Social Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I always hated all the social things. All the horrible events and presentations we had to go to. All false. You could see right through them all, and all the people there. I despised them. Perhaps it was partly from class. No, it wasn't. It was because they really were all false.

Just as little can we afford to follow the doctrinaires of an impossible - and incidentally of a highly undesirable - social revolution which, in destroying individual rights - including property rights - and the family, would destroy the two chief agents in the advance of mankind, and the two chief reasons why either the advance or the preservation of mankind is worthwhile.

Theodore Roosevelt

A soul which is conversant with virtue is like an ever flowing source, for it is pure and tranquil and potable and sweet and communicative (social) and rich and harmless and free from mischief.

By means of the banking system the distribution of capital as a special business, a social function, is taken out of the hands of the private capitalists and usurers. But at the same time, banking and credit become the most effective means of driving captialist production beyond its own limits and one of the most effective vehicles of crises and swindle.

Religion and Science are two aspects of social life, of which the former has been important as far back as we know anything of man

Bertrand Russell

Without looking, then, to those extraordinary social influences which are now acting in precisely this direction, but only at whatis inevitably doing around us, I think we must regard the land as a commanding and increasing power on the citizen, the sanative and Americanizing influence, which promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Study, analyse the social structure - that's always far more effective than moralising.

Vincent van Gogh

The bulk of mankind believe in two gods. They are under one dominion here in the house, as friend and parent, in social circles, in letters, in art, in love, in religion; but in mechanics, in dealing with steam and climate, in trade, in politics, they think they come under another.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whether we are rich or poor,
educated or uneducated,
whatever our nationality, colour,
social status or ideology may be,
the purpose of our lives is to be happy

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

For any one who is pervaded with the sense of causal law in all that happens, who accepts in real earnest the assumption of causality, the idea of a Being who interferes with the sequence of events in the world is absolutely impossible. Neither the religion of fear nor the social-moral religion can have any hold on him.

Albert Einstein

Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production.

The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I was turned out because I said to Europe no, no, no. That no, no, no has now turned into yes, yes. Two yes's not three because he got the Social Chapter out and he's reserved his position on the single currency.

Margaret Thatcher

The frequency with which a man experiences lust depends upon his own physical condition, whereas the occasion which rouse such feelings in him depend upon the social conventions to which he is accustomed

Bertrand Russell

The social body persists although the component cells may change.

A man's social and spiritual discipline must answer to his corporeal. He must lean on a friend who has a hard breast, as he wouldlie on a hard bed. He must drink cold water for his only beverage. So he must not hear sweetened and colored words, but pure and refreshing truths. He must daily bathe in truth cold as spring water, not warmed by the sympathy of friends.

Henry David Thoreau

There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery

Man is always a wizard to man, and the social world is at first magical.

Jean-Paul Sartre

We Social-Democrats always stand for democracy, not "in the name of capitalism," but in the name of clearing the path for our movement, which clearing is impossible without the development of capitalism.

Boys and young men acquire readily the moral sentiments of their social milieu, whatever these sentiments may be.

Bertrand Russell

There is no crime more infamous than the violation of truth. It is apparent that men can be social beings no longer than they believe each other. When speech is employed only as the vehicle of falsehood, every man must disunite himself from others, inhabit his own cave and seek prey only for himself.

Moral restrictions tend to become lax in a foreign country, since the fear of social opinion disappears.

The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress. Out of its bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old age pensions, government relief for the destitute, and, above all, new wage levels that meant not mere survival but a tolerable life.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

In all conversation between two persons, tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal; is God.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What can you do to make a difference? And why should you do it? (...) the scale of one's social investments doesn't matter. What matters is that you operate as a force for good at every scale available to you.

Richard Branson