromises of friendship, the deadening effects of habit. In the face of such persistent ills, we might naturally expect that no event would be awaited with greater anticipation than the moment of our own extinction. Someone — Alain De Botton

When our eyes fall from God to humanity, social ills replace sin, horizontal problems replace the fundamental vertical problem between us and God, winning elections eclipses winning souls. — Mark Dever

The prevalence of social ugliness made commitment to physical beauty all the more essential. And the very presence in life of double-wide mobile homes, Magic Marker graffiti, and orange shag carpeting had the effect of making ills such as poverty, crime, repression, pollution and child abuse seem tolerable. In a sense, beauty was the ultimate protest, and, in that it generally lasted longer than an orgasm, the ultimate refuge. The Venus de Milo screamed "No!" at evil, whereas the Spandex stretch pant, the macrame plant holder were compliant with it. — Tom Robbins

The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not suffice. — Wole Soyinka

But we have inherited a vast number of social ills which never came from Nature. They are the complicated products of all the tinkering, muddling, and blundering of social doctors in the past. — William Graham Sumner

I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know. God may call any one of us to respond to some far away problem or support those who have been so called. But we are finite and he will not call us everywhere or to support every worthy cause. And real needs are not far from us. — C.S. Lewis