Social Fragility Quotes

This Diversity of origins requires an infinitely firm guide, an infinitely delicate touch to manage this heterogeneous society, whose complex composition becomes destroyed, divided and dissolved with the slightest alteration.

As somebody who happens to be gay, I particularly resent that minorities are being encouraged to be fragile and bitter.

Implicit in the activist conception of government is the assumption that you can take the good things in a complex system for granted, and just improve the things that are not so good. What is lacking in this conception is any sense that a society, an institution, or even a single human being, is an intricate system of fragile inter-relationships, whose complexities are little understood and easily destabilized.

The reason Victorian society was so restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over.

Men have been barbarians much longer than they have been civilized. They are only precariously civilized, and within us there is the propensity, persistent as the force of gravity, to revert under stress and strain, under neglect or temptation, to our first natures.

The destruction that barbarians leave behind has a grim fascination, doesn't it? We're reminded how thin is the veneer of civilization.

The individual act of obedience is the cornerstone not only of the strength of authoritarian society but also of its weakness.

Conservatives reveal themselves through their care for ordinary human things, and their recognition of the fragility of decency and the need to protect it.

The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It's really precious, and it's really easy to lose.

If the current international order proves too brittle to change, it will simply crumble.

Small towns are like metronomes; with the slightest flick, the beat changes.

Nothing is so delicate as the reputation of a woman; it is at once the most beautiful and most brittle of all human things.

An arc of crisis stretches along the shores of the Indian Ocean, with fragile social and political structures in a region of vital importance to us threatened with fragmentation. The resulting political chaos could well be filled by elements hostile to our values and sympathetic to our adversaries.

On balance, I would say that anybody who reminds our lords and masters that the computerized society is fragile... has definitely done a service to the public at large.

I do not think you want too much sincerity in society. It would be like an iron girder in a house of cards.

Gansey had once told Adam that he was afraid most people didn't know how to handle Ronan. What he meant by this was that he was worried that one day someone would fall on Ronan and cut themselves.

Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.

In a culture fueled by burnout, a culture that has run itself down, our national resilience becomes compromised. And when our collective immune system is weakened, we become more susceptible to viruses that are part of every culture because they're part of human nature - fear-mongering, scapegoating, conspiracy theories, and demagoguery.

Look at the growing number of people that want to ban football. Or ban anything that might hurt somebody. Too violent or too brutal or what have you. There's a segment of our adult population that's still children, still kids.