Social Instability Quotes

So many awful things have happened in Karachi, it's true. It has its own crazy rhythm. Even as crazy as other news is in Pakistan, the city manages to beat that in the frequency of catastrophes.

You can count on violence if any illustration of the Prophet is published. It will cause riots, I predict, from Indonesia to Nigeria.

Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable.

I suspect that a substantial fraction of human problems in the world today, not just cults, result from the mismatch between the current environment and the environment in which we evolved.

The lack of societal and institutional safeguards provides fertile ground for populist movements fueled by fear.

[On Russia's civil disorder:] Comrade deputies, the most essential thing now is to overcome the crisis, to restore order in the country.

Our society will always remain an unstable and explosive compound as long as political power is vested in the masses and economic power in the classes. In the end one of these powers will rule. Either the plutocracy will buy up the democracy, or the democracy will vote away the plutocracy.

… representatives of those forces which simmer beneath the surface of every civilized community and if they could break out, would destroy not only property and civilization but finally even themselves. .

Panamanians live in a chronic state of insurrection and violence.

The result [of more rapidly adopting technology] is likely to be more unemployment in the short term and perhaps greater inequality—a recipe for social instability. Economists are right to remind us that workers who are displaced by machine intelligence need not be condemned to long-term idleness. Given the infinite variety of human desires, there is always more work to be done. But society will need to facilitate social structures that help employees face a lifetime of job changes.

Economic growth driven by large-scale infrastructure investments without equitable provision of education will leave hundreds of millions of people behind, exacerbating inequality, disillusion, and instability.

Some Western demographers have posited, due to the female shortage created by the one-child policy, that China will be forced to field a vast force - as in tens of millions strong - of wifeless men who'll gladly wage wars around the planet to burn off all those unrequited hormones.

If we neglect or abandon those who are suffering in poverty ... not only are we depriving ourselves of potential opportunities for markets and economic growth, but ultimately that despair may turn to violence that turns on us.

Today, neither Left nor Right can find their footing.

There is certainly a longstanding idea within western culture that civilization is only a thin veneer. As soon as something happens, say a war or a natural disaster or an epidemic like we're going through right now, the worst comes out in each of us.

Young men without prospects are open to radical offers.

If we have major geographic areas within our continent that have a tremendous lack of economic opportunity, we found that that is going to produce instability _ economic, political and social.

The more there are riots, the more repressive actin will take place, and the more we face the danger of a right-wing takeover and eventually a fascist society.

Soldiers quartered in a populous town will always occasion two mobs where they prevent one. They are wretched conservators of the peace.

No man was ever more than about nine meals away from crime or suicide.

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

Extreme poverty is the best breeding ground on earth for disease, political instability, and terrorism.

Since the passing of Victoria the Great there had been an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some compact and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people's ideas, and as if at once they had begun to blow about anyhow.

Most of the world is fooling about, especially the people who think they control the world and the community. The presidents, the politicians, the military, etc., are all jerking about, acting as if they are Lord over their own domains. That's basically Problem One on the planet.

When a society doesn't know what to do with its young, it's in real trouble. When the young don't know what to do with society - at the very least, revolutions start there.