Society Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Maximilien Robespierre

Margaret Thatcher

Rabindranath Tagore

Lord Byron

John F. Kennedy

Henry David Thoreau

Simone de Beauvoir

No civilized society can thrive upon victims, whose humanity has been permanently mutilated.

Rabindranath Tagore

If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature.

The general will rules in society as the private will governs each separate individual.

Maximilien Robespierre

There's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.

Margaret Thatcher

The great danger for family life, in the midst of any society whose idols are pleasure, comfort and independence, lies in the fact that people close their hearts and become selfish.

Pope John Paul II

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but nature more.

Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.

Henry David Thoreau

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners.

Work almost always has a double aspect: it is a bondage, a wearisome drudgery; but it is also a source of interest, a steadying element, a factor that helps to integrate the worker with society. Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.

Simone de Beauvoir

To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required — not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

John F. Kennedy

Similarly, thought is a system. That system not only includes thought and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society - as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times.

At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it.

Whittaker Chambers

There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

Adlai Stevenson II

The '80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.

Laughter is, after speech, the chief thing that holds society together.

Fascism is not in itself a new order of society. It is the future refusing to be born.

There can be hope only for a society which acts as one big family, not as many separate ones.

The definition of self-respect contains a clause to include pitiless contempt for some other class. … English society is impregnated from top to bottom with this spirit. The supreme satisfaction is to be able to despise one's neighbor and this fact goes far to account for religious intolerance. It is evidently consoling to reflect that the people next door are headed for hell.

Aleister Crowley

I used to be a discipline problem, which caused me embarrassment until I realized that being a discipline problem in a racist society is sometimes an honor.

Intellectual property is an important legal and cultural issue. Society as a whole has complex issues to face here: private ownership vs. open source, and so on.

Tim Berners-Lee

The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.

Courts of law, and all the paraphernalia and folly of law cannot be found in a rational state of society.

The central task of education is to implant a will and a facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.