society quotes

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

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.

Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.

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.

It’s rare for anyone to value the opinions of a teenage girl.

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

There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.

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

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

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

The public is a ferocious beast; one must either chain it or flee from it.

While victimhood in America is exalted, I don’t think our veterans should join those ranks.

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.

Modesty forbids what the law does not.

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.

We are not to give credit to the many, who say that none ought to be educated but the free; but rather to the philosophers, who say that the well-educated alone are free.

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

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

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

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.

Mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government.

The upward course of a nation’s history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its average men and women.

All the United States, it is a society that is split like to the bottom, that had very poor people in the country that is one of the wealthiest countries.

If we depend for our happiness on another, on society or on environment, they become essential to us; we cling to them, and any alteration of these we violently oppose because we depend upon them for our psychological security and comfort.

We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.

Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

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.

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.

All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.

There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

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.

Laws made by common consent must not be trampled on by individuals.

War is a way of shattering to pieces… materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and… too intelligent.

If we do not maintain justice, justice will not maintain us.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

That sort of half sigh, which, accompanied by two or three slight nods of the head, is pity’s small change in general society.

This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.

Society therefore is as ancient as the world.

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

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.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

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 Public is merely a multiplied ‚me.‘

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

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

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.