Quotes about society

Nor did I learn about sex from any reasoned source of instruction. I learned about it from the distorted and imperfect knowledge of other boys. This is the usual fate enforced upon youngsters by a society that is too prim and too hypocritical to have sex taught like any other branch of knowledge.

Considering how important sex is, how great a source of joy, how enormous a source of misery and disease, how is permeates the workings of courtship and marriage, isn’t it strange that we go to great lengths to teach our children to play football and make no effort whatever to teach them to play sex?

There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don’t come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity.

I refuse to consider myself to be anything more sharply defined than “human being,” and I feel that aside from overpopulation the most intractable problem we face in trying to avoid the destruction of civilization and humanity is the diabolical habit of people dividing themselves into tiny groups, with each group extolling itself and denouncing its neighbors.

The greatest single problem facing humanity today is the multiplicity of people. No environmental problem can possibly be solved till the population is stabilized and brought under control. Under these circumstances, it would seem that any young couple who were indifferent to children and showed no disposition to add to Earth’s burden ought to be encouraged and made much of.

The truth, however, is quite the contrary. The world would not let us be childless. People who met us invariably asked if we had children, and when we said we didn’t, they would look at us with disapproval or with sorrow.

When I was young, all youngsters wore caps.… Now they are gone, all gone. The story I’ve heard was that caps were always worn by the bad guys in the early gangster movies, and the American public, never notable for thinking for themselves, therefore rejected them.

“It is a mistake,” he said, “to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort. We know that well enough from our experience in the environmental crisis of the twentieth century.”

At the slightest stress, human beings seemed to divide themselves into antagonistic groups.

“But it’s been quiet under Cleon. And we’ve had fifty years of peace.”

“Yes, but soldiers who are well-paid would resent having that pay reduced just because there is peace. Admirals resist mothballing ships and having themselves reduced in rank simply because there is less for them to do. So the credits still go—unproductively—to the armed forces and vital areas of the social good are allowed to deteriorate. That’s what I call decay. Don’t you?”

No matter how the conomy and sociology of the neighbouring sectors of the Galaxy changes, there was always an elite; and it is always the characteristic of an elite that it possesses leisure as the great reward of its elite-hood.

An unpleasant nest of nasty, materialistic and aggressive people, careless of the rights of others, imperfectly democratic at home though quick to see the minor slaveries of others, and greedy without end.

There was no denying that he would always be conscious of the fact that an Earthman was an Earthman. He couldn’t help that. That was the result of a childhood immersed in an atmosphere of bigotry so complete that it was almost invisible, so entire that you accepted its axioms as second nature. Then you left it and saw it for what it was when you looked back.

It was the addition of status that brought the little things: a more comfortable seat here, a better cut of meat there, a shorter wait in line at the other place. To the philosophical mind, these items might seem scarcely worth any great trouble to acquire.

Yet no one, however philosophical, could give up those privileges, once acquired, without a pang. That was the point.