25 Quotes Tagged: social-commentary

"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure.

We’ve arranged a society on science and technology in which
nobody understands anything about science and technology, and
this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is
going to blow up in our faces. I mean, who is running the science and
technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about
it? Science is more than a body of knowledge, it’s a way of thinking. If
we are not able to ask skeptical questions to interrogate those who tell
us something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re
up for grabs for the next charlatan political or religious leader who
comes ambling along. It’s a thing that Jefferson lay great stress on.
It wasn’t enough, he said, to enshrine some rights in the Constitution
and the Bill of Rights, the people had to be educated and they have to
practice their skepticism and their education. Otherwise, we don’t run
the government, the government runs us. — Carl Sagan

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.

"On the raptors kept for falconry:
"They talk every night, deep into the darkness. They say about how they were taken, about what they can remember about their homes, about their lineage and the great deeds of their ancestors, about their training and what they've learned and will learn. It is military conversation, really, like what you might have in the mess of a crack cavalry regiment: tactics, small arms, maintenance, betting, famous hunts, wine, women, and song. Another subject they have is food. It is a depressing thought," he continued, "but of course they are mainly trained by hunger. They are a hungry lot, poor chaps, thinking of the best restaurants where they used to go, and how they had champagne and caviar and gypsy music. Of course, they all come from noble blood."
"What a shame that they should be kept prisoners and hungry."
"Well, they do not really understand that they are prisoners any more than the cavalry officers do. They look on themselves as being 'dedicated to their profession,' like an order of knighthood or something of that sort. You see, the member of the Muse [where Raptors are kept for falconry] is restricted to the Raptors, and that does help a lot. They know that none of the lower classes can get in. Their screened perches do not carry Blackbirds or such trash as that. And then, as for the hungry part, they're far from starving or that kind of hunger: they're in training, you know! And like everybody in strict training, they think about food.

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.

..the happy hum of humanity.

"In practice nobody cares if work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except " Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it"? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised."

Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?

Or was he merely a mollycoddled favorite, enjoying capriciously prejudiced love? Schenback was inclined to believe the latter. Inborn in nearly every artist’s nature is a voluptuous, treacherous tendency to accept the injustice if it creates beauty and to grant sympathy and homage to aristocratic preferences.

When it's better for everyone, it's better for everyone.

I know the police cause you trouble
They cause trouble everywhere
But when you die and go to heaven
You find no policeman there

When a place gets crowded enough to require ID’s, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.

Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).