Societal Improvement Quotes

I'm in favor of progress; it's change I don't like.

In the institution of societies, mankind in all probability thought father of redressing the evils, which they had experienced, than of procuring the several advantages resulting from laws, from commerce, from the arts and sciences, and from all those other improvements so frequently mentioned in history.

You have to reform yourself before reforming society and the world.

There are so many things that we could do to change the world in so many aspects. There are people working in nonprofit organizations, tackling the issues that we so desperately need to face, while governments fail so appallingly.

Men in masses do not forget the main gains of their civilization, and that, in spite of deteriorations, their tendency is upward.

I like many Americans are frustrated by a lot of things in the world and I would like to be a part of the dialogue moving forward to make this a better world for everyone.

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.

Ancient Rome was as confident of the immutability of its world and the continual expansion and improvement of the human lot as we are today.

The reports on human progress are beginning to come in, and some are a little discouraging.

The next great technology revolution might be around the corner, but it won't automatically improve most people's lives. That will depend on politics, which is indeed ugly but also inescapable.

Teaching is the human thing, in terms of building the kids' self-confidence, so if we take the broad ways that we want to see society to be better, science can only provide certain pieces of that.

We want to ensure a multilateral development of society, the thriving of all sides of social life, economy, science and culture, the improvement of management, the moulding of the new man and the promotion of socialist ethics and equity.

Is civilization only a higher form of idolatry, that man should bow down to a flesh-brush, to flannels, to baths, diet, exercise, and air?

It is easy to prescribe improvement for others; it is easy to organize something, to institutionalize this or that, to pass laws, multiply bureaucratic agencies, form pressure groups, start revolutions, change forms of government, tinker at political theory. The fact that these expedients have been tried unsuccessfully in every conceivable combination for 6,000 years has not noticeably impaired a credulous unintelligent willingness to keep on trying them again and again.

Parents usually educate their children merely in such a manner than however bad the world may be, they may adapt themselves to its present conditions. But they ought to give them an education so much better than this, that a better condition of things may thereby be brought about by the future.

We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, were marked by good qualities, or they could never have risen to a higher stage.

There is nothing wrong with America that Americans can't fix.

To return to higher standards of living we must abandon the false prophets and seek new leaders of our own choosing.

In this life of ours we remain directed toward the relative utopia of a better world, and sensibly this can be the only model for our action.

You grow up and recognise that in an educated, secular society, there's no excuse for ignorance. You have to recognise in yourself, and challenge yourself, that if you see racism or homophobia or misogyny in a secular society, as a member of that society, you should challenge it. You owe it to the betterment of society.

Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best.

I discovered very quickly that criticism is a form of optimism, and that when you are silent about the shortcomings of your society, you're very pessimistic about that society. And it's only when you speak truthfully about it that you show your faith in that society.

I thank God that I've lived long enough to see what I have seen, and I pray that people will continue to do better. We are doing better, it may not seem so, but there was a time when people were lynched in the middle of the street and it was not against the law. We are doing better, but we have so much more to do.

We muckraked, not because we hated our world, but because we loved it. We were not hopeless, we were not cynical, we were not bitter.