Society Quotes

Society is like the air; necessary to breathe, but insufficient to live on.

George Santayana

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

Aristotle, Politics

If people become ecstatic the whole society will have to change, because this society is based on misery. If people are blissful you cannot lead them to war - - To Vietnam, or to Egypt, or to Israel. No. Someone who is blissful will just laugh and say: This is nonsense!

Osho, My Way: The Way of The White Clouds

Educate your children to self - Control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.

Benjamin Franklin

Be very circumspect in the choice of thy company. In the society of thine equals thou shalt enjoy more pleasure; in the society of thy superiors thou shalt find more profit. To be the best in the company is the way to grow worse.

Francis Quarles

We live in a vastly complex society which has been able to provide us with a multitude of material things, and this is good, but people are beginning to suspect we have paid a high spiritual price for our plenty.

Euell Gibbons

Let... others call me a hypocrite because I fired a gun in a moment of personal peril. I shall still be for strict gun control. But as long as authorities leave this society awash in drugs and guns, I will protect my family.

Carl T. Rowan, Jr.

The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Jawaharlal Nehru

In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create but by what we refuse to destroy.

John C. Sawhill

The role of the teacher remains the highest calling of a free people. To the teacher, America entrusts her most precious resource, her children and asks that they be prepared... to face the rigors of individual participation in a democratic society.

Shirley Mount Hufstedle

What torture, this life in society! Often someone is obliging enough to offer me a light, and in order to oblige him I have to fish a cigarette out of my pocket.

Karl Kraus

Society attacks early when the individual is helpless.

B. F. Skinne

Religion... is the basis and foundation of government... before any man can be considered as a member of civil society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe.

James Madison

Man seeketh in society comfort, use and protection.

Sir Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 1605

Living up to basic ethical standards in the classroom - Discipline, tolerance, honesty - Is one of the most important ways children learn how to function in society at large.

Eloise Salholz

Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.

Randolph Bourne

It meant that New York philanthropists, New York society, would now rediscover the library. ... that learning, books, education have glamour, that self - Improvement has glamour, that hope has glamour.

Vartan Gregorian

Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.

R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1963

We are all born charming, fresh and spontaneous and must be civilized before we are fit to participate in society.

Judith Martin, (Miss Manners)

The individual is the central, rarest, most precious capital resource of our society.

Peter Drucke

Between two groups of men that want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds I see no remedy except force... It seems to me that every society rests on the death of men.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing; to realize that there were ten new trades in the world was like looking at the first ship or the first plough. It made a man feel what he should feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world.

G. K. Chesterton, The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown

We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature; we play the music; we change our minds; we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.

Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail (1979)

A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.

Greek prove

They have exiled me now from their society and I am pleased, because humanity does not exile except the one whose noble spirit rebels against despotism and oppression. He who does not prefer exile to slavery is not free by any measure of freedom, truth and duty.

Kahil Gibran, Spirits Rebellious

A liberal education is at the heart of a civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching.

A Bartlett Giamatti

Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident - - The luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society.

Edward C. Banfield

When you take charge of your life, there is no longer need to ask permission of other people or society at large. When you ask permission, you give someone veto power over your life.

Geoffrey F. Abert

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.

Wystan Hugh Auden

We live in a society of victimization, where people are much more comfortable being victimized than actually standing up for themselves.

Marilyn Manson

To surpress minority thinking and minority expression would tend to freeze society and prevent progress... Now more than ever, we must keep in the forefront of our minds the fact that whenever we take away the liberties of those we hate, we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love.

Wendell Willkie

Whatever their other contributions to our society, lawyers could be an important source of protein.

Guindon cartoon caption

To educate a man in mind, and not in morals, is to educate a menace to society.

Theodore Roosevelt

However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do want society.

Henry David Thoreau

A society like ours, which professes no one religion and has allowed all religions to decay, which indulges freedom to the point of license and individualism to the point of anarchy, needs all the support that responsible, cultivated homes can furnish. I hope your generation will provide a firmer shelter for civilized standards.

Alan Simpson

Dreams can become a reality when we possess a vision that is characterized by the willingness to work hard, a desire for excellence and a belief in our right and our responsibility to be equal members of society.

Janet Jackson

We have entered an age in which education is not just a luxury permitting some men an advantage over others. It has become a necessity without which a person is defenseless in this complex, industrialized society. ... We have truly entered the century of the educated man.

Lyndon B. Johnson