Society Quotes

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

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

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

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

Mark Twain

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

Man perfected by society is the best of all animals; he is the most terrible of all when he lives without law, and without justice.

Aristotle

When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.

Carl Sandburg

Accustomed to the veneer of noise, to the shibboleths of promotion, public relations, and market research, society is suspicious of those who value silence.

John Lah

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

Howard Mumford Jones

Weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society - - Things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed.

E. B. White

Man perfected by society is the best of all animals he is the most terrible of all when he lives without law, and without justice.

Aristotle

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

Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future.

Brian Tracy

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to opress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Frederick Douglass, Speech, April 1886

My purpose in life does not include a hankering to charm society.

James Dean

Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.

John Lah

No one would talk much in society, if he knew how often he misunderstood others.

Johann von Goethe

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

Oscar Wilde

Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

George Orwell

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

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy... neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

John W. Gardne

The church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.

Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 1963

We are 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

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

Marilyn Manson

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

Irv Kupcinet