On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

My age is very insignificant to me. I don’t think about it, but the world does. The world likes young people in general.

Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights.

There has to be a global mission of human progress.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

In this constant battle which we call living, we try to set a code of conduct according to the society in which we are brought up, whether it be a Communist society or a so-called free society; we accept a standard of behaviour as part of our tradition as Hindus or Muslims or Christians or whatever we happen to be.

Princes and governments are far more dangerous than other elements within society.

I have this feeling that the world is not in balance. And people are afraid, but we’re also starting to be really brave.

The masculine spirit is under assault. It’s obvious.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happily married life.

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

The environment that we call society is created by past generations; we accept it, as it helps us to maintain our greed, possessiveness, illusion.

If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world.

We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood.

We shall probably get nearest to the truth if we think of the conscious and personal psyche as resting upon the broad basis of an inherited and universal psychic disposition which is as such unconscious, and that our personal psyche bears the same relation to the collective psyche as the individual to society.

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

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.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I’m against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.

I myself have been on my own and utterly independent since I graduated. I haven’t belonged to any company or any system. It isn’t easy to live like this in Japan.

We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

Everyone got kind of crazy with me mentioning I was in love with a woman.

It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.

The mob is the mother of tyrants.

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.

I like working-class people, generally speaking.

Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress.

There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.

When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income.

You can’t get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.

What we have found in this country, and maybe we’re more aware of it now, is one problem that we’ve had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, by choice.

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country – we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

Wherever there is a settled society, religion is necessary; the laws cover manifest crimes, and religion covers secret crimes.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

If we go on your iPhone and go to the dictionary and look up ‚humble,‘ 80 per cent of the definition is negative. It’s a controlling word. It’s a way to control the masses and to control the sheep.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.

Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.

The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

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

No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.

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

Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.

Everything the working class has been told to do, the rich do not do. That is my message.

The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.

I find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating… because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition.

In the land of my birth I cannot vote, whereas a young person of eighteen can vote. And why? Because he or she possesses that wonderful biological attribute – a white skin.

All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

All government, of course, is against liberty.