Professional societies are sooner or later fractured by the ego of their leaders. Everyone wants to be president, chairman, CEO; no one wants to be a mere follower.
There are trends in our societies... that can lead to some political decisions in America and in Europe that can give some ground to the radicalization discourse.
The grandest of all laws is the law of progressive development. Under it, in the wide sweep of things, men grow wiser as they grow older, and societies better.
Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.
Societies can easily talk themselves into conflict and misery. But they can also talk, and act, their way out.
Shallowness and ignorance have been our lot in the mass consumer societies we inhabit, where we were too distracted to act politically, apart from periodically deputing political elites to take life-and-death decisions on our behalf.
This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.
The Islamic tradition does show some areas of apparent incompatibility with the goals of women in the West, and Muslims have a long way to go in their attitudes towards women. But blaming the religion is again to express an ignorance both of the religion and of the historical struggle for equality of women in Muslim societies.
Discomfort levels in our societies are rising, or so it would seem. In theory, we invoke diversity and tolerance. But in real life, we raise our hackles and withdraw into ourselves.
I have no idea if some societies, anthropologically speaking, aren't really suited for democracy. I don't think that's true.
Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve.
The importance of the arts to the societies in which they thrive is well documented.
The poorest and most backward societies are always those that put women down.
In Hindu societies, especially overprotected patriarchal families like mine, daughters are not at all desirable. They are trouble. And a mother who, as mine did, has three daughters, no sons, is supposed to go and hang herself, kill herself, because it is such an unlucky kind of motherhood to have.
I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.
People have been looking for love potions since hunter-gatherer societies.
American influence in the world is certainly considerable, but the United States does not control, directly or indirectly, the politics and economics of other societies, as empires have always done, save for a few special cases that turn out to be the exceptions that prove the rule.
For African societies, no issue looms larger than employment. Only vibrant entrepreneurship and thriving small businesses can hope to provide the millions of jobs that are needed.
There are so many societies, so many churches, so many -isms, that it is almost impossible for an independent man to succeed in a political career.
If you look at the primitive societies that we know about, the worst thing that could have happened to you was to be captured and be turned over to the women.
To measure the success of our societies, we should examine how well those with different abilities, including persons with autism, are integrated as full and valued members.
The Anthroposophical Society is different from other societies in that it will not tolerate any figments of the imagination in its organization but is constructed on the basis of reality.
Because I'm a doctor, I know when you have an injury it will heal if it's clean enough to heal; if your injury is dirty, it won't heal. And so when you are talking in societies, we are also talking in healing processes, and for a good healing process, you need to make things right.
The dual scourge of hunger and malnutrition will be truly vanquished not only when granaries are full, but also when people's basic health needs are met and women are given their rightful role in societies.
Time is found in the calibration of the individual to the timing of a collective endeavour, the social grace that less clock-bound societies must practise.
Everybody feels like an outcast because the world is so large and every fingerprint is so vastly different from one another, and yet we have these standards and beliefs, and dogmatic systems of judgment and ranking, in almost all the societies of the world.
I think modern societies have to ask a very basic question: What strategies buy the most health for people? Doctors can do so many marvelous things now. They can keep a corpse alive, almost.
Feudal societies don't create great cinema; we have great theatre. The egalitarian societies create great cinema. The Americans, the French. Because equality is sort of what the cinema deals with. It deals with stories which don't fall into 'Everybody in their place and who's who,' and all that. But the theatre's full of that.
Of course as children, we all, in all cultures and societies, learn behavior from observation, imitation, and encouragement of various kinds. So by the suggestion made, we all 'pretend' most of the time.
Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.
Western countries in particular can today no longer be separated from Muslim societies, because they have them within themselves. They are themselves internally globalized.
Goldman Sachs believes that economically empowering women globally is one of the best investments to grow economies, create jobs, and build more prosperous societies.
The truth is, we haven't really figured out yet how artists are going to thrive in modern mass societies. We're all experiments.
Sharing food has always had a central place in civilized societies; it's no accident that so many of our cultural, religious and patriotic rituals are involved with eating.
America is a noisy culture, unlike, say, Finland, which values silence. Individualism, dominant in the U.S. and Germany, promotes the direct, fast-paced style of communication associated with extraversion. Collectivistic societies, such as those in East Asia, value privacy and restraint, qualities more characteristic of introverts.
We can never run away from our past. The past will catch up to us because it is us. It is a part of us; it's what makes us we are. It's what delineates the borders of our societies.