Societal Consequences Quotes

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.

The liberty of thinking and publishing whatsoever each one likes, without any hindrances, is not in itself an advantage over which society can wisely rejoice. On the contrary, it is the fountainhead and origin of many evils.

I have a new theory of history, which is certain things happen because they seem like a good idea at the time. And suburbia seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was a special time and place in history, with special dynamics. And now, we're going to have to live with the consequences of that. And the consequences will be tragic.

We the children of the third and fourth generations are doomed to pay the penalties of the compromises made by the first.

The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation and still no one shows any signs of leaving. The problem of when the drink is going to run out is, however, going to have to be faced one day. The planet over which they are floating is no longer the planet it was when they first started floating over it. It is in bad shape

We are always impacting the world...through our presence, energy, interactions - what kind of impact are we having?

They say people can think for themselves? Do you honestly believe that the chap who can’t pass primary six knows the consequence of his choice when he answers a question viscerally, on language, culture and religion? But we knew the consequences. We would starve, we would have race riots. We would disintegrate.

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

And, I know that I'll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad.

Any nation that expects to be ignorant and free," Jefferson said, "expects what never was and never will be." And if the gap between the educated and the uneducated in America continues to grow as it is in our time, as fast as or faster than the gap between the rich and the poor, the gap between the educated and the uneducated is going to be of greater consequence and the more serious threat to our way of life. We must not, by any means, misunderstand that.

Taking power away from a man is a dangerous thing. Someone always pays.

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.

The hydrogen economy will make possible a vast redistribution of power, with far-reaching consequences for society. Today's centralized, top-down flow of energy, controlled by global oil companies and utilities, could become obsolete.

Surely all Americans have the right to give their money only to those causes which they support. But what kind of society has this created? A society where the ignorant reign. A society where enlightened must hold their tongues. A nation whose politicians must profess half-hearted devotion to an ancient fable or face the disastrous consequences of speaking their true mind.

I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.[...] I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape - but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community - to society?

I am trying to get at the moral arguments and the ethical status of various attempts at enhancement, or genetic engineering, or the bid for designer children. But there are implications for society at large.

I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt- and there is the story of mankind.

...What is at stake is civilization and humanity, nothing less. The idea that everything is permitted, as Nietzsche put it, rests on the premise of nihilism and has nihilistic implications. I will not pretend that the case against nihilism and for civilization is an easy one to make. We are here confronting the most fundamental of philosophical questions, on the deepest levels. In short, the matter of pornography and obscenity is not a trivial one, and only superficial minds can take a bland and untroubled view of it.

It will be interesting to see what the long term fruits of our national apathy will be, 'cos so far they've been pretty foul.

What happens to a dream deferred?

As a society, we are underinvesting resources in research on the societal implications of AI technologies.

What will be left of the power of example if it is proved that capital punishment has another power, and a very real one, which degrades men to the point of shame, madness, and murder?

If the economy becomes disembodied from society it can only lead to disaster.

We're all hoping that Trump doesn't get our world on his terms because there won't be anything of it left. Trump is a true psychopath, a psychopath in the way that tragedy becomes tragedy.