Quotes & Sayings About Society's Problems

A singular confusion exists about the notions of 'culture' and 'civilization'.
Culture began with the 'prologue in heaven.' With its religion, art, ethics, and philosophy, it will always be dealing with man's relation to that heaven from whence he came. Everything within culture means a confirmation or a rejection, a doubt or a reminiscence of the heavenly origin of man. Culture is characterized by this enigma and goes on through all time with the steady striving to solve it.
On the other hand, civilization is a continuation of the zoological, one-dimensional life, the material exchange between man and nature. This aspect of life differs from other animals' lives, but only in its degree, level, and organization. Here, one does not find man embarrassed by evangelical, Hamletian, or Karamasovian problems. The anonymous member of society functions here only by adopting the goods nature and changing the world by his work according to his needs. — Alija Izetbegovic

Nothing goes on forever. I think that's one of the illusions of life. When I talk about my life being an extension of my dreams and fantasies, there's a tendency to think of them as immature. I live in a mature world. The majority of the people in this society live with delusions and illusions much more irrational and hurtful than mine. They deal with mortality, with fantasies relating to heaven and hell, and they don't really deal with their problems at all. — Hugh Hefner

Ideal for the child and society in the best of times, Rudolf Steiner's brilliant process of education is critically needed and profoundly relevant now at this time of childhood crisis and educational breakdown. Waldorf Education nurtures the intellectual, psychological and spiritual unfolding of the child. The concerned parent and teacher will find a multitude of problems clearly addressed in this practical, artistic approach. — Joseph Chilton Pearce

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. — Dominic Monaghan

When you look at where the real problems are among minorities in our society, particularly blacks, it's at the bottom. It's the people who are in school systems that don't educate, neighborhoods where there is a lot of crime, drugs, the whole bit. — Clarence Thomas

You cannot run a scociety or cope with it's problems if people are not held accountable for what they do. — John Leo

A lawyer's either a social engineer or ... a parasite on society ... A social engineer [is] a highly skilled, perceptive, sensitive lawyer who [understands] the Constitution of the United States and [knows] how to explore its uses in the solving of problems of local communities and in bettering conditions of the underprivileged citizens. — Charles Hamilton Houston

Appeasers will always try to get the least dangerous person to bend to the most dangerous person. This is one of the main problems in dysfunctional relationships. The more mature and rational you are the more you are victimized because, they are aware that you're not going to be as aggressive, destructive, or possibly as abusive and so you are the one who has to bend. You're the one who has to change and this constant rapping of rational people's souls around the prickly irrationalities of other people are what appeasers are constantly doing. — Stefan Molyneux

Your age?" "My age? He has to be thirty." "Farm life is going to harden you, you know. You think you'll be young and beautiful for ever and that you'll have plenty of chances, but it doesn't work like that." "She's only sixteen, Em," my father said. "She has plenty of time." "That's what you think. We're not helping, keeping her out here with no company. School didn't do a thing - not that she was there long. She's wild. She doesn't know how to make conversation." "Why are we talking about manners and society, when there are real problems to think about? — Paula McLain

Engineering is not merely knowing and being knowledgeable, like a walking encyclopedia; engineering is not merely analysis; engineering is not merely the possession of the capacity to get elegant solutions to non-existent engineering problems; engineering is practicing the art of the organizing forces of technological change ... Engineers operate at the interface between science and society. — Gordon S. Brown

collectivity, on the other hand, is the place of what the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal calls "divertissement," an untranslatable word which roughly means "distraction" or "diversion": It is the escape from life's problems, and also its invitations, into activities that in ultimate terms are meaningless. It is a constant turning to superficial actions as a way to avoid facing the true realities of human life. The soap operas and situation comedies easily become an addiction. They take the place of the "bread and circuses" of ancient Rome. There was plenty wrong with Roman society and the Roman emperors offered the diversion of food and entertainment to make people forget the banality and meaninglessness of the lives they lived. Our society does much the same and has ever so much more in the way of sophisticated tools for doing so. — William H. Shannon

When you start (telling it like it is) speaking the truth, those who opposed it are part of the on-going problems that exist in any society. But it's always good to acknowledge the rebuttal of an opposition. Because the better rebuttal will often win the debate. — Henry Johnson Jr

Fairytales teach children that the world is fraught with danger, including life-threatening danger; but by being clever (always), honest (as a rule, but with common-sense exceptions), courteous (especially to the elderly, no matter their apparent social station), and kind (to anyone in obvious need), even a child can succeed where those who seem more qualified have failed.
And this precisely what children most need to hear.
To let them go on believing that the world is safe, that they will be provided for and achieve worthwhile things even if they remain stupid, shirk integrity, despise courtesy, and act only from self-interest, that they ought to rely on those stronger, smarter, and more able to solve their problems, would be the gravest disservice: to them, and to society as a whole.
-On the Supposed Unsuitability of Fairytales for Children — J. Aleksandr Wootton

I think the HeforShe campaign is a fantastic initiative, and of course men and boys should be involved in seeking equality for women, because we are people, and you are people, and people should help out other people. I think more engagement too could be found from addressing the problems males face from gender inequality, because while the problems girls and women face from sexism are much more violent, I sometimes think the pressures on boys and men are more poisonous. If we think about it clearly, we see that the gender inequalities men face often lead to the gender inequalities women face. For instance, domestic abuse is often about a man's assertion of power and control, but if he didn't think he needed those things in the first place, would the abuse ever happen? Similarly, rape culture is often about male entitlement, but that sense of entitlement comes from what we as a society tell men about their gender, and what it means. — Abigail Tarttelin

I'm an 'intelligent' sociopath. I don't have problems with drugs, I don't commit crimes, I don't take pleasure in hurting people, and I don't typically have relationship problems. I do have a complete lack of empathy. But I consider that an advantage, most of the time. Do I know the difference between right and wrong, and do I want to be good? Sure ... A peaceful and orderly world is a more comfortable world for me to live in. So do I avoid breaking the law because it's 'right'? No, I avoid breaking the law because it makes sense. — M.E. Thomas

It's not that everything needs to have substance, but when nothing does then you know we're living in a bankrupt society, an artistically bankrupt society, and that's not okay. I think there's room for forms of entertainment that are very light and frivolous and fun, but when those forms of entertainment, forms of "art" if you will, become presented as something more than that, and are believed to be something more than that, then we've got a lot of problems. — Davey Havok

So, if I'm no cheerleader of sports, why write a chapter about it? Sports do have some positive impact on society. They solve problems, such as how to get inner-city kids to spend $175 on shoes. They serve as a backdrop for some of our most memorable commercials. And they remain the one and only relevant application of math. Not only that, but we have sports to thank for most of the last century's advances in manliness. The system starts in school, where gym class separates the men from the boys. Then those men are taught to be winners, or at least, losers that hate themselves. — Stephen Colbert

I think sometimes in life we want to ignore the problems of society and just think about the good. I believe in positive thinking and affirmative living, I also think it's really important to remember all of our disenfranchised members of society. — Kerry Washington

Imagine saying to someone, "I have a kidney problem, and I'm having a lot of bad days lately." Nothing but sympathy, right? "What's wrong?" "My mom had that!" "Text me a pic of the ultrasound!" Then pretend to say, "I have severe depression and anxiety, and I'm having a lot of bad days lately." They just look at you like you're broken, right? Unfixable. Inherently flawed. Maybe not someone they want to hang around as much? Yeah, society sucks. My mental problems made me feel ashamed. I felt like I had to hide them until I could "work through it" on my own. Which I never did, because I didn't know how. And I didn't feel brave enough to make fixing my mind a priority because I didn't think anyone would understand. — Felicia Day

I can admit there are some problems in hip hop but it is only a reflection of what's taking place in our society. Hip hop is sick because America is sick. — David Banner

In a society that considers all genuine ideas subversive, which seeks to discourage ideological imagination, and which aims to abolish thought in favour of spectacle, the main goal must be to awaken people's consciences, raising traumatising problems and sending ideological electroshocks: shocking ideas. — Guillaume Faye

The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race. Until that task is accomplished, even partial reform will prove elusive, because white influence permeates every issue in U.S. society, whether domestic or foreign. — Noel Ignatiev

But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example. — Henry Louis Gates

Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem. It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced - in a word, insane. — Frank Herbert

We have this judgmental way of looking at the idea of leaving a home or a family, and our society has reinforced this idea that if we "run away," we are "running away from our problems." In some cases, though, to face certain problems (in this case, two family members who are not mentally stable and who are not going to face up to their issues) the family members who are capable of facing reality must realize that leaving is a viable option. Some environments are harmful. As fellow humans it is our job to judge less and encourage more when others choose to remove themselves from harmful environments. — A.S. King

When did we ever get this notion that our elders have little to offer society? The years of practical experience, the knowledge of past events for first-hand historical accounts, and the wisdom for dealing with problems they faced before us have given the elderly the role of Wise One or Sage in most cultures around the world. But in our self-centered, individualistic, now-oriented culture, we can leave our debts from the past in a nursing home and our debts for the future to our children. — Michael S. Horton

If somebody's gonna smoke a joint in their house and not do anybody else any harm, then perhaps there are other things that our cops should be looking at to engage in and try to clean up some of the other problems that we have in society that are appropriate for law enforcement to do and not concentrate on such a, relatively speaking, minimal problem that we have in the country. — Sarah Palin

As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world's problems or, for that matter, to any problems. I beg the Lord to grant us more politicians who are genuinely disturbed by the state of society, the people, the lives of the poor! It is vital that government leaders and financial leaders take heed and broaden their horizons, working to ensure that all citizens have dignified work, education and healthcare. — Pope Francis

I think it's great that we have organisations like Greenpeace. In a pluralistic society, we want to have people who point out all the problems that the Earth could encounter. But we need to understand that they are not presenting a full and rounded view. — Bjorn Lomborg

To this day, we see all around us the Promethean drive to omnipotence through technology and to omniscience through science. The effecting of all things possible and the knowledge of all causes are the respective primary imperatives of technology and of science. But the motivating imperative of society continues to be the very different one of its physical and spiritual survival. It is now far less obvious than it was in Francis Bacon's world how to bring the three imperatives into harmony, and how to bring all three together to bear on problems where they superpose. — Gerald Holton

Careless of waste, wallowing in refuse, exterminating the enemies ... despising age, denying human natural history, fabricating pseudotraditions, swamped in the repeated personal crises of the aging preadolescent; all are familiar images of American society. They are signs of private nightmares of incoherence and disorder in broken climaxes where technologies in pursuit of mastery create ever-worsening problems - private nightmares expanded to a social level. — Paul Shepard

In many cases, jobs that used to be done by people are going to be able to be done through automation. I don't have an answer to that. That's one of the more perplexing problems of society. — John Sculley

As I've often said, this is the biggest problem we have in our society - unwanted kids. If we solve this problem we solve all the other problems. So we have to start judging. As I said before, we judge smokers more harshly than we judge deadbeat dads in our current society. Seriously, how many antismoking PSAs have you seen this week vs. ones saying raise your kids, or don't have kids if you can't afford them? And what's hurting our society more? People need to see that asshole and call him an asshole so maybe other people thinking about being assholes wouldn't become assholes. We stopped judging people a long time ago because the idiots on the left told us everyone is the same and that we couldn't do that. We need to bring back judging. — Adam Carolla

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

Some people point to me as the cause of all society's problems, others as if I am the benefactor, responsible for everything good, but I am neither the former nor the latter. I am but a man in particular circumstances, and the most beautiful part is that an individual human life is capable of contributing to the growth, the awakening of the collective strength. That is what matters! — Hugo Chavez

When we look carefully at ourselves in the mirror of God's Word and see flaws, even evidences of selfishness, we might become discouraged. If that ever happens to you, reflect on the successful man in James' illustration. James did not stress how quickly the man fixed the problems he detected or even that he was able to correct every blemish; rather, James says that the man 'continued in the perfect law. (Jas. 1:25) He remembered what he saw in the mirror and kept working to improve. Yes, keep a positive view of yourself and a balanced view of your imperfections. (Ecclesiastes 7:20.) Continue to peer into the perfect law, and work to maintain your spirit of self-sacrifice. Jehovah is willing to help you, as he has helped so many of your brothers who, although imperfect, can and do have God's favor and blessing — Watch Tower Bible And Tract Society

There is a lingering pain that comes with some people's LGBT identity, especially in a society that has shamed their desires and forced them to fight for an opportunity to declare pride. Some of this shame can be deeply internalized, even if it's overcome in practice (and mostly so in attitude). LGBT people may believe the asexual people who want their support have never fought this type of shame and may not accept that "your orientation doesn't exist" can be as damaging as "your orientation means you're bad." Asexual people are usually perceived as sexually conservative or sexually abstinent, and LGBT people may have been attacked for the sex they may desire, so it could be very difficult for them to accept that someone who embodies a supposedly "ideal state" they've been pressured to emulate could possibly have comparable problems in Western society. — Julie Sondra Decker

Having come into contact with a civilization which has over-emphasized the freedom of the individual, we are in fact faced with one of the big problems of Africa in the modern world. Our problem is just this: how to get the benefits of European society - benefits that have been brought about by an organization based upon the individual - and yet retain African's own structure of society in which the individual is a member of a kind of fellowship. — Julius Nyerere

By properly deploying both incentives and nudges, we can improve our ability to improve people's lives, and help solve many of society's major problems. And we can do so while still insisting on everyone's freedom to choose. — Richard H. Thaler

Capitalism rules worldwide, and a society whose economic fabric depends on constant growth requires that its citizens have ever-expanding needs and wants ... In the West, it will take one with soul force equal to Gandhi's to change the prevailing dogma of ever increasing GNP. We may be forced to change our profligate ways some day, when the soil is depleted, the aquifers drained, the icecaps melted, and all the oil wells pumped dry. But the crisis will wait another fifty years or so; we'll leave those problems to a generation yet unborn. — Philip Yancey

I believe that lack of empathy is behind many problems, and I believe that it's disrupting our society. In Great Britain, there is a steady decline in the willingness to be truly generous, and by that I don't mean monetary generosity, but friendship and sympathy for others. — J.K. Rowling

People constantly requesting government intervention are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours. — Margaret Thatcher

It's not a crime to feel sad, down or depressed. Moving through difficult feelings is an essential part of living life authentically. Though society would have us believe that when we are sad, we need to smack a silly smile on our face and pretend everything is okay. Problems arise when we repress, deny or bury these feelings. We need to know when it's time to seek help and support, to avoid becoming overwhelmed by these types of emotion. Life is a bittersweet symphony, we need to hear every instrument and listen to every note. — Jaeda DeWalt

Philanthropy is often seen as society's risk capital. That means the onus is on philanthropists, nonprofit leaders and social entrepreneurs to innovate. But philanthropic innovation is not just about creating something new. It also means applying new thinking to old problems, processes and systems. — Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen

All of society's problems which could be solved by money, were caused by money. — Heather Marsh

Silence is what causes most of humanity's problems — Lauren Kate

I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our lack of attention to funding and caring for them properly in the United States has a direct bearing on problems of literacy, productivity, and our inability to compete in today's world. Libraries are everyman's free university. — John Jakes

Sheep only need a single flock, but people need two: one to belong to and make them feel comfortable, and another to blame all of society's problems on. — James Rozoff

I believe in his vision. The underrepresented are the underdogs. They are the ones fighting a fight that no one can imagine. He's giving a home to those people, the ones who have been cast aside. The strays. The wounded, the ruined, and the lost. Society can't begin to understand their problems, and it rarely provides a solution either. — Karina Halle

Television thus illustrates the mixed blessings of technological change in American society. It is a new medium, promising extraordinary benefits: great educational potential, a broadening of experience, enrichment of daily life, entertainment for all. But it teaches children the uses of violence, offers material consumption as the answer to life's problems, sells harmful products, habituates viewers to constant stimulation, and undermines family interaction and other forms of learning such as play and reading. — Kenneth Keniston

The mother's and father's attitudes toward the child correspond to the child's own needs ... Mother has the function of making himsecure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him. — Erich Fromm

Most people believe, mistakenly, that wealth in a human society has something to do with money, but that's not true. Money is simply a medium of exchange. Prosperity in a human society is the accumulation of solutions to human problems that we create for ourselves. — Nick Hanauer

Whether we like it or not, it is a fact that economics cannot remain an esoteric branch of knowledge accessible only to small groups of scholars and specialists. Economics deals with society's fundamental problems; it concerns everyone and belongs to all. It is the main and proper study of every citizen. — Ludwig Von Mises

Climate change is not a discrete issue; it's a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We're chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent. — Alex Steffen

But one afternoon Lila said softly that there was nothing that could eliminate the conflict between the rich and the poor.
"Why?"
"Those who are on the bottom always want to be on top, those who are on top want to stay on top, and one way or another they always reach the point where they're kicking and spitting at each other."
"That's exactly why problems should be resolved before violence breaks out."
"And how? Putting everyone on top, putting everyone on the bottom?"
"Finding a point of equilibrium between the classes."
"A point where? Those from the bottom meet those from the top in the middle?"
"Let's say yes."
"And those on top will be willing to go down? And those on the bottom will give up on going any higher?"
"If people work to solve all problems well, yes. You're not convinced?"
"No. The classes aren't playing cards, they're fighting, and it's a fight to the death. — Elena Ferrante

We all live in a society where someone who lives right across hasn't eaten and you don't know it or you are having problems where you are close to suicide and no one knows; everyone is going about their duty and thinking everything is fine. It's a dual world we live in and there is so much going on and yet it is not so obvious because we all live in our individual worlds. — Juliet Asante

One of the problems in the United States is the refusal on the part of our young people to remember or to want to remember, or to recognize the experiences of the past as being relevant, germane, important to the present and to the future. They simply don't want anything that's painful. They want to live in a painless society where everything is pleasant, and everything is joyful. — John Hope Franklin

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand 'I have a problem, it is the government's job to cope with it!' or 'I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!'; 'I am homeless, the government must house me!' and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society?
"There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.
"It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations. — Margaret Thatcher

The world is not something separate from you and me; the world, society, is the relationship that we establish or seek to establish between each other. So you and I are the problem, and not the world, because the world is the projection of ourselves, and to understand the world we must understand ourselves. That world is not separate from us; we are the world, and our problems are the world's problems. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated. — Njabulo S. Ndebele

I did feel a concentrated dislike for those boys, who couldn't submit to the odd faithless girlfriend, needling classmate, or dose of working-single-parent distraction
who couldn't serve their miserable time in their miserable public schools the way the rest of us did
without carving their dime-a-dozen problems ineluctably into the lives of other families. It was the same petty vanity that drove these boys' marginally saner contemporaries to scrape their dreary little names into national monuments. And the self-pity! That nearsighted Woodham creature apparently passed a note to one of his friends before staging a tantrum with his father's deer rifle: "Throughout my life I was ridiculed. Always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, blame me for what I do?" And I thought, Yes, you little shit! In a heartbeat! — Lionel Shriver

It is more fun to listen to the radio speeches of a dictator than to study economic treatises. The entrepreneurs and technologists who pave the way for economic improvement work in seclusion; their work is not suitable to be visualized on the screen. But the dictators, intent upon spreading death and destruction, are spectacularly in sight of the public. Dressed in military garb they eclipse in the eyes of the movie-goers the colourless bourgeois in plain clothes. The problems of society's economic organization are not suitable for light talk at fashionable cocktail parties. Neither can they be dealt with adequately by demagogues haranguing mass assemblies. They are serious things. They require painstaking study. They must not be taken lightly. — Ludwig Von Mises

Not my problem" is not a philosophy. It's a mental illness. Right up there with pessimism. Other people's problems are our problems. If your neighbor is laid off, you may feel as if you've dodged the bullet, but you haven't. The bullet hit you as well. You just don't feel the pain yet. Or as Ruut Veenhoven told me: "The quality of a society is more important than your place in that society." In other words, better to be a small fish in a clean pond than a big fish in a polluted lake. Lesson — Eric Weiner

Prison madness is much the same! Insanity is plentiful in prisons. These days with the drug culture it's not a lot of difference, as a lot of convicts make themselves psychotic and paranoid. Many end up killers, all over petty and minor problems. Where men would once squabble, fight and kill over a ½ oz of bacca they now do the same over a gram of white powder or a bag of brown! — Stephen Richards

It is hard to read a newspaper or watch a television newscast without encountering someone who has come up with a new 'solution' to society's 'problems.' — Thomas Sowell

I don't see much future for the Americans ... it's a decayed country. And they have their racial problem, and the problem of social inequalities ... my feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance ... everything about the behaviour of American society reveals that it's half Judaised, and the other half negrified. How can one expect a State like that to hold together? — Adolf Hitler

Indeed, my conclusion from a lifetime of psychohistorical study of childhood and society is that the history of humanity is founded upon the abuse of children. Just as family therapists today find that child abuse often functions to hold families together as a way of solving their emotional problems, so, too, the routine assault of children has been society's most effective way of maintaining its collective emotional homeostasis. — Lloyd DeMause

As I have explained in earlier chapters, abusiveness has little to do with psychological problems and everything to do with values and beliefs. Where do a boy's values about partner relationships come from? The sources are many. The most important ones include the family he grows up in, his neighborhood, the television he watches and books he reads, jokes he hears, messages that he receives from the toys he is given, and his most influential adult role models. His role models are important not just for which behaviors they exhibit to the boy but also for which values they teach him in words and what expectations they instill in him for the future. In sum, a boy's values develop from the full range of his experiences within his culture. — Lundy Bancroft

Lesson number one: "Not my problem" is not a philosophy. It's a mental illness. Right up there with pessimism. Other people's problems are our problems. If your neighbor is laid off, you may feel as if you've dodged the bullet, but you haven't. The bullet hit you as well. You just don't feel the pain yet. Or as Ruut Veenhoven told me: "The quality of a society is more important than your place in that society." In other words, better to be a small fish in a clean pond than a big fish in a polluted lake. — Eric Weiner

Sometimes, from outside, and from America especially, where the racial tension is so intense, you tend to understand Brazil as a kind of ideal situation, but it's not. There are a lot of problems. Historically, we have been in struggle, in real struggle to protect and defend the natural leaning towards absorbing the African and the Indian heritage that our society has. — Gilberto Gil

If you want to know how to solve society's problems, you start out with better public education. — Michael Bloomberg

It's important for that to exist in a society that doesn't present you with any genuine problems. — Tom Jenkinson

Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: We're producers of one thing at work, consumers of a great many things all the rest of the time, and then, once a year or so, we take on the temporary role of citizen and cast a vote. Virtually all our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another - our meals to the food industry, our health to the medical profession, entertainment to Hollywood and the media, mental health to the therapist or the drug company, caring for nature to the environmentalist, political action to the politician, and on and on it goes. Before long it becomes hard to imagine doing much of anything for ourselves - anything, that is, except the work we do "to make a living." For everything else, we feel like we've lost the skills, or that there's someone who can do it better ... it seems as though we can no longer imagine anyone but a professional or an institution or a product supplying our daily needs or solving our problems. — Michael Pollan

One of the greatest sources of problems in our society arises from people having loads of wrong theories in their heads - often theories that are critical of others - that they won't test by speaking to the relevant people about them. Instead, they talk behind people's backs, which leads to pervasive misinformation. — Ray Dalio

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

In the ensuing chapters, we will look in some detail at particular manifestations of the modern scientific ideology and the false paths down which it has led us. We will consider how biological determinism has been used to explain and justify inequalities within and between societies and to claim that those inequalities can never be changed. We will see how a theory of human nature has been developed using Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection to claim that social organization is also unchangeable because it is natural. We will see how problems of health and disease have been located within the individual so that the individual becomes a problem for society to cope with rather than society becoming a problem for the individual. And we will see how simple economic relationships masquerading as facts of nature can drive the entire direction of biological research and technology. — Richard C. Lewontin

We should get rid of the SAT as fast as we can. Look, there are bigger problems in society. This is not the biggest problem we have. But it's so easy to get rid of it. Right? Just pull the plug. — John Katzman

Sentimentalising is anathema, as far as I am concerned. It leads you into ethical problems about violence and killing and eating meat. The whole world becomes topsy-survy if you impose moralities that were evolved within human society on what a blowfly or what a parasite does ... there are lots of emotions you can deduce from an animal's behaviour that are correct, but when you start saying it's feeling guilty or thinking or a loved one or mourning, you must be very careful of those feelings. — David Attenborough

Two years ago, George Bush felt prompted to address this issue. More spending on public education, said the president, isn't "the best answer." Mr. Bush went on to caution parents of poor children who see money "as a cure" for education problems. "A society that worships money ... ," said the president, "is a society in peril." The president himself attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts - a school that spends $11,000 yearly on each pupil, not including costs of room and board. If money is a wise investment for the education of a future president at Andover, it is no less so for the child of poor people in Detroit. But the climate of the times does not encourage this belief, and the president's words will surely reinforce that climate. — Jonathan Kozol

For men to focus on controlling women's reproduction to solve a society's problems seems nothing short of mad or, at best, superstitious. But men's superstition or insanity has real and dire consequences for the women who are its object. And states, too, home in on women's bodies, perhaps to create the illusion that men are in control of uncontrollable forces. Indeed, almost all governments try to control women's bodies and regulate their appearance in some way. — Marilyn French

If anything needs to get fixed in society, it's people's consumption of other people's problems. — Corey Feldman

The truth is women need men, we are neither superior nor inferior to men. We are better at some things and worse at other things. Mature people take the hard road and choose to delay quick gratification for true love. Mature people realize that the world does not revolve around them, and their desires, but around commitment. Mature people are committed to something beyond themselves; God, good, the good of society, family etc.
If men are the source of your problems, then you are doomed to wait for eternity for them to fix it. — Osayi Emokpae Lasisi

We [Latinos] must be proud. We have the same rights in the U.S. as anybody else. Instead of crying and getting upset about visa problems and having our families come join us, go fight for your rights. Make yourself a productive individual in the society. — Patricia Velasquez

It is hard to grow up in a society in which one's important problems are treated as nonexistent. It is impossible to belong to it, it is hard to fight to change it. — Paul Goodman

People didn't realize it, but they needed myths to survive, just as much now as when their forebears were alive. Perhaps more. Mythology embodied the world's dreams, helped to make sense of the great human problems. Just as the dreams of individuals exist to give subconscious support to their conscious lives, so do myths serve as society's dreams. They uncover the dark, hidden places where mysteries dwell and can turn to nightmare if left untended. They make sense of injustice in archetypal terms. They give men and women a blueprint for how they may respond to success or failure, tragedy or joy. — Charles De Lint

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

Two people pass each other. As one looks upon the other's skin color, the other is looking back at their appearance. Both justifying, how better and righteous they are, in their own insecurities. — Anthony Liccione

Currently, U.S. society has been encouraged by its political and subsidized mass-media intelligentsia to view U.S. life as a continual "morning in America" paradise, where the only social problems occur in the inner cities. Psychologists call this denial. — Ishmael Reed

Maya repeated the achingly slow process with the remote control in reverse, and in the profound quiet that ensued, looked at Leyla.
'Why are you doing this to me?'
Yasmin turned on her mother. 'She's not doing anything, she is gay. It's not a choice. So I think, actually, that you should be telling us why you have such a problem with it. — Shamim Sarif

We are so sluggish in our mentality that we think the world's problems are not our business, that they have to be resolved by the United Nations or by substituting new leaders for the old. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

If you eliminate suffering from this world you eliminate life. There's no evolution. Those species that don't suffer don't survive. Sometimes the insane and the contrarians and the ones who are the closest to suicide are the most valuable people society has. They may be the precursors of social change. They've taken the burdens of the culture onto themselves and in their struggle to solve their own problems they're solving problems for the culture as well — Robert M. Pirsig

We have created a mindset in our society where everyone wants what they want when they want it. And if we don't get what we want when we want it, we feel ripped off. To make matters worse, we intensify our problems by continuously rehashing our woe-is-me story to the entire world. Whatever it is that has the potential to keep you from enjoying the day, understand that it's not the situation itself that is causing you to be unhappy. It's your thoughts and how you allow them to control you. It's what you choose to focus on that fuels your emotions and defines your reality. — Steve Rizzo

The police are there to do the job, not to think about it,' was the line used by critics, the harshest of which were often other police. But police officers see and hear at first hand the things that ail a society, and along the way they gain trememdous insight into how to fix problems or processes, even if they can't change people's behaviours or attitudes. With the right systems and resources, their personal capacity for creating a safer society is far more powerful than the guns they carry. This would be the thinking driving my direction when I later came to Victoria to take charge of its police force. — Christine Nixon

It is certain that the labors of these early workers in the field of natural knowledge were brought to a standstill by the decay and disruption of the Roman Empire, the consequent disorganisation of society, and the diversion of men's thoughts from sublunary matters to the problems of the supernatural world suggested by Christian dogma in the Middle Ages. And, notwithstanding sporadic attempts to recall men to the investigation of nature, here and there, it was not until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that physical science made a new start, founding itself, at first, altogether upon that which had been done by the Greeks. Indeed, it must be admitted that the men of the Renaissance, though standing on the shoulders of the old philosophers, were a long time before they saw as much as their forerunners had done. — Thomas Henry Huxley

It's clear that other problems such as [ ... ] the domination of business over government, science, thought, and society, are much bigger than non-free software. — Richard Stallman

Holman's world is a worst case scenario but it's healthy to examine extreme possibilities. If the technology that is used for genetic enrichment in Genus had been distributed equitably, across society, it could have been nirvana, a great world where people don't fear the diseases that we die from. The problems that arrive are more to do with resource hording than technology itself. — Jonathan Trigell

On the lowest level, this loss of soul turns the man into the hen-pecked husband who lives with his wife as though she were his mother upon whom he is solely dependent in all things having to do with emotions and the inner life. But even the relatively positive case where the woman is the mistress of the inner domain and mother of the home who simultaneously has the responsibility for dealing with all the man's questions and problems having to do with emotions and the inner life, even this leads to a lack of emotional vitality and sterile one-sidedness in the man. He discharges only the "outer" and "rational" affairs of life, profession, politics, etc. Owing to his loss of soul, the world he has shaped becomes a patriarchal world that, in its soullessness, presents an unprecedented danger for humanity. In this context we cannot delve further into the significance of a full development of the archetypal feminine potential for a new, future society. — Erich Neumann

Don't believe it when people tell you that you will never accomplish anything great in life, or that you're ordinary or should just stay the same as everybody else. Don't let them define you, your life or your future. Don't let society or people restrict or blind you with their definitions of what's beautiful and what's not, and what's successful and what's not, follow your heart. — Auliq Ice

The solution to the nation's problems, depends on the true American achievers. It's people like you, playing by the rules and celebrating and continuing to remind people of the traditions and institutions that made this country great, who can re-create a society that is great once more. It's only by doing the right thing that this country is going to fix itself and survive. — Rush Limbaugh

Since the dawn of the twentieth century, we have been told that
the federal government has the answers to solve all of society's problems.
We have been promised, by supposedly serious men who have
sworn an oath before God and man, that if we just give Washington,
D.C., more of our money and more of our personal freedom, the
problems of poverty, illiteracy, racism, unemployment, crime, and
corruption will all be solved. Today, each and every one of these
problems is worse than it has ever been. The federal government and
its blood-sucking bureaucracies do not have a solution to the problem,
they are the problem. — Ziad K. Abdelnour