I should tie myself to no particular system of society other than of socialism.

If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.

All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.

Our society is illuminated by the spiritual insights of the Hebrew prophets. America and Israel have a common love of human freedom, and they have a common faith in a democratic way of life.

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.

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.

We have to do more than just elect a new President if we truly want to change this country.

We are so conformist; nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff; we have been trained to be consumers, and we are all consuming far too much.

There is no room for military people, including our veterans, to see themselves as victims, even if so many of our countrymen are prone to relish that role.

A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.

Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.

I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.

I am concerned about the whole man. I am concerned about what the people, using their government as an instrument and a tool, can do toward building the whole man, which will mean a better society and a better world.

Progressively saved by the machine from the anxieties that bound his hands and mind to material toil, relieved of a large part of his work and compelled to an ever-increasing speed of action by the devices which his intelligence cannot help ceaselessly creating and perfecting, man is about to find himself abruptly plunged into idleness.

The basic thing nobody asks is why do people take drugs of any sort? Why do we have these accessories to normal living to live? I mean, is there something wrong with society that’s making us so pressurized, that we cannot live without guarding ourselves against it?

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

Here’s the thing. We do a movie with a predominantly black cast, and it’s put in a category of being a black film. When other movies are done with a predominantly white cast, we don’t call them a white film. I’m trying to remove the stigma off things they call black films.

The society in ‚The Handmaid’s Tale‘ is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.

I really don’t like women who try to be men. All these politicians, I think they’re horrendous. We could have a brilliant future, but we have this terrible male vision of destroying everything. They’d better sort themselves out and become more womanly.

I would just like to say something, ladies and gentlemen. Something that I think is very important. It is that, you, we – we own this country. We – we own it. It is not you owning it, and not politicians owning it. Politicians are employees of ours.

Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.

To deprive a man of his natural liberty and to deny to him the ordinary amenities of life is worse then starving the body; it is starvation of the soul, the dweller in the body.

The people of England are the most enthusiastic in the world.

The clearest way to show what the rule of law means to us in everyday life is to recall what has happened when there is no rule of law.

No one has done a study on this, as far as I can tell, but I think Facebook might be the first place where a large number of people have come out. We didn’t create that – society was generally ready for that. I think this is just part of the general trend that we talked about, about society being more open, and I think that’s good.

Peoples do not defy repression and death, nor do they remain for nights on end protesting energetically, just because of merely formal matters.

I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us.

We can’t have special interests sitting shotgun. We gotta have middle class families up in front. We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

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

Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.

In socialism, private property is anathema, and equal distribution of income the first consideration. In capitalism, private property is cardinal, and distribution left to ensue from the play of free contract and selfish interest on that basis, no matter what anomalies it may present.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

The revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.

There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.

The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.

If I were a Negro, I’d be fighting, as Martin Luther King fought, for human recognition and justice. I’d rather go down with my flag flying. If you’re weak or crippled, or you can’t speak out or fight back in some way, then people don’t hesitate to treat you badly.

Women should be obscene and not heard.

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.

Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.

I claim that human mind or human society is not divided into watertight compartments called social, political and religious. All act and react upon one another.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.

Maybe every city has a unique sensibility, but we don’t have names for what they are or haven’t identified them all. We can’t pinpoint exactly what makes each city’s people unique yet.

We can’t afford to be killing one another.

Those who ‚abjure‘ violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

Modesty forbids what the law does not.

Where there is righteousness in the heart, there is harmony in the house; when there is harmony in the house, there is order in the nation; when there is order in the nation, there is peace in the world.