society quotes

The mainstream is always under attack.

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.

It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.

In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society.

I have observed that society in general always seems to honor its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

America is just downright mean.

I happen to be a big fan of Western civilization; I think it beats the hell out of tyranny and starvation.

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

Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

If you look at the history of our country over the last 100 years, there have been periods where science and research have been celebrated. They were really kind of held up as heroes in society, which encouraged a generation of people to go into these fields.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

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

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.

If you’re not producing as much as you consume, or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.

I like working-class people, generally speaking.

The more people smoke herb, the more Babylon fall.

I think that people are tired. They’re tired of the same old kind of politics. People want a new tone to politics.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

Hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

Children are all foreigners.

Barack Obama would not be President if he were dark skin. You know what I mean? That’s just the truth. I might not be as successful as I am now if I was dark skin.

For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.

To terrify children with the image of hell… to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

Democracy is the road to socialism.

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

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

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

My music fights against the system that teaches to live and die.

In France there are, I think, less than one per cent of people who are too skinny.

Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Cultures, for better or worse, are very stable.

Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country’s scared.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

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

No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.

A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or regard that quality in its chosen leaders today – and in fact we have forgotten.

In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan’s writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way.

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.

For too long in this society, we have celebrated unrestrained individualism over common community.

We have an epidemic of insecure people in our society today.

Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.

We don’t have to let extremists define us.

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

Democracy don’t rule the world, You’d better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that’s better left unsaid.

Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman.

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

The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

There’s only one thing that can kill the movies, and that’s education.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.