"No one "voted in" the market economy and the industrial revolution, but today issues of direction of the economy, costs, redress, priorities, and goals all have become matters of conscious and debated social policy."

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“The relationship between a civilization's socio-economic structure and its culture is perhaps the most complicated of all problems for the sociologist.”

“Television, as the most "public" of media, has its limits.”

“The discussion of any society risks seduction by what is transient and tumultuous.”

“Every society seeks to establish a set of meanings through which people can relate themselves to the world.”

“Crime is a form of "unorganized" class struggle, and the lowest groups in the society have always committed a disproportionate number of crimes.”

“That fabulous polymath Samuel Johnson maintained that no man in his right mind ever read a book through from beginning to end.”

Resonant Thoughts

"In twenty to thirty thousand years memories become legends and legends become superstitions and even the superstitions become lost. Metals rust and corrode back into earth while the wind, the rain and…"

— Fredric Brown

Literature1906–1972

#nature

"Although this is less often commented on in the academic literature, democracy is as much about opposition to the arbitrary exercise of power as it is about collective self-government...."

— Ian Shapiro

Science

#politics

"We need to abandon the economist's notion of the economy as a machine, with its attendant concept of equilibrium. A more helpful way of thinking about the economy is to imagine it as a living organism…"

— Paul Ormerod

Economics1950

#mind

"Did you have one of those days today, like a nail in the foot? Did the pterodactyl corpse dropped by the ghost of your mother from the spectral Hindenburg forever circling the Earth come smashing thro…"

— Harlan Ellison

Literature1934–2018

#time