Societal Cost Quotes

These are our children. We will all profit by and pay for whatever they become.

Politically, resistance to industrialism must force the viability of industrial society into public consciousness and debate. What purpose does this machine serve? What problem has become so great that it needs this solution? Is this invention nothing but, as Thoreau put it, an improved means to an unimproved end? Who are the winners? Who are the losers? Will this invention concentrate or disperse power, encourage or discourage self worth? Can society at large afford it? Can the biosphere?

Cash imposes a huge burden. We don't understand it, as it is not immediately visible. It is a huge burden on society.

Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!

Progress, under whose feet the grass mourns and the forest turns into paper from which newspaper plants grow, has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts for our tools.

Society does not need more children; but it does need more loved children. Quite literally, we cannot afford unloved children - but we pay heavily for them every day. There should not be the slightest communal concern when a woman elects to destroy the life of her thousandth-of-an-ounce embryo. But all society should rise up in alarm when it hears that a baby that is not wanted is about to be born.

Without being overtly political about it, if people with severe disabilities are calculated in societal terms purely as a monetised unit, in terms of how much they cost in terms of care, you lose an important sense of who they are and the effect they have.

The cost of Colonel Gaddafi's rule on Libyan society is incalculable.

The price of freedom keeps going up, but the quality keeps deteriorating.

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.

Growth is a funny sort of concept. For example, our GNP increases every time we build a prison. Well, okay, it's growth in a sense.

So much torture, bloodshed, deceit. You cannot make your young people practice torture twenty-four hours a day and not expect to pay a price for it.

The question is not whether we can afford to invest in every child; it is whether we can afford not to.

Companies that pollute should be taxed so that a product's cost to society is reflected in the price of that product.

There is a cost to every decision, and whether or not you impose a public health order has costs to industry and the public.

It seems like such a terrible shame that innocent civilians have to get hurt in wars, otherwise combat would be such a wonderfully healthy way to rid the human race of unneeded trash.

Man seeks his own good at the whole world's cost.

And he’s right to say that every faction loses something when it gains a virtue: the Dauntless, brave but cruel; the Erudite, intelligent but vain; the Amity, peaceful but passive; the Candor, honest but inconsiderate; the Abnegation, selfless but stifling.

Every crime destroys more Edens than our own

We do ourselves in and expect society to pick up the tab.

One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the effort of every man to get the most he can for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of capital, to get his services for the least possible return.