One of the frustrating tics of our society's progressive vanguard is the assumption that every evil it discovers was entirely invisible in the past, that this generation is the first to wrestle with dominance and cruelty.
I think it would be great if in 50 years you could find out lots more about the conditions your child is going to have - and if we lived in a society that is so tolerant that many things that might now lead to abortion would then be seen as part of human variance.
I think vegetarianism is a crucial ethical choice for an individual and a society.
The existing legal constitution is nothing but the product of a revolution. Revolution is the act of political creation in the history of classes, while constitutional legislation is the expression of the continual political vegetation of a society.
It is only partly true that religion does more harm than good in society. The community makes God into the image it wants, vengeful, or milky sweet, or scrupulously just, and so on.
The thrill of science is the process. It's a social process. It's a process of collective discovery. It's debate, it's experimentation and it's verification of claims that might be false. It's the greatest foundation for a society.
I think the greatest of people that have ever been in society, they were never versions of someone else. They were themselves.
It's always more interesting to make a movie about what is relevant in your society. What's the political global backdrop? What are our threats? What are we vulnerable to? Because that's what an audience vibes on - that is what people are interested in, universally.
Once you attain stardom, you lose that finer touch with society. When you are a man on the street, you get to know every vibration. But once you attain this status, more than you, people become self-conscious by your presence.
For blacks in our society, victimization may be a true issue. But it isn't a true issue for women. Neither men nor women are victimized. The true issue, that I try to point out, is that both sexes suffer restricted roles.
The purpose of our justice system is to reflect the values of our society and to punish those who violate our standards.
No man can be judged a criminal until he is found guilty; nor can society take from him the public protection until it has been proved that he has violated the conditions on which it was granted. What right, then, but that of power, can authorize the punishment of a citizen so long as there remains any doubt of his guilt?
The radicals who perpetrated the Charlie Hebdo attack were not motivated by Western imperialism but by members of a free society violating Islamic law.
I think South Africa would be in a lot worse position had you not had visionaries like the Mandelas or the Oliver Tambos or the people there who came together after... both during apartheid and afterwards to create and structure their society.
If someone chooses a vocational route, why do they not get the same respect in society as someone who just does a pure academic route?
Government is force, pure and simple. There's no way to sugar-coat that. And because government is force, it will attract the worst elements of society - people who want to use government to avoid having to earn their living and to avoid having to persuade others to accept their ideas voluntarily.
In a consumer society, people wallow in things, fascinating, enjoyable things. If you define your value by the things you acquire and surround yourself with, being excluded is humiliating.
I'm an optimist. My own fiction, while it has its own dark warnings about pitfalls ahead, depicts the potential of science to improve society by networking human minds.
Warp speed developments in technology - automation, artificial intelligence, and the arrival of the sharing economy - are transforming how we work. Beyond technology, traditional working patterns are also being disrupted by changes in society, organizations and workforce management, leading to the rise of a more independent and dispersed workforce.
I meant that the Chinese people are not aware of their own entrapment. They believe they live in a free society, but don't realize how much they are being monitored and controlled, how much the information they receive is restricted and warped, until they step out of line, that is, and feel the heavy hand of the state fall on them.
