societal concerns Quotes

In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.

I think the smart people will get even smarter, and the dumb people will get even dumber. But I think they all will enjoy A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila, no matter how you slice it. You know, we keep eating it up. Some of the most intelligent people I know cannot get enough of it. That's a dangerous thing.

Economics has become as riveting as politics.

I think the biggest problem in the world is that we have a generation of young people, and maybe two, who don't think it's going to get any better.

As ecstatic as I was at the birth of my daughter, I felt selfish bringing her, and later my son, into our screwed-up world.

I do think that you're starting to see young people pay attention to some longterm issues that they feel Washington has neglected.

And so popular culture raises issues that are very important, actually, in the country I think. You get issues of the First Amendment rights and issues of drug use, issues of AIDS, and things like that all arise naturally out of pop culture.

Consumerism diverts us from thinking about women's rights, it stops us from thinking about Iraq, it stops us from thinking about what's going on in Africa - it stops us from thinking in general.

Not a whole lot of us are wrestling somebody for a canned food item in the supermarket or having an ax fight in the jungle clearing. Instead, we sit and think about taxes and the ozone layer.

Utopias now appear much more realizable than one used to think. We are now faced with a different new worry: How to prevent their realization.

One of the things that Americans, as a multiracial society, feel is a tremendous sensitivity to racial comments of all kinds.

I don't like the way I see society going.

What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?

Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can't even finish my second apple pie.

I really look at my life before kids and after kids and before I was more - not narcissistic - but I was definitely more selfish. I didn't have the same concerns as I do now. I've always been political, but you've gotta be engaged. You can't be apathetic anymore because what's at stake is bigger than yourself, it's your kids.

I do ballads that say what every man wants to say and that every woman wants to hear, or I do songs about social issues.

You know, it's fashionable right now for people to be cynical. We go in cycles like this and right now a lot of people are saying, 'Oh, America is doing terribly' and 'What are we going to do?'

But I think musicals are going to have to deal with important subjects.

I'd like to see people, instead of spending so much time on the ethical problem, get after the problems that really affect the people of this country

We are living in such a troubled world that fashion seems completely irrelevant. Yet...it's a very, very mysterious thing. Why all of a sudden do people like yellow? Why all of a sudden do people wear combat boots?

You know, something may be going down tonight, but it ain’t going to be jobs, sweetheart!

The development of technology will leave only one problem: the infirmity of human nature.

Two-thirds of Americans think our kids will have a worse life than we did. That is a powerful indication we are on the wrong path. I think we can change that, but I'll tell you, that's what I'm going to fight to do, and the reason so many grass-roots activists poured so much into it is they believed in our country. They believed in liberty.

A lot of women ask themselves why they should bring a child into the world? So that it will be hungry, so that it will be cold, so that it will be betrayed and humiliated, so that it will be slaughtered by war or disease? They reject the hope that its hunger will be satisfied, its cold warmed, that loyalty and respect will accompany it through life, that it will be a devote a life to the effort to eliminate war and disease.

The trilogy composed of politics, religion and sex is the most sensitive of all issues in any society.