Quotes About Rules In Society

“However much the theory of political realism may have been misunderstood and misinterpreted, there is no gainsaying its distinctive intellectual and moral attitude to matters political.
Intellectually, the political realist maintains the autonomy of the political sphere, as the economist, the lawyer, the moralist maintain theirs. He thinks in terms of interest defined as power, as the economist thinks in terms of interest defined as wealth; the lawyer, of the conformity of action with legal rules; the moralist, of the conformity of action with moral principles. The economist asks: "How does this policy affect the wealth of society, or a segment of it?" The lawyer asks: "Is this policy in accord with the rules of law?" The moralist asks: "Is this policy in accord with moral principles?" And the political realist asks: "How does this policy affect the power of the nation?”

— Hans J. Morgenthau

“This was the Mecca of the American Dream, the world that everyone wanted. A world of sleek young women (allied with Slenderella to be so) in shorts and halters, driving 400-horsepower station wagons to air-conditioned, music-serenaded supermarkets of baby-sitter corporations and culture condensed into Great Books discussion groups. A life of barbecues by the swimming pool and drive in movies open all year. It did't appeal to me. Fuck health insurance plans and life insurance. They wanted to live without leaving the womb. It made me more alive to play a game without rules against society, and I was prepared to play it to the end. A tremor almost sexual passed through me as I anticipated the comming robbery.”

— Edward Bunker

“I'm sure that there must have been times when you have read books or watched films and found yourself secretly wishing for the villain to win. Why? Isn't that against the rules by which our society lives? Why should you feel this way? It's simple, really; the villain is the true hero of these tales, not the well-intentioned moron who somehow foils their diabolical scheme. The villain get's all the best lines, has the best costumes, has unlimited power and wealth- why on earth would anyone not want to be the villain?”

— Mark Walden

“The general will rules in society as the private will governs each separate individual.”

— Maximilien De Robespierre

“-Those who aren't following Jesus aren't his followers. It's that simple. Followers follow, and those who don't follow aren't followers. To follow Jesus means to follow Jesus into a society where justice rules, where love shapes everything. To follow Jesus means to take up his dream and work for it.”

— Scot McKnight

“Therefore, poets do not 'fit' into society, not because a place is denied them but because they do not take their 'places' seriously. They openly see its roles as theatrical, its styles as poses, its clothing costumes, its rules conventional, its crises arranged, its conflicts performed and its metaphysics ideological.”

— James P. Carse

“Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

“What is morality? It is not the following of enjoined rules of conduct. It is not a question of standing above temptations, or of conquering hate, anger, greed, lust and violence.
Questioning your actions before and after creates the moral problem. What is responsible for this situation is the faculty of distinguishing between right and wrong and influencing your actions accordingly.Life is action. Unquestioned action is morality. Questioning your actions is destroying the expression of life. A person who lets life act in its own way without the protective movement of thought has no self to defend. What need will he have to lie or cheat or pretend or to commit any other act which his society considers immoral?”

— U.G. Krishnamurti

“In a rule-based society, we often choose efficiency over value, but, while rules-based governance systems may often serve well the values of fairness and representation, their seeming efficiency hides a deep and important flaw: We often rely on rules when they are not, in fact, the most efficient or effective solution to getting the result that we desire.”

— Dov Seidman

“Of course it doesn't make sense." Lady Wendall said. "The rules of society rarely do.”

— Patricia C. Wrede

“Now, I'm not saying that we don't need rules in society. But the question of who makes the rules and on what basis becomes supremely important. Will the rule-making flow from the matrix of voluntary exchange based on the ethic of serving others through private enterprise? Or will the rules be made and enforced by people wearing guns and bulletproof vests with a license to shock or kill based on minor annoyances?”

— Jeffrey Tucker

“The most dangerous truth a Confessor knows is that the rules of society are just consensual hallucinations. Choosing to wake up from the dream means choosing to end your life.”

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

“It was one of the rules which above all others made Doctr. Franklin the most amiable of men in society, never to contradict anybody.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“Natural disasters are terrifying - that loss of control, this feeling that something is just going to randomly end your life for absolutely no reason is terrifying. But, what scares me is the human reaction to it and how people behave when the rules of civility and society are obliterated.”

— Eli Roth

“Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries because they've always been second-class citizens, kinda having had to claw their way up. I mean, who made up all the rules in the culture? Men - white male corporate society. So why wouldn't a woman want to rebel against that?”

— Kim Gordon

“If you're white and you're wrong, then you're wrong; if you're black and you're wrong, you're wrong. People are people. Black, blue, pink, green - God make no rules about color; only society make rules where my people suffer, and that why we must have redemption and redemption now.”

— Bob Marley

“If you love freedom, if you think the human condition is dignified by privacy, by the right to be left alone, by the right to explore your weird ideas provided you don't hurt others, then you have common cause with the kids whose web-browsers and cell phones are being used to lock them up and follow them around.
If you believe that the answer to bad speech is more speech - not censorship - then you have a dog in the fight.
If you believe in a society of laws, a land where our rulers have to tell us the rules, and have to follow them too, then you're part of the same struggle that kids fight when they argue for the right to live under the same Bill of Rights that adults have.”

— Cory Doctorow

“It is as if, in today's permissive society, transgressive violations are allowed only in a "privatized" form, as a personal idiosyncrasy deprived of any public, spectacular, or ritualistic dimension. We can thus publicly confess all our weird private practices, but they remain simply private idiosyncrasies. Perhaps we should also invert here the standard formula of fetishistic disavowal: "I know very well (that I should obey the rules), but nonetheless ... (I occasionally violate them, since this too is part of the rules)." In contemporary society, the predominant stance is rather: "I believe (that repeated hedonistic transgressions are what make life worth living), but nonetheless ... (I know very well that these transgressions are not really transgressive, but are just artificial coloring serving to re-emphasize the grayness of social reality).”

— Slavoj Žižek

“To discover the rules of society that are best suited to nations, there would need to exist a superior intelligence, who could understand the passions of men without feeling any of them, who had no affinity with our nature but knew it to the full, whose happiness was independent of ours, but who would nevertheless make our happiness his concern, who would be content to wait in the fullness of time for a distant glory, and to labour in one age to enjoy the fruits in another. Gods would be needed to give men laws.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Poetry aside, a religion is really a moral code that is expressed through legends, myths, or any type of literary device in order to establish a system of beliefs, values, and rules with which to regulate a culture or a society.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don't like to be shaped by society.”

— Charles Bukowski

“Collins and Morales represent a segment of society which, if attacked with the weapons society sanctions, one finds buffered by innumerable layers of law, bureaucracy, lies, evasions. They rest secure within their palaces, confident that they possess defenses against all possible attacks within the rules of the game, yet willing to violate those rules themselves ... We both know that although it is not listed in the rules, a player can end the game by kicking over the board and throttling his opponent.”

— Roger Zelazny

“A woman's reputation is her worth ... IT is the way it is. You may hate me for saying so, but there is the truth. Do you not remember that this is how our mother died? She would still be here and Father would be well and none of this would ever have happened if she had simply lived according to the time-trusted codes of society.'
Perhaps it proved impossible. Perhaps she could not fit within so tight a corset. Perhaps I am the same.'
One does not have to like the rules, Gemma. But one does need to adhere to them. That is what makes civilization. Do you think I agree with every ... decision made by my superiors”

— Libba Bray

“For the civil government can give no new right to the church, nor the church to the civil government. So that, whether the magistrate join himself to any church, or separate from it, the church remains always as it was before - a free and voluntary society. It neither requires the power of the sword by the magistrate's coming to it, nor does it lose the right of instruction and excommunication by his going from it. This is the fundamental and immutable right of a spontaneous society - that it has power to remove any of its members who transgress the rules of its institution; but it cannot, by the accession of any new members, acquire any right of jurisdiction over those that are not joined with it.”

— John Locke

“Cancer cells are fixed at an age where they are still too young to have learned the rules of the society in which they live. As with so many immature individuals of all living kinds, everything they do is excessive and uncoordinated with the needs or constraints of their neighbors ... they are reproductive but not productive.”

— Sherwin B. Nuland

“We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

“Sick is a relative concept. We're all sick. The question is, what degree of functionality do we have with respect to the rules society sets for desirable behavior? No actions are in themselves symptoms of sickness. You have to look at the context within which these actions are performed.”

— Jo Nesbø

“In my brief sojourn in college, my favorite classes were political science because I loved the idea of systems we can set up that benefit society - rules we can put in place that sometimes you run against, sometimes they're painful, but ultimately they benefit the world.”

— Matt Mullenweg

“To create a community of radical scholars, men and women who recognize that rules and social conventions are arbitrary, but have mastered them nonetheless, a community which shares such a scorn and disrespect for the present society that it can embrace the whole bundle of rules and subvert them thereby, that should be our goal.”

— Howard Adelman

“In today's society, people use those qualities - I call them qualities - for all things. It is for self-gratification. It is for sex. It is for excitment. This kind of fervor servers it's own purpose. It doesn't obey rules. It runs amok. You see it on the news everyday, but society cannot hang it's moral and ethical values on me to survive. i do what I must in all ways, and I'm proud of it. The necessity to be myself passes all moral barriers.”

— Richard Ramirez

“No one can act alone in the name of all and no one can accept the anarchy of a society without rules.”

— Jacques Chirac

“The family is the engine that drives civilization. Throughout history, those cultures that have failed to found their rules and attitudes of society on the central importance of the family unit have decayed and disintegrated.”

— Jeremiah Denton

“When there is no one to remind you what society's rules are, and there is nothing to keep you linked to that society, you had better be prepared for some startling changes.”

— Robyn Davidson

“Since people, in a competitive or any other society, are by no means always just to each other, some regulation by the state in its capacity of umpire is unavoidable, What must be kept in mind is that the greatest in of all is done when the umpire forgets that he too is bound by the rules, and begins to make them as between contestants in behalf of his own prejudices.”

— Felix Morley

“These are the rules of big business. They have superseded the teachings of our parents and are reducible to a simple maxim: Get a monopoly; let Society work for you; and remember that the best of all business is politics, for a legislative grant, franchise, subsidy or tax exemption is worth more than a Kim-berly or Comstock lode, since it does not require any labor, either mental or physical, for its exploitation.”

— Frederic C. Howe

“The rules of workplace democracy are founded in solidarity and mutual trust. They are at the core of a historic process which promises to introduce a new economy, and thereby a new society, after capitalism.”

— Seymour Melman

“Motherhood, to be sure, receives a great deal of sentimental adulation, but only if it is committed in accordance with rules which have been prescribed by a predominantly masculine society. Per se it is accorded no respect whatever. When it results from a sexual relationship which has been duly sanctioned by organized society, it is holy, no matter how much it may transgress the rules of decency, health, or common sense. Otherwise it is a sin meriting social ostracism for the mother and obloquy for the child - an ostracism and obloquy, significantly enough, in which the father does not share.”

— Suzanne La Follette

“Rebels defy the rules of society, risking everything to retain their humanity. If the world Atwood depicts is chilling, if 'God is losing,' the only hope for optimism is a vision that includes the inevitability of human struggle against the prevailing order.”

— Joyce Johnson

“The Conservative sees in the free market the harmony of interests and rules of cooperation that also underlie the civil society.”

— Mark Levin

“I've been regulated my whole life. We have progressive taxes. It's not a free-market free-for-all. I completely understand that society has a perfectly legitimate right to put in structures and regulations and rules that make it fairer, better, cleaner.”

— Jamie Dimon

“Third, and finally, the educated citizen has an obligation to uphold the law. This is the obligation of every citizen in a free and peaceful society
but the educated citizen has a special responsibility by the virtue of his greater understanding. For whether he has ever studied history or current events, ethics or civics, the rules of a profession or the tools of a trade, he knows that only a respect for the law makes it possible for free men to dwell together in peace and progress.”

— John F. Kennedy

“Born in other countries, yet believing you could be happy in this, our laws acknowledge, as they should do, your right to join us in society, conforming, as I doubt not you will do, to our established rules. That these rules shall be as equal as prudential considerations will admit, will certainly be the aim of our legislatures, general and particular.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them? Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object. He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“In organizations (or even in a society) where culture is weak, you need an abundance of heavy, precise rules and processes.”

— Brian Chesky

“One of many ways to be useful is to inspire people to forget some rules imposed by society. IMPORTANT rules are dictated by our hearts.”

— Paulo Coelho

“Obviously, the state's responsibility should be to legislate rules for a well-ordered society. It has no right or duty to creep into the bedrooms of the nation.”

— Pierre Trudeau

“Society flourishes when and only when its molecular unit, the family, flourishes. We know that lasting improvement comes only in the small increments produced by individuals adhering to the simple rules of life ...”

— George Will

“I refuse to follow the rules where society tries to control people with low self esteem.”

— Kanye West

“It is the law of love that rules mankind. Had violence, i.e. hate, rules us we would have become extinct long ago. And yet, the tragedy of it is that the so-called civilised men and nations conduct themselves as if the basis of society was violence.”

— Mahatma Gandhi