Society Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Lord Byron

Simone de Beauvoir

Pope John Paul II

John F. Kennedy

Vladimir Lenin

Maximilien Robespierre

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Rabindranath Tagore

The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living; they never flatter us to our faces, nor slander us behind our backs, nor intrude upon our privacy, nor quit their shelves until we take them down.

Charles Caleb Colton

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

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it... Advanced art today is no longer a cause – it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Harold Rosenberg

The people currently in charge have forgotten the first principle of an open society, namely that we may be wrong and that there has to be free discussion. That it's possible to be opposed to the policies without being unpatriotic.

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

The American system demands success, and in order to succeed we must first believe that we can. Yet our society, with its intolerance of failure and poverty, traps millions of people in positions where any kind of success seems impossible to contemplate, and in which failure itself is a kind of passive rebellion against their own misery and the social system which created it in the first place.
To succeed it is necessary to accept the world as it is and rise above it.

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I would as soon put a girl alone into a closet to meditate as give her only the society of her needle.

The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power.

Harriet Martineau

Badger hates Society, and invitations, and dinner, and all that sort of thing.

Kenneth Grahame

Having soon discovered to be great, I must appear so, and therefore studiously avoided mixing in society, and wrapped myself in mystery, devoting my time to fasting and prayer.

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

C. Wright Mills

The most violent element in society is ignorance...

We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.