Quotes about society

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“The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius…”

“They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.”

“To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.”

“Once a man has seen society's black underbelly, he can never turn his back on it. Never pretend, like you do, that it doesn't exist.”

“You can hand out condoms, drop bombs, build roads, or put in electricity, but until the girls are educated a society won’t change.”

“The most violent element in society is ignorance.”

“Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.”

“Remember, children. For every exit, there is also an entrance. ~ Milligan, The Mysterious Benedict Society”

“Badger hates Society, and invitations, and dinner, and all that sort of thing.”

“Psychopaths [make] the world go around… society [is] an expression of that particular sort of madness… I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity?”

“There is so much more to this world then outward appearances. Our society basks in the illusion of normalcy every day, and hides from the truth every night.”

“As a performer, I wanted to be the loudest, most persistent alarm clock I could be, because there didn’t seem like any other way to snap society out of its Christianity- and media-induced coma.”

“Only the individual can think, and thereby create new values for society — nay, even set up new moral standards to which the life of the community conforms. Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.
The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it as on their close political cohesion.”

“I endeavored to renounce society, that I might avoid temptation. But it was a poor religion; so far as it prevailed, only tended to make me gloomy, stupid, unsociable, and useless.”

“Is there any point in public debate in a society where hardly anyone has been taught how to think, while millions have been taught what to think?”

“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.”

“The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”

“Since we live in a society that promotes faddism and temporary superficial adaptation of different values, we are easily convinced that changes have occurred in arenas where there has been little or no change.”

“The plain working truth is that it is not only good for people to be shocked occasionally, but absolutely necessary to the progress of society that they should be shocked pretty often.”

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

“No matter what a woman's appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize - as her personal problem - observations she makes about the beauty myth in society.”

“It must be recognized that in any culture the source of law is the god of that society.”

“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”

“The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)”

“It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar.”

“To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages today that determine success--the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history--with a society that provides opportunities for all.”

“Slavery… dishonors labor. It introduces idleness into society, and with idleness, ignorance and pride, luxury and distress. It enervates the powers of the mind and benumbs the activity of man.”

“Personally I regard idling as a virtue, but civilized society holds otherwise.”

“We overlook just how large a role we all play--and by 'we' I mean society--in determining who makes it and who doesn't.”

“You know the message you're sending out to the world with these sweatpants? You're telling the world, 'I give up. I can't compete in normal society. I'm miserable, so I might as well be comfortable.”

“And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.”

“Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.”

“Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually.”

“Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.”

“Education spending will be most effective if it relies on parental choice & private initiative -- the building blocks of success throughout our society.”

“Who is he?"
"An idiot, said Adrian. "Makes me look like an upstanding member of society.”

“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”

“I don't like this world. I definitely do not like it. The society in which I live disgusts
me; advertising sickens me; computers make me puke.”

“We live in a primitive time—don’t we, Will?—neither savage nor wise. Half measures are the curse of it. Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books.”

“Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.”

“American long for a closed society in which everything can be bought, where laborers are either hidden away or dressed up as nonhumans, so as not to be disconcerting. This place is called Disney World”

“People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?”

“An average person with average talent, ambition and education can outstrip the most brilliant genius in our society, if that person has clear, focused goals.”

“When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of Hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.”

“The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental. The unfriendliness of society to his activity is difficult for the artists to accept. Yet this very hostility can act as a lever for true liberation... Both the sense of community and of security depend on the familiar. Free of them, transcendental experiences become possible.”

“If humans were to model the lifestyle displayed by healthy community of cells, our societies and our planet would be more peaceful and vital”

“It taught me, at an early age, that being wrong can be dangerous, but being right, when society regards the majority’s falsehood as truth, could be fatal.”

“A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repressive and murderous society.”

“No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.”

“Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead.”

“Every society has the criminals it deserves.”

“The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I'm against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.”

“Participating in Society in not a thing one can do naturally; one has to rehearse for it.”

“Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.”

“The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more”

“Incredible. It never ceases to amaze Starkey how far society will go to protect the children it loves and to discard the ones it doesn’t.”

“The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.”

“Who will guard the guards? If we're the guards of society, then who will watch us and make sure that we're not dangerous?”

“I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign.”

“Now, 75 years [after], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.

[Open Letter,, July 2006]”

“Tom has a theory that homosexuals and single women in their thirties have natural bonding: both being accustomed to disappointing their parents and being treated as freaks by society.”

“In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society. In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category.”

“In polite society, we call our obsessions hobbies.”

“I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.”

“Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.”

“Everyone is isolated from everyone else. The concept of society is like a cushion to protect us from the knowledge of that isolation. A fiction that serves as an anesthetic.”

“To be raped is to be sexually violated. For society to force someone, through shame and ostracism, to comply with love and sex that it defines, is nothing but organized rape. That is what homophobia is all about. Organized rape.”

“Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.”

“Raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place. It's the most important thing that happens, and it's the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure that has evolved.”

“Mercy is the golden chain by which society is bound together.”

“That is the one unforgivable sin in any society. Be different and be damned!”

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

“A woman at a certain age who is unmarried, our society teaches her to see it as a deep personal failure. And a man, after a certain age isn’t married, we just think he hasn’t come around to making his pick.”

“Political activism is seductive because it seems to offer the possibility that one can improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one's perceptions and transforming one's self.”

“One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.”

“In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.”

“In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.”

“In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.”

“The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation”

“The measure of mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society, is our level of productivity, our attention to responsibility, our ability to plain and simple hold down a job.”

“Average is very acceptable in our society but I don't think the angels are applauding. If you are determined to be excellent, to not back out of it, you will reap a harvest in your life.”

“A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.”

“I have no argument with those who see in organized religion a template or an imperative to live life according to a prescribed set of beliefs. Just give others the room, within the laws of civil society, to believe or not believe whatever they like.”

“The society killed Kendra."
…
Don't mention it to Verl. He might dive into a chasm.”

“A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.”

“In a society that worships love, freedom and beauty, dance is sacred, It is a paryer for the future, a remembrance of the past and a joyful exclamation of thanks for the present.”

“The mature man lives quietly, does good privately, takes responsibility for his actions, treats others with friendliness and courtesy, finds mischief boring and avoids it. Without the hidden conspiracy of goodwill, society would not endure an hour.”

“In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them.”

“In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.”

“The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.”

“In the English language, it all comes down to this: Twenty-six letters, when combined correctly, can create magic. Twenty -six letters form the foundation of a free, informed society.”

“Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity?”

“Any society which does not insist upon respect for all life must necessarily decay.”

“Ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore -- "I'm easy; I'll eat anything" -- can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society.”

“Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of "wrong" ideas.”

“The transformative power of love is not fully embraced in our society because we often wrongly believe that torment and anguish are our ‘natural’ condition.”

“The danger today is in believing there are no sick people, there is only a sick society.”

“A society gets the criminals it deserves.”

“It isn't the desire to abide by the law that makes everyone behave as society requires, but the fear of punishment. Each one of us carries a gallows inside us.”