Social Pathology Quotes

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Crime is a product of social excess.

I didn't create thug life, I diagnosed it

If you look at our theories of social pathology and then at the dismal conditions in which children grow up in our ghettos, you would predict that all of them would be on drugs or psychological basket cases. Yet if you use criteria like gainful employment, forming partnerships and life without crime, you will find that most of those kids make it.

All crime is a kind of disease and should be treated as such.

We have not yet made violence against women abnormal, extraordinary, unacceptable. We have not yet come to see it as a pathological issue.

The only reality is our society, and I mean this seriously, Western Society is a very sick society.

Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology.

Conformity to a sick society is to be sick.

Those who automatically say that the social pathology of the ghetto is due to poverty discrimination and the like cannot explain why such pathology was far less prevalent in the 1950s, when poverty and discrimination were worse. But there were not nearly as many grievance mongers and race hustlers then.

Liberals have been driven to the desperate expedient of attributing . . .social pathology in today's ghettos to 'a legacy of slavery' even though black children grew up with two parents more often under slavery than today.

The level of shyness has gone up dramatically in the last decade. I think shyness is an index of social pathology rather than a pathology of the individual.

The Bush Republicans' policies are, the antithesis of patriotic. And so we urge Democrats to reclaim patriotism - to call on all Americans to pull together. And, yes, to sacrifice. Rich people will have to do with fewer tax cuts. Middle class people will need to drive less and switch to more fuel efficient cars . And poor folks - especially young ones - will have to reduce out-of-wedlock pregnancies and other indicia of social pathology.

But someone like Claude Chabrol tries to make a connection between the society in which we live and the social reasons which make monsters out of some people.

Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.

The most significant social pathology of my youth was the generation gap.

I consider racism to be a medical problem. Racists need serious medical and psychiatric help, because they are killing themselves and making others suffer along with them.

The danger today is in believing there are no sick people, there is only a sick society.

We can imagine a society in which no one could survive as a social being because it does not correspond to biologically determined perceptions and human social needs. For historical reasons, existing societies might have such properties, leading to various forms of pathology.

The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic.

While there are many experts in the psychoanalysis of individuals, there seems to be little active authority or understanding in the matter of the persistent shared madness in everyday life. It's as if collective mental illness doesn't exist except in the vernacular and in contemporary folk myth, where it remains trapped and politically useless.

The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused by and sustained by the sickness of his civilization