Social Disruption Quotes

Natural disasters are terrifying - that loss of control, this feeling that something is just going to randomly end your life for absolutely no reason is terrifying. But, what scares me is the human reaction to it and how people behave when the rules of civility and society are obliterated.

There's no single movement out there. It's not like in the '60s, when Revolver came out and that's just it for the next year.

Human society can only adapt to social change at a certain rate.

Then, I realized that there is an indigenous presence in the Solar System. It's us. So, then, I got to wondering what would happen if a more technologically advanced society moved next door to us, the way we moved next door to the American Indians.

A mighty influence is abroad, surging and heaving the world.

Trouble can often be traced to a single strong individual — the stirrer, the arrogant underling, the poisoner of goodwill. If you allow such people room to operate, others will succumb to their influence. Do not wait for the troubles they cause to multiply, do not try to negotiate with them — they are irredeemable. Neutralize their influence by isolating or banishing them. Strike at the source of the trouble and the sheep will scatter.

I'm truly sorry man's dominion has broken Nature's social union.

Society was passing through a most critical stage. The French Revolution had diseased the imagination and unsettled the understanding of men everywhere. The old foundations of social order, loyalty, tradition, habit, reverence for antiquity, were everywhere shaken, if not subverted. The authority of the past was gone.

I've watched the world crash and burn in every sense. I've watched the record industry crash and burn; politically I've watched it crash and burn, financially crash and burn.

I was 14 when the Democratic convention in my hometown of Chicago erupted into violence. It was a tough year.

Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence. It weakened their authority. Their situation approached the point of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed

The diabolical influence of communism on youth was manifested in the ... communist inspired riots in San Francisco, where students were duped into disgraceful demonstrations against a Congressional committee.

The Press is reducing everything that is noblest and impressive in modern life into terms of Press photographs and Press interviews. In fact they try to dominate everything. How can you concentrate on the solemnity of a scene when you have men with cameras in every direction, whose sole object is to get as near as they can to the central figures? How can you be impressed as much as you would like to be by what is said, when you know that all round you are people taking notes, and that the people who are speaking know that they are taking notes. One or two reporters, for the sake of preserving a record, would not be so bad. But they have to be dealt with in armies nowadays. The Press is destroying all romance, all solemnity, all majesty. They are as unscrupulous as they are vulgar.

The agents that move politicks are the popular passions, and those are ever ... under the command of the disturbers of society.

Although, from the point of view of sociology, the overt ambition of 'American Pastoral' - to imagine the impact on a good man of America's fall from the family decencies of the '30s and '40s to the self-centred violence of the '60s - outstrips anything Sabbath's Theater attempts, the writing is no less fervid an excurse into the writer's mind.

Tribal life comes automatically to an end when a primitive people begins to live in a town or a city, for sooner or later a tribal organization is found to be incompatible with life in a city.

Nudity is a problem for Americans. It disrupts our social exchange.

What would happen if we withdrew? Anarchy and confusion.

Party spirit was ... and always will be, wherever indulged, the bane of society and good neighborhood.

The election of any man avowing the principles of Mr. Jefferson would ... destroy religion, introduce immorality and loosen all the bonds of society.

Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.

The pressure in Brazil is a little complicated, a little menacing.

Leftist law breaking, rule breaking, violence, and disruption have already marred the public Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.

Ours is a world which feels so unsettled and dangerous in large ways, whether it's terrorism or global financial meltdown or climate change - huge things that affect us deeply, and yet things about which we can do, individually, very little.