Sports and entertainment are the only places where inner-city kids see themselves being able to succeed. Their intellectual development is something they don't relate to.
I think that when we have a better educated society when there is less violence in our cities when people get back into the workforce and have the opportunity to take care of themselves and their families - that for me really is the kind of success and the kind of America that I think most of us still want we aspire to.
I believe that writers unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite are at heart people who live by night a little bit outside society moving between delinquency and conformity.
Watching people just look out for themselves I think is extremely interesting. It goes right back to something like 'The Beggar's Opera' - the underbelly of society how it operates and how that reflects their so-called betters.
In this I-me society my job is to get people to buy into something bigger than themselves.
I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society what we owe to ourselves.
The first task in teaching is to bring to consciousness what the students already believe by virtue of their personal experiences about themselves and society.
We should like to have some towering geniuses to reveal us to ourselves in colour and fire but of course they would have to fit into the pattern of our society and be able to take orders from sound administrative types.
If you want a free society teach your children what oppression tastes like. Tell them how many miracles it takes to get from here to there. Above all encourage them to ask questions. Teach them to think for themselves.
The 1960s were about releasing ourselves from conventional society and freeing ourselves.
You've got all these books on self help getting to know yourself doing the right thing eating the so-called right foods even down to what books you have on your shelves. People are encouraged to look to themselves first as opposed to being a part of society.
How many of you have broken no laws this month? That's the kind of society I want to build. I want a guarantee - with physics and mathematics not with laws - that we can give ourselves real privacy of personal communications.
The point of mythology or myth is to point to the horizon and to point back to ourselves: This is who we are this is where we came from and this is where we're going. And a lot of Western society over the last hundred years - the last 50 years really - has lost that. We have become rather aimless and wandering.
It's unfortunate that we live in such a panicked dysmorphic society where women don't even give themselves a chance to see what they'll look like as older persons. I want to have some idea of what I'll look like before I start cleaning the slates.
Society cannot continue to disable themselves through their need to categorize people or make assumptions as to another individual's abilities.
Companies to date have often used the excuse that they are only beholden to their shareholders but we need shareholders to think of themselves as stakeholders in the well being of society as well.
The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living: they never flatter us to our faces nor slander us behind our backs nor intrude upon our privacy nor quit their shelves until we take them down.
But we have created a society that does not allow opportunities for those people to take care of themselves because we have denied them those opportunities.
A brain is a society of very small simple modules that cannot be said to be thinking that are not smart in themselves. But when you have a network of them together out of that arises a kind of smartness.
Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others they are dragged down by the mass either by ridicule or slander.
We live in a society of victimization where people are much more comfortable being victimized than actually standing up for themselves.
The smarter the journalists are the better off society is. For to a degree people read the press to inform themselves - and the better the teacher the better the student body.
The basic thing nobody asks is why do people take drugs of any sort? Why do we have these accessories to normal living to live? I mean is there something wrong with society that's making us so pressurized that we cannot live without guarding ourselves against it?
I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.
We have treated our most serious adversaries such as Iran and North Korea in the most juvenile manner - by giving them the silent treatment. In so doing we have weakened not strengthened our bargaining position and our leadership.