Should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil.
Thomas Paine
If it is said that such organizations are not societies because they do not meet the ideal requirements of the notion of society, the answer, in part, is that the conception of society is then made so "ideal" as to be of no use, no matter how opposed to the interests of other groups, has something of the praiseworthy qualities of "Society" which hold it together.
John Dewey
Afghanistan was a dilapidated extremely poor country.It neither bought from the west or the rest of the world nor had anything to sell to them. So Afghanistan in terms of the economics of today and in terms of the ways the world work today was irrelevant to the world. A country that doesn´t buy from you and that does not sell to you. The society that does not have much to sell to you or to buy from you is not relevant to the consumer world of today.
Hamid Karzai
Absolutely everything beloved and cherished of the bourgeoisie, the conservative, the cowardly, and the impotent — the State, family life, secular art and science — was consciously or unconsciously hostile to the religious idea, to the Church, whose innate tendency and permanent aim was the dissolution of all existing worldly orders, and the reconstitution of society after the model of the ideal, the communistic City of God.
Thomas Mann
Men banded together in a criminal conspiracy, business aggregations that prey upon the public while serving it, political machines held together by the interest of plunder, are included. If it is said that such organizations are not societies because they do not meet the ideal requirements of the notion of society, the answer, in part, is that the conception of society is made so "ideal" as to be of no use, having no reference to facts; and in part, that each of these organizations, no matter how opposed to the interests of other groups, has something of the praiseworthy qualities of "Society" which hold it together.
John Dewey
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr
Sombart, Nicolaus
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