Society Quotes

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

Even as the cell is the unit of the organic body, so the family is the unit of society.

Ruth Nanda Anshen

One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

There is in us a lyric germ or nucleus which deserves respect; it bids a man to ponder or create; and in this dim corner of himself he can take refuge and find consolations which the society of his fellow creatures does not provide.

Norman Douglas

Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.

Edmund Burke

Above all, we are coming to understand that the arts incarnate the creativity of a free people. When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.

Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 1931

Society is now one polished horde, - - - Formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.

Lord Byron, Don Juan

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

Judith Martin, (Miss Manners)

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

Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.

Sir Thomas Browne

A society that puts equality... ahead of freedom will end up with neither.

Milton Friedman

Any activity that adversely affects society is immoral.

B. J. Gupta

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

There are many who lust for the simple answers of doctrine or decree. They are on the left and right. They are not confined to a single part of the society. They are terrorists of the mind.

A Bartlett Giamatti

Bourgeois society is infected by monomania the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets.

Simone Weil

The function of government ought to be: make sure you have good water to drink, somebody picking up the garbage, good roads to drive on, enough electricity to turn your light bulbs and your record player on, and whatever smaller amounts of regulatory assistance is necessary to make this society work.

Frank Zappa, Interview with this submitter, New York City, 5/08/1980

Our American values are not luxuries but necessities, not the salt in our bread, but the bread itself. Our common vision of a free and just society is our greatest source of cohesion at home and strength abroad, greater than the bounty of our material blessings.

Jimmy Carte

If I were to select a jack - Booted group of fascists who are perhaps as large a danger to American society as I could pick today, I would pick BATF.

John Dingell

Society has traditionally always tried to find scapegoats for its problems. Well, here I am.

Marilyn Manson

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

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

Guindon cartoon caption

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.

Adam Smith

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

Mark Twain

A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular.

Adlai Ewing Stevenson

Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunites for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.

Eric Hoffe

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

The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act. A general association takes place, and common interest produces common security.

Thomas Paine, in his "The Rights of Man" (1791)

I believe that individuals can make a difference in society. Since periods of change such as the present one come so rarely in human history, it is up to each of us to make the best use of our time to help create a happier world.

The Dalai Lama, 1992 Speech

It is the first step of wisdom to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the society in which they occur.

George Whitehead

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

Theodore Roosevelt

In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary.

Kathleen Norris

Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.

Robert F. Kennedy, 1966 speech

A state is not a mere society, having a common place, established for the prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange... Political society exists for the sake of noble actions, and not of mere companionship.

Aristotle, Politics

Football incorporates the two worst elements of American society violence punctuated by committee meetings.

George Will

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

The first duty of society is to give each of its members the possibility of fulfilling his destiny. When it becomes incapable of performing this duty it must be transformed.

Alexis Carrel