61 quotes about Society



Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.
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The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.
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American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
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The happiness of society is the end of government.
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Society lives by faith, and develops by science.
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Nor was civil society founded merely to preserve the lives of its members; but that they might live well: for otherwise a state might be composed of slaves, or the animal creation... nor is it an alliance mutually to defend each other from injuries, or for a commercial intercourse. But whosoever endeavors to establish wholesome laws in a state, attends to the virtues and vices of each individual who composes it; from whence it is evident, that the first care of him who would found a city, truly deserving that name, and not nominally so, must be to have his citizens virtuous.
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Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.
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Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.
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I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.
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Society is indeed a contract. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
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Society is now one polished horde, formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.
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We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named fair competition and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.
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Society is composed of two great classes, those that have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.
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Society is divided into two classes, the shearers and the shorn.
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We can imagine a society in which no one could survive as a social being because it does not correspond to biologically determined perceptions and human social needs. For historical reasons, existing societies might have such properties, leading to various forms of pathology.
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The circumstances of human society are too complicated to be submitted to the rigor of mathematical calculation.
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You can tell all you need to about a society from how it treats animals and beaches.
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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.
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Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.
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Society is a hospital of incurables.
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Society always consists in the greatest part, of young and foolish persons.
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Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
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Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.
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It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggression.
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To be social is to be forgiving.
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Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.
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Compare society to a boat. Her progress through the water will not depend upon the exertion of her crew, but upon the exertion devoted to propelling her. This will be lessened by any expenditure of force in fighting among themselves, or in pulling in different directions.
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If everybody is rewarded just for being alive, you get the same sort of effect as you do when you reward every student just for being enrolled. You destroy not only education, you destroy society by giving A's to everyone. This is a philosophical consideration that bothers me very much as I sit in the United States Senate and see the great budget allocations going through.
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Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.
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Society is always trying in some way to grind us down to a single flat surface.
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Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.
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The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom -- these are the pillars of society.
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Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.
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No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
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The great society is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goods than with the quantity of their goods.
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What can you say about a society that says God is dead and Elvis is alive?
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Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly as he thinks.
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The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being -- which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs -- where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.
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A system in which the two great commandments are to hate your neighbor and to love your neighbor's wife.
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Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.
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We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it means danger, revolution, anarchy.
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Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!
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To me, we must learn to spell the word RESPECT. We must respect the rights and properties of our fellowman. And then learn to play the game of life, as well as the game of athletics, according to the rules of society. If you can take that and put it into practice in the community in which you live, then, to me you have won the greatest championship.
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Any relations in a social order will endure, if there is infused into them some of that spirit of human sympathy which qualifies life for immortality.
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Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
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What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures.
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Society is like a schoolmaster who estimates boys according to their conformity to a standard that is easiest for running a school.
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Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
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The greatest difficulty with the world is not its ability to produce, but the unwillingness to share.
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Our society is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units.
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One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.
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A free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
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Society in shipwreck is comfort to all.
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No civilized society can thrive upon victims, whose humanity has been permanently mutilated.
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You can tell how high a society is by how much of its garbage is recycled.
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There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.
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Sobriety, severity, and self-respect are the foundations of all true sociality.
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A civilized society that can no longer feel outrage, can no longer be civilized.
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Never speak disrespectfully of Society. Only people who can't get into it do that.
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Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.
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Societies that do not eat people are fascinated by those that do.
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