Social Dysfunction Quotes

One of the things I learned is that you've got to deal with the underlying social problems if you want to have an impact on crime - that it's not a coincidence that you see the greatest amount of violent crime where you see the greatest amount of social dysfunction.

Civilization is what makes you sick.

Three strikes' laws make no sense as policy. They are more about the politicians responding to the people's desire to see their fury at social dysfunction reflected in the law. Our sentences are way too long. We need to look at the war on drugs, which is to say we need to look and this is easier said than done. Once again, politically, not an easy lift at all. Nevertheless, our policy is self-defeating. We're not keeping people from using the substances. We're creating a huge black market, just like we did under prohibition, which attracts all kinds of criminal enterprise.

Religion was no cure for dysfunction.

All too often, government's response to social breakdown has been a classic case of 'patching' - a case of handing money out, containing problems and limiting the damage but, in doing so, supporting - even reinforcing - dysfunctional behaviour.

The corrosion of our public language reflects deep pathologies — societal, cultural, economic — in the body politic.

In politics, almost everywhere we see what looks like the externalisation of psychic wounds or deficits.

The black community has fallen into this horribly dysfunctional equilibrium.

Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it's merely destructive.

Migrants are essentially escaping from countries with dysfunctional social models.

The functioning of our society is in a certain way sclerotic.

American families don't work. There is an illusion that they do.

Something is sick with our society that we have to deal with.

The defense of our democracy against the forces that threaten it from without has made some of its failures to function at home glaringly apparent.

Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.

What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.

The most profound indication of social malignancy ... no sense of humor. None of the monoliths could take a joke.