You can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons; the next, by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things; the highest, by their preference for the discussion of ideas.

Your neighbors are not all sheep. Your political opponents are not all evil or fools. Try talking to those you despise. They are your fellow citizens. And together, we are not lesser than any "greatest generation.".

Those who most obstinately oppose the most widely-held opinions more often do so because of pride than lack of intelligence. They find the best places in the right set already taken, and they do not want back seats.

...there is nothing so dangerous in its consequences as injustice to individuals- whether it arise from prejudice of color or from any other source; that a wrong done to one man is a wrong to society and to the world.

Home, home - a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease and smells.

A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it.

In our society of fixed texts and printed words, it is the function of the poet to see the life value of the facts round about, and to deify them, as it were, to provide images that relate the everyday to the eternal.

So long as there is death there will be sorrow, and so long as there is sorrow it can be no part of the duty of human beings to increase its amount, in spite of the fact that a few rare spirits know how to transmute it.

It is not in our interest, I suppose, to let South Sudan fall under the category of the burdened societies. We must be critical about our own actions if we want to move forward as a nation proud of its immense diversity.

The American Dream has become a death sentence of drudgery, consumerism, and fatalism: a garage sale where the best of the human spirit is bartered away for comfort, obedience and trinkets. It's unequivocally absurd.

They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.

If you can change the way people think, she said.The way they see themselves.The way they see the world.If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives.And that's the only lasting thing you can create.

A new question for the psychotherapist to ask is whether a theory can go beyond mere effectiveness in achieving either a so-called cure or even personal growth into its implications for the nature of an evolving society.

Criminal justice" is what happens after a complicated series of events has gone bad. It is the end result of failure--the failure of a group of people that sometimes includes, but is never limited to, the accused person.

Whereas the health of an individual depends on the ego's regular descent and return to and from the unconscious, a society's longevity depends on actual people journeying into the unknown and returning with ideas.