Closed Society Quotes

In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it.

Koreans stuck to their traditional way of life without knowing what was going on outside the country. We were like frogs in a well.

Tory society is a closed society, in which birth and wealth have priority.

What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.

Belarus is a closed, authoritarian system, and the theme of Chernobyl is also a closed topic.

If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate.

Because North Korea was so totally cut off, we didn't hear anything of the outside world. We had only one TV channel, which showed only propaganda, and we believed everything.

I'm not suggesting we suddenly become a jingoistic, closed-door society that erects barricades at Dover. That would not be in the interests of London. But we can't, in my view, go on for ever accepting an unlimited number of people.

The whole Chinese system - not just the political leadership, the military too, the whole power structure, our education system, the whole of society - is suffering from being cut off from the free flow of information. That's why the country can't face up to open competition - unless it resorts to measures like North Korea.

The collapse of a closed society does not always lead to an open society.

Leaving North Korea is not like leaving any other country. It is more like leaving another universe.

Cities have become places where we are controlled, by CCTV and other means, in the same way as machines are controlled. My works provide an imaginative space in which this can be challenged. It's like opening a window in a closed room.

In the case of 'Disobedience,' the very secretive way of life and religion and tradition that the North London Orthodox Jewish community has was a huge invitation to explore an unknown world. And also a possible trap, and I tried to overcome that by portraying it, hopefully, with great nuance and detail and texture.

American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World

My feet always danced to Irish traditional music, but I was very glad to get out of the North of Ireland in the mid-Seventies when it was really closed and tight and relentlessly unforgiving.

The cadence of life is slower in North Korea.

The Old South offered little advice to outsiders and accepted none from them…

An island can be dreadful for someone from outside. Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure and self-sufficient place. Within their shores, everything functions according to rituals that are as hard as rock from repetition, and at the same time they amble through their days as whimsically and casually as if the world ended at the horizon.

In Russia everything is a secret, but there is no secrecy.

The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.

In a milieu of resignation, where the young men think of society as a closed room in which there are no values but the rejected rat race, ... it is extremely hard to aim at objective truth or world culture. One's own products are likely to be personal or parochial.

So, Japan as a country has lost its vigor; it feels very much closed in for various reasons.

Membership in the closed society of the motion-picture industry is almost never revoked for moral failings.

Life within the Kremlin was shrouded in impenetrable secrecy.