Society And Environment Quotes & Sayings

No matter how advanced society becomes, institutionally or technologically, a house in which nature can be sensed represents for me the ideal environment in which to live. From a functional viewpoint, the courtyard of the Rowhouse in Sumiyoshi forces the inhabitant to endure the occasional hardships. At the same time, however, the open courtyard is capable of becoming the house's vital organ, introducing the everyday life and assimilating precious stimuli such as changes in nature. — Tadao Ando

Our oil-based society depends on non-renewable resources. It requires relentless probing into vast reaches of pristine land, sacrificing vital bioregions, and irreplaceable cultures. The possibility of catastrophic climate change is substantially increased by the 40 million barrels of oil burned every day by vehicles. We must all move shoulder to shoulder in a unified front to show this administration that the true majority of people are willing to vote for a cleaner environment and won't back down. — Leonardo DiCaprio

Liberty creates an environment where all living beings within a society have an equal opportunity to exercise freedom. An equal opportunity to exercise freedom would further infer that, in liberty, living beings have equal access to knowledge and experience. Knowledge and experience are both inseparable from freedom. Liberty is balanced societal freedom and may also be considered balanced knowledge and experience. With equal access to knowledge and experience, living beings have an equal opportunity to enhance their abilities. Liberty is perceived as true freedom because it maximizes the opportunities for most living beings within a society. — C W Newman

The weapons were conceived and created by a small band of physicists and chemists; they remain a cataclysmic threat to the whole of human society and the natural environment. — Barry Commoner

If capitalism is to remain a healthy, vibrant economic system, corporations must participate in taking care of the society and the environment in which they live. — Simon Mainwaring

The greatest gift of education, Korya, is the years of shelter provided when learning. Do not think to reduce that learning to facts and the utterances of presumed sages. Much of what one learns in that time is in the sphere of concord, the ways of society, the proprieties of behaviour and thought. Haut would tell you that this is another hard-won achievement of civilization: the time and safe environment in which to learn how to live. When this is destroyed, undermined or discounted, then that civilization is in trouble. — Steven Erikson

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to loose. — Marshall McLuhan

Since the individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining, the average man must take to daydreaming. — Gore Vidal

I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What's the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world. — Larry Page

Above all, it seems to me wrongheaded and dangerous to invoke historical assumptions about environmental practices of native peoples in order to justify treating them fairly ... By invoking this assumption [i.e., that they were/are better environmental stewards than other peoples or parts of contemporary society] to justify fair treatment of native peoples, we imply that it would be OK to mistreat them if that assumption could be refuted. In fact, the case against mistreating them isn't based on any historical assumption about their environmental practices: it's based on a moral principle, namely, that it is morally wrong for one people to dispossess, subjugate or exterminate another people. — Jared Diamond

A premise of the new city is that we want a society to be as egalitarian as possible. For this purpose, quality-of-life distribution is more important than income distribution. [And quality of life includes] a living environment as free of motor vehicles as possible. — Enrique Penalosa

Food is at the core of our lives in ways we don't always think about - how it affects our environment, how it affects our health and well-being, how it affects the expense of society, the expense of government. — Cory Booker

The quality of life depends upon the ability of society to teach it's members how to live in harmony with their environment-def ined first as family, then the community, then the world and its resources. — Ellen Swallow Richards

Los Angeles is a town where status is all and status is only given to success. Dukes and millionaires and playboys by the dozen may arrive and be glad-handed for a time, but they are unwise if they choose to live there because the town is, perhaps even creditably, committed to recognising only professional success, and nothing else, to be of lasting value. The burdensome obligation imposed on all its inhabitants is therefore to present themselves as successes, because otherwise they forfeit their right to respect in that environment ... There is no place in that town for the "interesting failure" or for anyone who is not determined on a life that will be shaped in a upward-heading curve. — Julian Fellowes

The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining. — Gore Vidal

We may live in concrete nests piled on top of each other, we may file in and out of our planes and freeways in neat lines, but we are making it all up as we go along. An ant is born into a complex chemical environment where every small instruction had been laid down in advance. Mother tells the workers what to do and they do everything for the greater good of their enormous family.
In contrast, every human being is capable of working for the advancement of their own procreating, their own minuscule families. Yet we somehow recognize the value of a larger form of society, and readily respond to a larger world beyond our own narrow self-interests. With our unique creative capacity, we have modified ourselves as we have modified our physical conditions, and we have developed an extraordinary division of labor. You and I may be as different as night and day, but that is our strength, and it is precisely this diversification that makes my time in Africa so intensely satisfying. — Craig Packer

It is a wonderful honor to receive the Audubon Medal from the National Audubon Society, which for more than a century has fought tirelessly to protect and preserve our natural resources and environment for future generations. — Louis Bacon

One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery. — Wallace Stegner

Each of us is a product of our family, environment, friends, education, culture, and society. These conditions lead to a certain way of seeing things and a certain way of responding to things. When we see this, we have compassion for everyone, including ourselves. We see that if we want something to change, we also have to help change his or her family, environment, friends, education, culture, and society. We are responsible, directly or indirectly, for each person's consciousness attitudes. — Thich Nhat Hanh

...To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity, "labor power" cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man's labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity of "man" attached to the tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rovers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed... — Karl Polanyi

I find littering very annoying. It's a minor but also a major thing: a society that litters is one that also has so little respect for the environment and, consequently, other people. If we had clean streets, a lot of other things would be fixed almost effortlessly. — Joanne Harris

As long as nuclear engineering can strive for new innovations and learn from its history of accidents and mistakes, the benefits that nuclear power can yield for our economy, society, and yes, environment, will come. — James Mahaffey

You can't talk about the environment, you can't talk about political correctness, affirmative action and all the other innumerable things that freedom is about, unless you have a free society based upon the integrity of the individual. If you have a responsible society, these other issues will not come up in a responsible society, and that is what freedom is all about. — Russell Means

Of course, the speed at which any society embraces these strategies will always be a product of the interplay between politics, culture, and leadership. Culture shapes a society's political responses, and its leadership and politics, in turn, shape culture. What exactly is culture? I like this concise definition offered by BusinessDictionary: culture is the "pattern of responses discovered, developed, or invented during the group's history of handling problems which arise from interactions among its members, and between them and their environment. These responses are considered the correct way to perceive, feel, think, and act, and are passed on to the new members through immersion and teaching. Culture determines what is acceptable or unacceptable, important or unimportant, right or wrong, workable or unworkable." One — Thomas L. Friedman

Religion, politics, society are exploiting you, and you are being conditioned by them; you are being forced in a particular direction. You are not human beings; you are mere cogs in a machine. You suffer patiently, submitting to the cruelties of environment, when you, individually, have the possibilities of changing them. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Secular progressive thought also denies free will, viewing all our behavior as ultimately attributable to genes and environment. Between blaming society and denying free will, progressives are more interested in understanding violent criminals than in punishing them. That explains why in Norway, for example, the maximum sentence for murder is 21 years in prison, and few Norwegian murderers spend more than 14 years behind bars. — Dennis Prager

To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment ... would result in the demolition of society. — Karl Polanyi

Discovery is adventure. There is an eagerness, touched at times with tenseness, as man moves ahead into the unknown. Walking the wilderness is indeed like living. The horizon drops away, bringing new sights, sounds, and smells from the earth. When one moves through the forests, his sense of discovery is quickened. Man is back in the environment from which he emerged to build factories, churches, and schools. He is primitive again, matching his wits against the earth and sky. He is free of the restraints of society and free of its safeguards too. — William O. Douglas

Art then becomes a safety valve for the expression of individual and collective neuroses originating in the inability of coping with the environment. Its products serve as a retarded correction of perception braked by the system of conventions and stereotypes that stabilize society. They create a slightly updated system which, eventually assimilated by history, will require a new system and so on without end. Art objects serve as points of identification alienated from the consumer, requiring more sympathy than empathy. — Luis Camnitzer

It will take a massive effort to move society from corporate domination, in which industry's rights to pollute and damage health and the environment supersede the public's right to live, work, and play in safety. This is a political fight. The science is already there, showing that people's health is at risk. To win, we will need to keep building the movement, networking with one another, planning, strategizing, and moving forward. Our children's futures, and those of their unborn children, are at stake. — Lois Gibbs

Our society trains us to think of marriage as a contractual arrangement. If one party fails to fulfill his or her end, the contract is null and void. Increasingly children are raised in a contractual environment. When contractual thinking dominates our horizon, we can even make Jesus or the church an asset we think we can manage. — Michael Horton

Preindustrial living standards are predictable based on knowledge of disease and environment. Differences in social energy across societies were muted by the Malthusian constraints. They had minimal impacts on living conditions. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, we have entered a strange new world in which economic theory is of little use in understanding differences in income across societies, or the future income in any specific society. Wealth and poverty are a matter of differences in local social interactions that are magnified, not dampened, by the economic system, to produce feast or famine. — Gregory Clark

The life we live today - the environment in which we live - is not one of security - it's one of doubt, one of suspicion, one of absolute tension - we're not a pastoral society any more. We feel around us the pressure of man's inadequacy to control his own development. The time when the great forces of nature, the stones and the rocks, were the gods, is gone. — Reg Butler

If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it's hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the "Obama economy" and how it had affected his life. I don't doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he's made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day. — J.D. Vance

We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment... — Harry Harrison

The character of a child is formed largely during the first twelve years of his life. He spends 16 times as many waking hours in the home as in the school, and 126 times as many hours in the home as in the church. Each child is, to a great degree, what he is because of the ever-constant influence of home environment and the careful or neglectful training of parents. Home is the best place for the child to learn self-control, to learn that he must submerge himself for the good of another. It is the best place in which to develop obedience, which nature and society will later demand. — David O. McKay

An organization is not, like an animal, an end in itself, and successful by the mere act of perpetuating the species. An organization is an organ of society and fulfills itself by the contribution it makes to the outside environment. — Peter F. Drucker

It is becoming fashionable to scorn the idea of sin in society. The impact of humanistic thinking is to belittle the concept that man is corrupt. Psychologists and psychiatrists would persuade us that people really are not responsible for their wrongs. Rather, the view of sociologists is that the environment is all wrong.
Their cry is, 'Change society and you will get better men and women'. It simply does not happen.
Christ's call is, 'Change men and women and you will get a better society'. This does work. It always has. — W. Phillip Keller

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more. Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers. Taxes pay for doctors and nursing homes and medicine. During an emergency, like an earthquake or a hurricane, taxes pay for rescue workers, shelters, and services. For people whose lives are devastated by other kinds of disaster, like the disaster of poverty, taxes pay, even, for food. — Jill Lepore

We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly. — T. S. Eliot

Artists are very sensitive and heart-driven, and are usually prone to speaking freely about anything that touches them. The first way to identify a corrupt society is to study public figures in the entertainment sector. If many lack real talent, or have talent but rarely speak out openly about policies that affect them besides the environment, then that country has rigid gatekeepers. — Suzy Kassem

And finally, to all Canadians: Canada is a great country, one of the hopes of the world. We can be a better one - a country of greater equality, justice, and opportunity. We can build a prosperous economy and a society that shares its benefits more fairly. We can look after our seniors. We can offer better futures for our children. We can do our part to save the world's environment. We can restore our good name in the world. — Jack Layton

It's a beautiful book [Into the Forest], so for those who are thinking about reading it, they absolutely should. First and foremost, I just devoured it, as a story. At that time, and still, it just encompassed a lot of things that I was thinking about, and that the world is thinking about, with society's relationship to the environment, our personal relationship to it, and how disconnected we are from it, myself included. — Ellen Page

As musicians and artists, it's important we have an environment - and I guess when I say environment, I really mean the industry, that really nurtures these gifts. Oftentimes, the machine can overlook the need to take care of the people who produce the sounds that have a lot to do with the health and well-being of society. — Lauryn Hill

It can be said that there are four basic and primary things that the mass of people in a society wish for: to live in a safe environment, to be able to work and provide for themselves, to have access to good public health and to have sound educational opportunities for their children. — Nelson Mandela

Yes we dream of our selves, of what we will become," Chi Ling told me, "but it's the environment that tells us what is possible. I don't think our dreams are limitless; they are bounded by the society we live in and its conception of what is respectable and good. — Julie Lythcott-Haims

The most important thing is to actually think about what you do. To become aware and actually think about the effect of what you do on the environment and on society. That's key, and that underlies everything else. — Jane Goodall

The society of life on Mars, or the challenge of making Mars more livable, will have significant benefits on our attempts to modify and change in some ways the environment here on Earth. — Buzz Aldrin

There is ... a contemporary trend to make a sort of 'common intellect' out of society and forbid man his own independent access to truth. All is culture-clouded, and society as the climate of thought is the cause of our thoughts. But in Thomas's theory a man can transcend his environment just as he can transcend the material conditions surrounding any essence; material conditions will be his point of departure, and yet arrival at the truth or being of whatever he is studying is not ruled out. As an unlimited power, man's intellect opens man to the infinite, although only love reaches it. The relation of each man to transcendent existence in his knowing and living experience - this is the ground of objectivity. — Mary T. Clark

Yet Wallace and other segregationists created an inflamed environment in which a confused but also ambitious man like Ray could think it was permissible, perhaps even noble, to murder King. The signals Ray was picking up enabled him to believe that society would smile on his crime. What — Hampton Sides

Letting a maximum number of views be heard regularly is not just a nice philosophical notion. It is the best way any society has yet discovered to detect maladjustments quickly, to correct injustices, and to discover new ways to meet our continuing stream of novel problems that rise in a changing environment. — Ben Bagdikian

You can raise good children in single parent households, and many of you perhaps here today come from that type of environment. It is possible and many do it in heroic situations, but it's much more difficult and the numbers move against us in a broad society. — Sam Brownback

Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialise, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The 'expert' is the man who stays put. — Marshall McLuhan

Frequently, I have been asked how I got to be this way. How did I, born black in a white country, poor in a society where wealth is adored and sought after at all costs, female in an environment where only large ships and some engines are described favourably by using the female pronoun-how did I get to be Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou

I share the belief of many of my contemporaries that the spiritual crisis pervading all spheres of Western industrial society can be remedied only by a change in our world view. We shall have to shift from the materialistic, dualistic belief that people and their environment are separate, toward a new conciousness of an all-encompassing reality, which embraces the experiencing ego, a reality in which people feel their oneness with animate nature and all of creation. — Albert Hofmann

I have often asked myself, "What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?" Like modern loggers, did he shout "Jobs, not trees!"? Or: "Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we'll find a substitute for wood"? Or: "We don't have proof that there aren't palms somewhere else on Easter, we need more research, your proposed ban on logging is premature and driven by fear-mongering"? Similar questions arise for every society that has inadvertently damaged its environment. — Jared Diamond

It's not just the effect of technology on the environment, on religion, on the economic structure, on society, on politics, etc. It's that everything now exists in technology to the point where technology is the new and comprehensive host of nature of life. — Godfrey Reggio

The environment is so fundamental to our continued existence that it must transcend politics and become a central value of all members of society. — David Suzuki

To achieve true sustainability, we must reduce our "garbage index" - that which we permanently throw away into the environment that will not be naturally recycled for reuse - to near zero. Productive activities must be organized as closed systems. Minerals and other nonbiodegradable resources, once taken from the ground, must become a part of society's permanent capital stock and be recycled in perpetuity. Organic materials may be disposed into the natural ecosystems, but only in ways that assure that they are absorbed back into the natural production system. — David Korten

I create enclosed spaces mainly by means of thick concrete walls. The primary reason is to create a place for the individual, a zone for oneself within society. When the external factors of a city's environment require the wall to be without openings, the interior must be especially full and satisfying. — Tadao Ando

And when you look, most of the time these authority structures have no justification: they have no moral justification, they have no justification in the interests of the person lower in the hierarchy, or in the interests of other people, or the environment, or the future, or the society, or anything else - they're just there in order to preserve certain structures of power and domination, and the people at the top. So — Noam Chomsky

Somehow, we've managed to create a social, cultural and political environment in which even our youngest citizens have been so deeply indoctrinated to hate. Who else, I wonder, have we indoctrinated them against? Little Muslim kids against Hindus? Little Hindu kids against Muslims? Little Dalits against all Yadavs? — Sidin Vadukut

Don't let your society and environment dictate what you do with your time — Sunday Adelaja

If you define the goal of a society as GNP, that society will do its best to produce GNP. It will not produce welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency unless you define a goal and regularly measure and report the state of welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency. The world would be a different place if instead of competing to have the highest per capita GNP, nations competed to have the highest per capita stocks of wealth with the lowest throughput, or the lowest infant mortality, or the greatest political freedom, or the cleanest environment, or the smallest gap between the rich and the poor. — Donella H. Meadows

The economic and marketing forces of modern society have engineered an environment ... that maximize[s] consumption at the long-term cost of well-being, — Sebastian Junger

Those who have a scientific outlook on human behaviour, moreover, find it impossible to label any action as 'sin'; they realise that what we do has its origin in our heredity, our education, and our environment, and that it is by control of these causes, rather than by denunciation, that conduct injurious to society is to be prevented. — Bertrand Russell

Rape culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture. Rape culture is perpetuated through the use of misogynistic language, the objectification of women's bodies, and the glamorization of sexual violence, thereby creating a society that disregards women's rights and safety. Rape culture affects every woman. Most women and girls limit their behavior because of the existence of rape. Most women and girls live in fear of rape. Men, in general, do not. That's how rape functions as a powerful means by which the whole female population is held in a subordinate position to the whole male population, even though many men don't rape, and many women are never victims of rape. — Rebecca Solnit

Whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it's actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that with our food all the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illness, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water
of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap. No thinking person will tell you they don't care about all that. I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food. — Michael Pollan

It is only logical that the pauperization of our soul and the soul of society coincide with the pauperization of the environment. One is the cause and the reflection of the other. — Paolo Soleri

Modern life seems to recede further and further away from nature, and closely connected with this fact we seem to be losing the feeling of reverence towards nature. It is probably inevitable when science and machinery, capitalism and materialism go hand in hand so far in a most remarkably successful manner. Mysticism, which is the life of religion in whatever sense we understand it, has come to be relegated altogether in the background. Without a certain amount of mysticism there is no appreciation for the feeling of reverence, and, along with it, for the spiritual significance of humility. Science and scientific technique have done a great deal for humanity; but as far as our spiritual welfare is concerned we have not made any advances over that attained by our forefathers. In fact we are suffering at present the worst kind of unrest all over the world. — D.T. Suzuki

I no longer believe the conservative message that children are naturally selfish and destructive creatures who need civilizing by hierarchies or painful controls. On the contrary, I believe that hierarchy and painful controls create destructive people. And I no longer believe the liberal message that children are blank slates on which society can write anything. On the contrary, I believe a unique core self is born into every human being; the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again. — Gloria Steinem

In contrast to our own social environment which brings out different aspects of human nature and often demonstrated that behavior which occurs almost invariably in individuals within our society is nevertheless due not to original nature but to social environment; and a homogeneous and simple development of the individual may be studied. — Margaret Mead

We live in a Patriarchal society meaning the masculine side of our mind dominates our environment. That means both men and women are identified with their masculine rational logical mind.- Author Serena Jade — Serena Jade

When we see the human race, we must see before all else environment and food. Historians write about social change without taking these factors into account. This is why it is difficult for them to see the reasons decline and prosperity in society. — Michio Kushi

At a time when we need an urgent national conversation about how schools and curriculum should address the environmental crisis, we're being told that the problems we need to focus on are teacher incompetence, government monopoly, and market competition. The reform agenda reflects the same private interests that are moving to shrink public space-interests that have no desire to raise questions that might encourage students to think critically about the roots of the environmental crisis, or to examine society's unsustainable distribution of wealth and power. — Bill Bigelow

Society has to be structured such that there are checks and balances, so that it can't be manipulated, for instance, for the profit of just some multinational company who's going to get rich on trying to legislate the environment. — Greg Graffin

The only technology that helps to create a plethora of business and employment opportunity while promoting the green environment, is serving good for the society and, therefore, the sustainability. — Anuj

We are fossil fuel addicts. What happens when drug addicts detox? They can be rash, cranky, even psychotic and dangerous. It would be good for the environment if the entire economy abruptly quit fossil fuels, but that's not realistic. I wouldn't want to be around if it ever happened. Perhaps it's best to think of natural gas like methadone. It's a way for an energy addicted society to get off dirtier fuels and smooth out the detox bumps. — Russell Gold

The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them. — Ivan Illich

Loving the Earth with a fierce devotion can mean that we view the damage being done to nature as attacks on our own family and kinship group. The despair and rage we feel as witnesses to terracide, animal exploitation and the everyday callous disregard for the environment can be channelled into creating awareness, resistance efforts, the earth rights movement, and by rejecting the numbing and destructive values of Empire. By opening our hearts to the Earth in our thoughts, words, actions and cultural life we will find sacred purpose in the co-creation of an earth-honoring society. Our re-enchantment with the natural world is essential for devoting ourselves to eco-activism, environmental healing, earth restoration and rewilding, and the future rests with us! — Pegi Eyers

This is our greatest challenge: learning to live in a crowded and interconnected world that is creating unprecedented pressures on human society and on the physical environment. — Jeffrey Sachs

We have this sacred cow in our society that what the majority of people want is right-but is it? Our populace can't really be informed, not the majority of them-most people vote the way they have been manipulated and by the way they have responded to that manipulation-they are working out their own patterns of wishful thinking on the social environment in which they live. — David Gerrold

And just like that, as if I hadn't said anything at all, the ladies sprang into a conversation about the sinful nature the Jews possessed when killing their Lord Jesus. I didn't know if I was hearing this right because I had become so intoxicated, but I couldn't believe that anyone would talk about religion while on vacation. How could Miss Nebraska think this was a proper environment to discuss something so controversial? One woman went on to say that if she had her way not only would President Bush serve a second four-year term, but she hoped they would overturn Roe v. Wade. This woman was obviously a menace to society and needed to be stopped. — Chelsea Handler

Seeing that humans in modern cultures were destroying their environment for the sake of self-indulgence, the Dokkalfar focused their attention on poorer nations, whose terrain still flourished. A century of ethnic cleansing, deforestation, and war assured the land weakened and humans stayed in abject poverty. The result was a perfect contrast. In certain parts of the world, millions of children died of starvation and disease while other countries held excesses and riches never before seen. Earth became a place of greedy extremes. Societies lost the ability to relate to one another, choosing instead to focus on their own. No one noticed the one common theme every culture held.
The world itself was dying. — Elizabeth Isaacs

Dollar for dollar, no other society approaches the United States in terms of the number of square feet per person, the number of baths per bedroom, the number of appliances in the kitchen, the quality of the climate control, and the convenience of the garage. The American private realm is simply a superior product. The problem is that most suburban residents, the minute the leave this refuge, are confronted by a tawdry and stressful environment. They enter their cars and embark on a journey of banality and hostility that lasts until they arrive that interior of their next destination. Americans may have the finest private realm in the developed world, but our public realm is brutal. — Andres Duany

The Caring for Climate initiative is fully aligned with our own explicit commitments, which reflect our respect for society in which we operate, respect for the environment, respect for the future generations. Climate change must be addressed through mutually beneficial collaboration and multi-stakeholder channels to be effective ultimately. — Jose Lopez

According to man's environment, society has made as many different types of men as there are varieties in zoology. The differences between a soldier, a workman, a statesman, a tradesman, a sailor, a poet, a pauper and a priest, are more difficult to seize, but quite considerable as the differences between a wolf, a lion, an ass, a crow, a sea-calf, a sheep, and so on. — Honore De Balzac

They were and are children of privilege ... the privilege taught, learned, and imbibed, in a "liberal arts education" is the privilege to indict. These children have, in the main, never worked, learned to obey, command, construct, amend, or complete - to actually contribute to the society. They have learned to be shrill, and that their indictment, on the economy, on sex, on race, on the environment, though based on no experience other than hearsay, must trump any discourse, let alone opposition. It occurred to me that I had seen this behavior elsewhere, where it was called developmental difficulty. — David Mamet

When our environment changes we change, and this combination of transformative deeds create a synergistic effect. Seemingly, insignificant and imperceptible quantitative changes can eventfully lead to fundamental qualitative changes in the way a group of people function as a society. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The immersive ugliness of the built environment in the USA is entropy made visible. It indicates not simple carelessness but a vivid drive toward destruction, decay and death: the stage-set of a literal "death trip," of a society determined to commit suicide. Far from being a mere matter of aesthetics, suburbia represents a compound economic catastrophe, ecological debacle, political nightmare, and spiritual crisis - for a nation of people conditioned to spend their lives in places not worth caring about. — James Howard Kunstler

Put a man in the wrong atmosphere and nothing will function as it should. He will seem unhealthy in every part. Put him back into his proper element and everything will blossom and look healthy. But if he is not in his right element, what then? Well, then he just has to make the best of appearing before the world as a cripple. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Equality of opportunity is not enough. Unless we create an environment where everyone is guaranteed some minimum capabilities through some guarantee of minimum income, education, and healthcare, we cannot say that we have fair competition. When some people have to run a 100 metre race with sandbags on their legs, the fact that no one is allowed to have a head start does not make the race fair. Equality of opportunity is absolutely necessary but not sufficient in building a genuinely fair and efficient society. — Ha-Joon Chang

In current society, your security is cash, and that has huge repercussions. But when you take that out of the equation, you have to have relationships with people and you have to have relationships with the environment to survive. — Mark Boyle

Find the right surroundings, the people who will help you to carry out your mission and realize your gift — Sunday Adelaja

It is not biology alone but heroism too that drives women to find the will and grit and creativity to put one's own impulses aside to serve the needs of a tiny creature around the clock - especially in an environment in which that heroic choice is only casually acknowledged, much less honored, cherished, or assisted. I believe the myth about the ease and naturalness of mothering - the ideal of the effortlessly ever-giving mother - is propped up, polished, and promoted as a way to keep women from thinking clearly and negotiating forcefully about what they need from their partners and from society at large in order to mother well, without having to sacrifice themselves in the process. — Naomi Wolf

Years of misguided teaching have resulted in the destruction of the best in our society, in our cultures and in the environment. — Cesar Chavez

Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the ABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could not laugh at a person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even with affection, but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our affection out of court and impose silence upon our pity. In a society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhaps there would still be laughter; whereas highly emotional souls, in tune and unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor understand laughter. — Henri Bergson

When women are able to live in a safe and secure environment, they can participate effectively in the economy and society. This helps overcome poverty, reduces inequalities and is beneficial for children's nutrition, health and school attendance. Every woman and girl has the right to live in safety in her home and community. — Helen Clark

Sadly, in any industry and in any work-related environment, females always strive to achieve a certain amount of perfection, whether that be skinny or pretty. It's a constant, in our society. — Mila Kunis

In my work, I am not attempting to predict the future. I am only pointing out what is possible with the intelligent application and humane use of science and technology. This does not call for scientists to manage society. What I suggest is applying the methods of science to the social system for the benefit of human kind and the environment. — Jacque Fresco