Society

The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded. – Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

Information and communications technology unlocks the value of time, allowing and enabling multi-tasking, multi-channels, multi-this and multi-that. – Li Ka Shing

The West has enough technology, enough science, enough affluence, enough money, but something of the inner is missing. There is no peace, no silence, no joy, no bliss, no meditativeness, no experience of godliness. – Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

Western laziness…. consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time left to confront the real issues. – Sogyal Rinpoche, Glimpse After Glimpse: Daily Reflections on Living and Dying

[The] men of the technostructure are the new and universal priesthood. Their religion is business success; their test of virtue is growth and profit. Their bible is the computer printout; their communion bench is the committee room. – J.K. Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 1977

Things happen too quickly, crisis follows crisis, the soil of our minds is perpetually disturbed. Each of us, to relieve his feelings, broadcasts his own running commentary on the preposterous and bewildering events of the hour: and this, nowadays, is what passes for conversation. – Jan Struther, Mrs. Miniver, 1930s

[H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely. – Will and Ariel Durant, Lessons of History

Information should be used as food for thought, not poison to the soul. – Shellie R. Warren

The things that are wrong with the country today are the sum total of all the things that are wrong with us as individuals. – Charles W. Tobey

The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic… power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age. – Russell Baker, New York Times, 1 May 1969

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun. – George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant, 1950

It is not that artistic power has left the world but that a more rapid life has developed itself in it, leaving no time for deliberate dainty decoration or labours of love. – Mrs. Orrinsmith, 1877

It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Over the Teacups, 1891

There is no appeal from the ways of the world, which must continue on its own terms or take us all down with it into chaos and confusion. – Mark van Doren

In nature, there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences. – Robert Greene Ingersoll, “The New Testament,” Some Reasons Why, 1881