societal perspective Quotes

At the end of the day, you're just another person in society. It doesn't matter how much fame you have. It doesn't matter how much money you have.

Take a look at public opinion. About 70 percent of the population, in the polls, said the [Vietnam ] war was fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake. And that attitude lasted as long as polls were taken in the early '80s.

... garden books are quite unconscious that besides telling us how to turn our patch of earth into a garden, they are also expressing the way their age looks at the world, the state of their society.

Canadians and Americans may look alike, but the contents of their heads are quite different. Americans experience themselves, individually, as small toads in the biggest and most powerful puddle in the world. Their sense of power comes from identifying with the puddle. Canadians as individuals may have more power within the puddle, since there are fewer toads in it; it's the puddle that's seen as powerless.

For me, my dream came true. But for society it showed me that people want to move on, to look to the future. We said something, we made a statement.

Let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad collision, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best use to put a fine person to is to drown him to save his board.

The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.

What is life? A continuous praise and blame.

Professional psychologists seem to think that they are the only people who make sense out of human actions. The rest of us know that everybody tries to do just this. What else is gossip?

As to the rout that is made about people who are ruined by extravagance, it is no matter to the nation that some individuals suffer. When so much general productive exertion is the consequence of luxury, the nation does not care though there are debtors; nay, they would not care though their creditors were there too.

There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses

If its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body, they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists, at any hour of the day or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable globe.

The proper way to understand any social system was to view it from above.

Same reason why young women on juries are not a good idea, they don't get it. They're not in that same life experience of paying the bills, doing the mortgage, kids, community, crime, education and health care. They're like healthy and hot and running around without a care in the world... I just think, excuse them, so they can go back on Tinder and Match.com.

With sociology one can do anything and call it work