Society Quotes

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

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)

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.

James Russell Lowell

The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role in society is to make money.

A. J. Liebling

What can you say about a society that says that God is dead and Elvis is alive.

Irv Kupcinet

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

Bias against the Negro is the worst disease from which the society of our nation suffers.

Albert Einstein

Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain ideas that every man is bound to be a critic for life.

Henry Van Dyke

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

In the state of nature... all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of the law.

Charles de Montesquieu

In our society those who are in reality superior in intelligence can be accepted by their fellows only if they pretend they are not.

Marya Mannes

To those who charge that liberalism has been tried and found wanting, I answer that the failure is not in the idea, but in the course of recent history. The New Deal was ended by World War II. The New Frontier was closed by Berlin and Cuba almost before it was opened. And the Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina.

George Stanley McGovern

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.

Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than another.

Oscar Wilde

I love tranquil solitude And such society As is quiet, wise, and good.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Men make history, and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.

Harry S Truman

Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

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 most violent element in society is ignorance.

Emma Goldman

Organized crime constitutes nothing less than a guerilla war against society.

Lyndon B. Johnson

I greet you as the shapers of American society.

Lyndon B. Johnson

There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

George Gordon Byron

Society, my dear, is like salt water, good to swim in but hard to swallow.

Arthur Stringer, "The Silver Poppy".

We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.

Lyndon B. Johnson

To conclude that women are unfitted to the task of our historic society seems to me the equivalent of closing male eyes to female facts.

Lyndon B. Johnson

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.

W. H. Auden

People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses, or the problems of modern society.

Vince Lombardi

Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it.

Howard Mumford Jones

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

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

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

Acceptance of dissent is the fundamental requirement of a free society.

Richard Royste

The society of women is the element of good manners.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

Solitude shows us what should be; society shows us what we are.

Robert Cecil

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

It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught, as men take diseases, one from another; therefore, let all take heed as to the society in which they mingle, for in a little while they will be like it.

Rule of Life