SOCIETY QUOTES
quotations about society
We must reform society before we can reform ourselves.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
preface, Misalliance
A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society.
EMIL CIORAN
History & Utopia
Society is composed of two great classes -- those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
When virtual reality gets cheaper than dating, society is doomed.
SCOTT ADAMS
Dogbert
Society than solitude is worse
And man to man is still the greatest curse.
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD
Ovid to His Wife
The sanity of society is a balance of a thousand insanities.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
"Nominalist and Realist", Essays
Mannequin, Mannequin
They're all the same
Plastic faces
Plastic faces
Society's to blame
GRANDMASTER MELLE MEL
"The Truth"
What is not good for the beehive, cannot be good for the bees.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.
VINCE LOMBARDI
attributed, Forbes, 1975
Society is my friend
He makes me lie down
In a cool blood bath
He stole my old lady sayin'
'Hey, how ya doin', let's kiss
My hand is not for you to hold
So kiss me with your mouth
Without closin' it all that much.'
Oh, society
KURT VILE
"Society Is My Friend"
A society regulated by a public sense of justice is inherently stable.
JOHN RAWLS
A Theory of Justice
The principal aim of society is to protect individuals in the enjoyment of those absolute rights, which were vested in them by the immutable laws of nature.
WILLIAM BLACKSTONE
Commentaries on the Laws of England
Any decent society must generate a feeling of community. Community offsets loneliness. It gives people a vitally necessary sense of belonging. Yet today the institutions on which community depends are crumbling in all the techno-societies. The result is a spreading plague of loneliness.
ALVIN TOFFLER
The Third Wave
Society knows perfectly well how to kill a man and has methods more subtle than death.
ANDRE GIDE
Autumn Leaves
Society is inside of man and man is inside society, and you cannot even create a truthfully drawn psychological entity on the stage until you understand his social relations and their power to make him what he is and to prevent him from being what he is not. The fish is in the water and the water is in the fish.
ARTHUR MILLER
"The Shadows of the Gods"
It is so easy for society to shock the people who are not in it.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools?
HENRIK IBSEN
An Enemy of the People
[A] new society cannot be created by reproducing the repugnant past, however refined or enticingly repackaged.
NELSON MANDELA
Nobel lecture, December 10, 1993
Just as there is no society or group that is not a collective view of persons, so there is no individual who may not be regarded as a particular view of social groups. He has no separate existence; through both the hereditary and the social factors in his life a man is bound into the whole of which he is a member, and to consider him apart from it is quite as artificial as to consider society apart from individuals.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
What passed for society was a loud, giddy whirl of thieves and pretentious hustlers, a dull sideshow full of quacks and clowns and philistines with gimp mentalities.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Rum Diary