Society famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role in society is to make money.
-- A. J. Liebling -
Any society that takes away from those most capable and gives to the least will perish.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
We have produced a world of contented bodies and discontented minds.
-- Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. -
No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.
-- Adam Smith -
The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson -
It is high time the ideal of success should be replaced with the ideal of service.
-- Albert Einstein -
Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.
-- Albert Schweitzer -
Man, like the generous vine, supported lives; the strength he gains is from the embrace he gives.
-- Alexander Pope -
Exclusiveness in a garden is a mistake as great as it is in society.
-- Alfred Austin -
The conviction of tragedy that rises out of his [John Dos Passos's] work is the steady protest of a sensitive democratic conscience against the tyranny and the ugliness of society, against the failure of a complete human development under industrial capitalism.
-- Alfred Kazin -
A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions.
-- Alfred North Whitehead -
Men lived like fishes; the great ones devoured the small.
-- Algernon Sidney -
One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition.
-- Alvin Toffler -
MUSTANG, n. An indocile horse of the western plains. In English society, the American wife of an English nobleman.
-- Ambrose Bierce -
The suppression of inner patterns in favor of patterns created by society is dangerous to us.
-- Anais Nin -
Once the Xerox copier was invented, private diplomacy died. There's no such thing as secrecy. It's just a question of whether it's leaked or revealed openly.
-- Andrew Young -
Society than solitude is worse, And man to man is still the greatest curse.
-- Anna Letitia Barbauld -
In the process of helping some (perhaps most) people to more utility and justice, the state imposes on civil society a system of interdictions and commands.
-- Anthony de Jasay -
Society, dead or alive, can have no charm without intimacy and no intimacy without an interest in trifles.
-- Arthur Balfour -
The individual is not a killer, but the group is, and by identifying with it the individual is transformed into a killer.
-- Arthur Koestler -
The more backwoodish a social group, juvenile or adult, the stricter its conception of the normal, and the readier it will ridicule any departure from it.
-- Arthur Koestler -
in the course of the last century science has become so dizzy with its successes, that it has forgotten to ask the pertinent questions- or refused to ask them under the pretext that they are meaningless, and in any case not the scientists concern.
-- Arthur Koestler -
The 'missing link' between ape and man will probably never be found- because it was an embryo.
-- Arthur Koestler -
Wherever we find orderly, stable systems in Nature, we find that they are hierarchically structured, for the simple reason that without such structuring of complex systems into sub-assemblies, there could be no order and stability- except the order of a dead universe filled with a uniformly distributed gas.
-- Arthur Koestler -
one of the tests of a theory is that, once grasped, it appears self-evident.
-- Arthur Koestler -
The ultimate object of education should be, Gandhi said, to help create not only a balanced and harmonious individual but also a balanced and harmonious society where true justice prevails, where there is no unnatural division between the haves and the have-nots, and where everybody is assured of a living wage and the right to live and the right to freedom.
-- Arun Manilal Gandhi -
No society can prosper if it aims at making things easier-instead it should aim at making people stronger.
-- Ashoka -
That is the whole trouble with being a heretic. One usually must think out everything for oneself.
-- Aubrey Menen -
Society is a madhouse whose wardens are the officials and the police.
-- August Strindberg -
Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
-- B. F. Skinner -
Many social practices essential to the welfare of the species involve the control of one person by another, and no one can suppress them who has any concern for human achievements
-- B. F. Skinner -
Avoid self-righteousness like the devil- nothing is so self-blinding.
-- B. H. Liddell Hart -
A great man is different from an eminent one in that he is ready to be the servant of the society.
-- B. R. Ambedkar -
The winner of the hoop race will be the first to realize her dream, not society's dream, her own personal dream.
-- Barbara Bush -
The social potential movement is on the threshold of a mass awakening, seeking to carry into society what individuals have learned spiritually and personally.
-- Barbara Marx Hubbard -
Let us get on with creating the democratic and pluralistic society that we say we are.
-- Barbara Mikulski -
We have really lost in our society the sense of the sacredness of life.
-- Basil Hume -
When an individual is protesting society's refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.
-- Bayard Rustin -
The art of governing mankind by deceiving them.
-- Benjamin Disraeli -
Popular privileges are consistent with a state of society in which there is great inequality of position. Democratic rights, on the contrary, demand that there should be equality of condition as the fundamental basis of the society they regulate.
-- Benjamin Disraeli -
The eyes of the social herd, who always observe little things, and generally form from them their opinions of great affairs.
-- Benjamin Disraeli -
Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
-- Benjamin Franklin -
A good person can make another person good; it means that goodness will elicit goodness in the society; other persons will also be good.
-- Bhumibol Adulyadej -
The day we learn to allow an ambulance to pass through in traffic, might be the first step towards being a truly responsible society.
-- Boman Irani -
Why had I become a writer in the first place? Because I wasn't fit for society; I didn't fit into the system.
-- Brian Aldiss -
The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.
-- C. Northcote Parkinson -
Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.
-- C. Wright Mills -
If we want to produce people who share the values of a democratic culture, they must be taught those values and not be left to acquire them by chance.
-- Cal Thomas -
everything is too important ever to be entrusted to professional experts, because every organization of such professionals and every established social organization becomes a vested-interest institution more concerned with its efforts to maintain itself or advance its own interests than to achieve the purpose that society expects it to achieve.
-- Carroll Quigley -
The worst of revolutions is a restoration.
-- Charles James Fox -
There is no comparing the brutality and cynicism of today's pop culture with that of forty years ago: from High Noon to Robocop is a long descent.
-- Charles Krauthammer -
He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society.
-- Charles Lamb -
Society is divided into two classes: the shearers and the shorn. We should always be with the former against the latter.
-- Charles Maurice de Talleyrand -
If anything were FULLY explained, everything would be explained.
-- Christian Friedrich Hebbel -
It is with a company as it is with a punch, everything depends upon the ingredients of which it in composed.
-- Christian Nestell Bovee -
Society may predict, but only I can determine my destiny.
-- Clare Oliver -
There is one fact that can be established. The only phenomenon which, always and in all parts of the world, seems to be linked with the appearance of writing
-- Claude Levi-Strauss -
The more we study the early Church, the more we realize that it was a society of ministers. About the only similarity between the Church at Corinth and a contemporary congregation, either Roman Catholic or Protestant, is that both are marked, to a great degree, by the presence of sinners.
-- D. Elton Trueblood -
Behold then Septimus Dodge returning to Dodge-town victorious. Not crowned with laurel, it is true, but wreathed in lists of things he has seen and sucked dry. Seen and sucked dry, you know: Venus de Milo, the Rhine or the Coliseum: swallowed like so many clams, and left the shells.
-- D. H. Lawrence -
America does to me what I knew it would do: it just bumps me. The people charge at you like trucks coming down on you -- no awareness. But one tries to dodge aside in time. Bump! bump! go the trucks. And that is human contact.
-- D. H. Lawrence -
I think societal instinct much deeper than sex instinct — and societal repression much more devastating.
-- D. H. Lawrence -
The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.
-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan -
The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.
-- Daniel Webster -
Industrial societies can only be run successfully by dictators or oligarchs.
-- Dora Russell -
The several sorts of religion in the world are little more than so many spiritual monopolies.
-- E. F. L. Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax -
After all, for mankind as a whole there are no exports. We did not start developing by obtaining foreign exchange from Mars or the moon. Mankind is a closed society.
-- E. F. Schumacher -
The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
-- E. M. Forster -
In a neighborhood, as in life, a clean bandage is much, much better than a raw or festering wound.
-- Ed Koch -
I feel sure that coups d'état would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what was happening and not miss anything.
-- Edmond de Goncourt -
We will be able to achieve a just and prosperous society only when our schools ensure that everyone commands enough shared background knowledge to be able to communicate effectively with everyone else.
-- Edward Hirsch -
As a society, we've learned that we're all better off when everyone is included in the opportunities of this great nation.
-- Edward Kennedy -
The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things.
-- Elise M. Boulding -
Man's characteristic privilege is that the bond he accepts is not physical but moral; that is, social. He is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience superior to his own, the superiority of which he feels. Because the greater, better part of his existence transcends the body, he escapes the body's yoke, but is subject to that of society.
-- Emile Durkheim -
Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.
-- Eric Hoffer -
A society that refuses to strive for superfluities is likely to end up lacking in necessities.
-- Eric Hoffer -
When grubbing for necessities man is still an animal. He becomes uniquely human when he reaches out for the superfluous and extravagant.
-- Eric Hoffer -
Conservatism is sometimes a symptom of sterility. Those who have nothing in them that can grow and develop must cling to what they have in beliefs, ideas and possessions. The sterile radical, too, is basically conservative. He is afraid to let go of the ideas and beliefs he picked up in his youth lest his life be seen as empty and wasted.
-- Eric Hoffer -
The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.
-- Eric Hoffer -
It is not at all simple to understand the simple.
-- Eric Hoffer -
The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one's individual distinctness in a compact collective whole.
-- Eric Hoffer -
It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have "something worth fighting for,they do not feel like fighting.
-- Eric Hoffer -
One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.
-- Eric Hoffer -
Spiritual stagnation ensues when man's environment becomes unpredictable or when his inner life is made wholly predictable.
-- Eric Hoffer -
All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance.
-- Eric Hoffer -
There is apparently no surer way of turning a thing into its opposite than by exaggerating it
-- Eric Hoffer -
Quite often the social doctors become part of the disease.
-- Eric Hoffer -
We run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.
-- Eric Hoffer -
Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet.
-- Eric Hoffer -
The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth century ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.
-- Eric Hoffer -
The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led.
-- Eric Hoffer -
The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence.
-- Eric Hoffer -
The fanatic is not really a stickler to principle. He embraces a cause not primarily because of its justness or holiness but because of his desperate need for something to hold onto.
-- Eric Hoffer -
Words have ruined more souls than any devil's agency.
-- Eric Hoffer -
Proselytizing is more a passionate search for something not yet found than a desire to bestow upon the world something we already have. It is a search for a final and irrefutable demonstration that our absolute truth is indeed the one and only truth. The proselytizing fanatic strengthens his own faith by converting others.
-- Eric Hoffer -
In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.
-- Ernst Fischer -
Life is simply the reification of the process of living.
-- Ernst Mayr -
most scientific problems are far better understood by studying their history than their logic.
-- Ernst Mayr -
Evolution as such is no longer a theory for a modern author. It is as much a fact as that the earth revolves around the sun.
-- Ernst Mayr -
Scientific progress consists in the development of new concepts.
-- Ernst Mayr
