Societal Crisis Quotes

My country is bleeding, my people are perishing around me. But I feel as a South Carolinian, I am bound to tell the North, go on!go on! Never falter, never abandon the principles which you have adopted.

If we look around, then, at the crucial problem areas of our society - the areas of crisis and failure - we find in each and every case a “red thread” marking and uniting them all: the thread of government. In every one of these cases, government either has totally run or heavily influenced the activity.

A crippling fallacy that characterizes our modern media is the idea that every event that rises to the level of news must connote some wider societal or political crisis that can only be remedied by government intervention. Tragedies, natural disasters, acts of unspeakable evil aren’t simply to be reported and explained for what they often are: the products of individual will or negligence, irremediable human malignity or some complex set of scientific interactions. Instead each event—from lethal accidents to vicious murders to Category 5 hurricanes—is immediately sorted into its prelabeled moral narrative file, each one full of similarly useful sententious parables. They become props in the larger drama that is being constantly written for us by the preachy puritans who now control most news organizations, convenient plot devices to illustrate the virtue of their cause and the malevolence of that of their critics.

I can get away before the storm hits. Away from a world in which opiates have become the religion of the masses.

Each country thinks its school is in a specific crisis, without ever linking the school's crisis to that of the society around it.

Genocide is not just a murderous madness; it is, more deeply, a politics that promises a utopia beyond politics - one people, one land, one truth, the end of difference. Since genocide is a form of political utopia, it remains an enduring temptation in any multiethnic and multicultural society in crisis.

Do our children now have to choose between getting an education and dying? Some of us cannot move on and accept that kind of society.

There is a certain increase in the importance I assign to women in getting us out of the mess that we are in, which is a reflection of the role of women in my traditional culture - that they do not interfere in politics until men really make such a mess that the society is unable to go backward or forward. Then women will move in.

This society is in tough shape when it comes to philosophy.

A crippling fallacy that characterizes our modern media is the idea that every event that rises to the level of news must connote some wider societal or political crisis that can only be remedied by government intervention.

The magnitude of this evil among us is so deeply felt, and so universally acknowledged, that no merit could be greater than that of devising a satisfactory remedy for it.

Across the world, wherever good art has been created, that society has been in crisis.

The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule.

The crisis besetting America is not just an economic or political crisis; something deeper is wreaking havoc across the land, a mercenary and utilitarian attitude that demonstrates little empathy for people’s actual well-being, that dismisses imagination and thought, branding passion for knowledge as irrelevant.