Social Quotes

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As National Socialists we see our program in our flag. In the red we see the social idea of the movement.

I do not believe that the spiritual law works on a field of its own. On the contrary, it expresses itself only through the ordinary activities of life. It thus affects the economic, the social and the political fields.

Black Power alone is no more insurance against social injustice than white power.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.

The worthless and offensive members of society, whose existence is a social pest, invariably think themselves the most ill-used people alive, and never get over their astonishment at the ingratitude and selfishness of their contemporaries.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful.

Theodore Roosevelt

In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The flowering of civilization is the finished man, the man of sense, of grace, of accomplishment, of social power--the gentleman.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.

Theodor W. Adorno

Condemned to Hope's delusive mine,
As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blasts or slow decline
Our social comforts drop away.

Peace is not solely a matter of military or technical problems—it is primarily a problem of politics and people. And unless man can match his strides in weaponry and technology with equal strides in social and political development, our great strength, like that of the dinosaur, will become incapable of proper control—and like the dinosaur vanish from the earth.

John F. Kennedy

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Let the entire system of government be strengthened, and let the balance of power be drawn up in such a manner that it will be permanent and incapable of decay because of its own tenuity. Precisely because no form of government is so weak as the democratic, its framework must be firmer, and its institutions must be studied to determine their degree of stability … unless this is done, we will have to reckon with an ungovernable, tumultuous, and anarchic society, not with a social order where happiness, peace, and justice prevail.

Simón Bolívar

There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the Future: the Establishment and the Movement. At times the resistance is reanimated, the schism runs under the world and appears in Literature, Philosophy, Church, State and social customs.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races: that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.

Abraham Lincoln

In nearly all the matters in which the Pan-German movement was wanting, the attitude of the Christian Social Party was correct and well-planned.

And numerous people whose families belong to the peasantry and working classes are now filling prominent positions in this National Socialist State. Some of them actually hold the highest offices in the leadership of the nation, as Cabinet Ministers, Reichsstatthalter and Gauleiter. But National Socialism always bears in mind the interests of the people as a whole and not the interests of one class or another. The National Socialist Revolution has not aimed at turning a privileged class into a class which will have no rights in the future. Its aim has been to grant equal rights to those social strata that hitherto were denied such rights.

A society whose principles are acquisition, profit, and property produces a social character oriented around having, and once the dominant pattern is established, nobody wants to be an outsider, or indeed an outcast; in order to avoid this risk everybody adapts to the majority, who have in common only their mutual antagonism.

We are misunderstood, we are misrepresented, we are misreported. We are not nurses, we are not doctors, we are not teachers, we are not social workers. We are religious, we are religious, we are religious.

Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of the people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.

John F. Kennedy

To preserve health is a moral and religious duty, for health is the basis of all social virtues. We can no longer be useful when not well.

The man who has graduated from the flogging block at Eton to the bench from which he sentences the garrotter to be flogged is the same social product as the garrotter who has been kicked by his father and cuffed by his mother until he has grown strong enough to throttle and rob the rich citizen whose money he desires.

George Bernard Shaw

Go further, and require each of them to make a contribution: you will see how many things are still missing, and you will be obliged to get the assistance of a large number of men who belong to different classes, priceless men, but to whom the gates of the academies are nonetheless closed because of their social station. All the members of these learned societies are more than is needed for a single object of human science; all the societies together are not sufficient for a science of man in general.

Now, there are in our civic and social life very much worse creatures than snobs, but none more contemptible. [...] If you have any stuff in you at all, and try to amount to anything in after life, you will not remain snobs even if you start as such. It will be taken out of you very soon and very roughly if you go into any real work. Go into politics, go to your district convention, and try to carry it on the snob basis and see how far you will get. The thing that will strike you in just about a week is that there are a whole lot of able people sliding around this planet. The fact that the individual opposed to you does not wear a cravat, and does wear a saw-edge collar, does not imply that you are going to carry the convention against him!

Theodore Roosevelt