Societal Ills Quotes

The key ingredient of politics is the idea that all of society's ills can be cured politically. It's like a cookbook where the recipe for everything is to fry it. The fruit cocktail is fried.

No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power.

The vision of the anointed is one in which ills as poverty, irresponsible sex, and crime derive primarily from 'society,' rather than from individual choices and behavior. To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by 'society'.

History is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes

We believe that the defects of so many perverse and so many frivolous people, who make up society, are organic, and society is a hospital of incurables.

A bonus, being a writer, is that the true-life source material is fabulously bizarre. There's so much corruption, violence and free-floating depravity that the well never runs dry, whether you're a novelist, a journalist, or both.

Any issue and any problem, no matter what height you look at it from, no matter how much you extend past the first fractal, it's still a fractal of something that emanates from within your consciousness - from within the human consciousness. And it'll move on and manifest itself externally, and then those are what we pick up as societal ills. But all these battles we're fighting are internal. For me, it's reconciling hope with dread and trying to cut out some place in my mind where my heart can be protected a little bit.

Of all the ills that our poor ... society is heir to, the focal one, it seems to me, from which so much of our uneasiness and confusion derive, is the absence of standards.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

Civilization is a social plague on the planet, and vices are just as necessary to it as is a virus to disease.

Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.

Comforts and syphilis are the greatest enemies of mankind.

Immorality, violence, and divorce, with their accompanying sorrows, plague society worldwide.

There's a lot of bad isms floating around this world, but one of the worst is commercialism.

Over all, many of society's values are a cesspool.

Organized charity itself is. . . the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents

If we could sweep intemperance out of the country, there would be hardly poverty enough left to

In the mouth of Society are many diseased teeth, decayed to the bones of the jaws. But Society makes no effort to have them extracted and be rid of the affliction. It contents itself with gold fillings.

The world is full of religion, and full of misery and crime.

Bad schools, crime, drugs, high taxes, the social security mess, racism, the health care ? crisis? unemployment, welfare state dependency, illegitimacy, the gap between rich and poor. What do these issues have in common? Politicians, the media, and our so-called leaders lie to us about them. They lie about the cause. They lie about the effect. They lie about the solutions.

I harbor no illusion that government and elected office is a panacea for all of society's ills.

The sin and the shame and the sorrow, The crime and the want and the woe That are born there in your workshop, No hand can paint, you know.

The cheapness of man is every day's tragedy.

Uprooting is by far the most dangerous of the ills of human society, for it perpetuates itself.