societal comparison Quotes

All envy would be extinguished, if it were universally known that there are none to be envied.

Pre-state societies were far more violent than our own.

If you look within the United States, religion seems to make you a better person. Yet atheist societies do very well - better, in many ways, than devout ones.

But the higher our standard of living, the higher our levels of education, the further people will look around. And we can see which level of openness other societies enjoy. We are no different - we too want more freedom. The question is: How much freedom will be allowed?

All TV is, is really: 'Don't you want to be this, aren't you glad you're not that.' There's nothing really in the middle.

All generations think the present moment is the greatest but also have this fascination with before their time. I do the same thing. I see old British movies. I'm like, 'Man, I would love to be in London at that time.' But then I wouldn't be able to watch 'The Walking Dead,' I wouldn't have cable, and my pizza options would be limited.

Every society needs to examine itself in relation to other societies.

Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards.

My point is that there are a lot of forces, like the media and the general political rhetoric tells us we should have more. That we should do better than our parents and have a bigger house or a better car.

I'm comparing Americans to international peers in terms of GDP, educational system - the sort of benchmarks we used to designate a so-called developed society. In that sense, we are outliers. Are we suckers? Yes, but it's not just that. That puts too fine a point on what I am saying. We're not idiots and victims. It's about us as a people, compared with, say, Canadians, believing whatever we believe because, well, we're Americans, we feel this way without regard for what scholars and scientists say.

It is partly to avoid consciousness of greed that we prefer to associate with those who are at least as greedy as we ourselves. Those who consume much less are a reproach.

I recall asking the late eminent liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, in a public forum in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, if he would say that America was, all things considered, a better, i.e., more moral, society than Soviet society. He said he would not.

When people impute special vices to the Christian Church, they seem entirely to forget that the world (which is the only other thing there is) has these vices much more. The Church has been cruel; but the world has been much more cruel. The Church has plotted; but the world has plotted much more. The Church has been superstitious; but it has never been so superstitious as the world is when left to itself.

Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable.

The reason societies with democratic governments are better places to live in than their alternatives isn't because of some goodness intrinsic to democracy, but because its hopeless inefficiency helps blunt the basic potential for evil.

The history of man so far is nothing to brag about, from the standpoint of our ideas - and what I mean is, that in comparison with most other societies, our present-day American society has achieved things which are remarkable: material wealth, greater than for any other nation; a relative freedom from oppression; a relative mobility; a spreading of art, of music, of thought, which is also rather unique.

I think some of the best reporters are the ones who can really illustrate the differences between societies, at the same time trying to connect the fact that there are a lot of shared values in addition to those differences.

To place man properly at the present time, he stands somewhere between the angels and the French.

There's not a whole lot of similarity between the two societies, Russian and American. There are similarities behind psychological forces. One thing we can learn is that things can change pretty fast. And this idea that we know who we are and that things can only get so bad in this country - that's wrong.

He that would travel for the entertainment of others, should remember that the great object of remark is human life. Every Nation has something peculiar in its Manufactures, its Works of Genius, its Medicines, its Agriculture, its Customs, and its Policy. He only is a useful Traveller, who brings home something by which his country may be benefited; who procures some supply of Want, or some mitigation of Evil, which may enable his readers to compare their condition with that of others, to improve it whenever it is worse, and whenever it is better to enjoy it.

One could construe the life of man as a great discourse in which the various people represent different parts of speech (the same might apply to states).