There has to be a global mission of human progress.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

When I look at public opinion, I’m not far out of the mainstream. I’m in it, in many respects. In some respects, public opinion goes beyond anything I’ve ever said.

Even after Independence, we have had to face the poison of casteism and communalism. How long these evils will continue? Whom does it benefit?

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

The good of the people is the greatest law.

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

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.

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.

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.

Society is at odds with itself.

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

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.

Regardless of what society says, we can’t go on much longer in the sea of immorality without judgment coming.

I think one of the great things about the United States has been our ability to maintain a distinction between our military and domestic law enforcement.

I think the first duty of society is justice.

Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.

I don’t think even ungodly people realize what a society would be like that had no godly influence at all.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

Dissident intellectuals aren’t all beautiful.

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.

Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we’ve always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

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.

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

Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.

If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.

Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society.

One of the powerful temptations is that of the cinema palace. The cinema has undoubtedly an enormous attraction for boys, and people are constantly cudgelling their brains how to stop it. But it is one of those things which would be very difficult to stop even if it were altogether desirable.

To cut short the question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent, and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

Most people are happy being average. Most are happy being faceless in a sea of faces.

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

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

Politics have no relation to morals.

Meditation is not to avoid society; it is to look deep to have the kind of insight you need to take action. To think that it is just to sit down and enjoy the calm and peace, is wrong.

The Public is merely a multiplied ‚me.‘

The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

Children are all foreigners.

The very word ‚secrecy‘ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all – the apathy of human beings.

With the amount of fixed expense that goes into developing something like the BE-4 engine, you want it to be used as much as possible.

Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

Governments don’t control people like they used to.

Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.

‚Fahrenheit 451‘ postulates a lot of things I didn’t want to have happen.

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.

We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.

I live in a crazy time.

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.

In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime.

We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.

Civilization is the making of civil persons.

In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress ‚suspects.‘

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.

Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.