Social Complacency Quotes

I have absolutely no idea what my generation did to enrich our democracy. We dropped the ball. We entered a period of complacency and closed our eyes to the public corruption of our democracy.

Where there is no opposition to evil, it multiplies.

We have learned to live with unholiness and have come to look upon it as the natural and expected thing.

We should not permit tolerance to degenerate into indifference.

We have perfected the art of finding problems without fixing real-world issues. We focus too much on complexity, not harm.

So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.

If society is a ship, it appears to many to be firmly at anchor in moral waters. Perhaps this isn't so.

The world is a horrible place, but no one worries because we have all been pacified by anodyne television in which incorruptible cops solve crimes, crusading lawyers keep the innocent out of prison, and streetwise social workers rescue children from abuse.

Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and a sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.

I am very much afraid that to the fiction writer the fact that we shall always have the poor with us is a source of satisfaction,for it means, essentially, that he will always be able to find someone like himself.

The writing has been on the wall for some years now, but we are a nation illiterate in the language of the wall. The writing just gets bigger. Something will eventually bring down the charming, infuriating naïveté of Americans that allows us our blithe consumption and cheerful ignorance of the secret ugliness that bring us whatever we want.

Smug respectability, like the poor, we've had with us always. Today, however, ... such obtuseness is an indulgence we can no longer afford. The computer, nuclear energy for better or worse, and sudden, simultaneous influences upon everyone's TV screen have raised the ante and the risk considerably.

They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy evil, that they may no longer have have it to regret.

We’ve convinced ourselves that poverty is a tolerable thing. The basic problem is the sense of resignation about poverty in our society.

It will be interesting to see what the long term fruits of our national apathy will be, 'cos so far they've been pretty foul.

The audiences like to think that satire is doing something. But, in fact, it is mostly to leave themselves satisfied. Satisfied rather than angry, which is what they should be.

We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

Fat is mainstream, which is why everyone has become complacent. What used to be considered pudgy before isn't even worthy of a comment today.

We've invented most of the stuff that we need and now we're just messing about

There is very little point in trying to urge the world to mend its ways as long as that world is still convinced that its ways are perfectly adequate.

I've always considered myself a feminist. But, like a lot of women of my generation, I didn't think we had to fight for it. I thought it was all done. I took so much for granted.

We have this attitude in America of, 'Someone else is going to fix the problem.' That's what the majority of Americans have. Or, 'I'm just going to go online and sign this petition, and that will take care of it.' That's doesn't do it.

A society which allows an abominable event to burgeon from its dung heap and grow on its surface is like a man who lets a fly crawl unheeded across his face or saliva dribble from his mouth -- either epileptic or dead.

It's very, very hard to affect culture. And you can get surprised thinking you're farther down the path of change than you really are because, frankly, most of us like the way things are.

Science, the largest religion of the twentieth century, had become tarnished by images of exploding space shuttles, crack babies, and a generation of complacent Americans who allowed the television to raise their children. People were looking for something - I think they just didn't know what. And even though they were once again starting to open their eyes to the world of magic and the arcane that had been with them all the while, they still thought I must be some kind of joke.