societal failure Quotes

Civilization has always been a bust.

A criminal is undoubtedly a poor soul, who is punished for his poverty.

There is a deep sadness to American poverty, greater than the sadness of any other kind. It's because America has such an ideology of success.

The world is being run by irresponsible spoiled brats.

I'm fascinated by the period that goes from the Industrial Revolution to right after World War II. There's something about that period that's epic and tragic. There's a point after the industrial period where it seems like humanity's finally going to make it right. There were advances in medicine and technology and education. People are going to be able to live longer lives; literacy is starting to spread. It seemed like finally, after centuries of toiling and misery, that humanity was going to get to a better stage. And then what happens is precisely the contrary. Humanity betrays itself.

Every 36 seconds in America a woman lays her body down forced to choose abortion out of a lack of practical resources and emotional support. Abortion is a reflection that society has failed women.

The long history of mankind is studded with convergences, perhaps most notably in social systems and the use of artefacts and technology. But for human history, set in the arrow of time, there appears to be one intolerable stumbling-block. This is the catastrophic failure in human values and decency.

If we look around, then, at the crucial problem areas of our society - the areas of crisis and failure - we find in each and every case a “red thread” marking and uniting them all: the thread of government. In every one of these cases, government either has totally run or heavily influenced the activity.

We are at great risk in our democracy for failing to understand the great depths of poverty.

What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?

As a society, we're failing to recognize something my dad knew to be true - that kindness is the greatest show of strength. Too often, we are led to believe that strength is best demonstrated by exerting dominance or superiority over others, while kindness is portrayed as the opposite - a sign of weakness.

Liberal child welfare experts decided that child abuse was not evidence of a moral or character flaw in the abusing parent. Instead, like poverty, crime, and homelessness, child abuse came to be viewed as evidence of a societal failure.

Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.

For many, the American dream has become a nightmare.

Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realize what it has done. When the man's punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins.

What kind of society have we become when children in a great city cannot rely on mothers or fathers for a bowl of cereal in the morning and a brown bag with a sandwich and apple in it for lunch?

Into this wild-beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in jail was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars.

I believe that we all get rewarded and punished according to whether we operate in harmony or in conflict with nature's laws, and that all societies will succeed or fail in the degrees that they operate consistently with these laws.

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion.

War is society's dirty work, usually done by kids cleaning up failures perpetrated by adults.

The fact that cultures are failing all over the world means that they don't know how to operate a society to make it work. Politicians have no real knowledge of technology; therefore, they are not capable of increasing food production, designing transportations systems that are safe… They have no knowledge in that area. Therefore it's senseless to talk to them about anything of significance.

Perhaps it is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand.

Mighty cultures never - are almost never conquered. They crumble from within. And frankly, I think that a lot of Americans are acting like spoiled brats because everything isn't working out perfectly every time.

The history of man is a graveyard of cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge.

The world hath failed to impart the joy our youth forebodes; failed to fill up the void which in our breasts we bear.