Society Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself—with a smile.

J. B. Priestley

A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.

The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.

Herbert Marcuse

All literary men are Red Sox fans—to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

Jacob Bronowski

Tremendous amounts of talent are being lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt.

Shirley Chisholm

Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers.

Mignon McLaughlin

It is already clear, after twenty years of socialism in Russia, that if you do not provide your society with a new religion, it will gradually revert to the old one.

Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.

I am here to speak on freedom of speech. It is a great topic, and I am going to make my speech as free as possible. But you know that this cannot be done, for when anyone announces that he is going to speak his mind freely, everyone is frightened. This shows that there is no such thing as true freedom of speech. No one can afford to let his neighbors know what he is thinking about them. Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.

The very existence of government at all, infers inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior to those who are not, so long as he is the repository of power, and the child inherits the wealth of the parent as a controlling law of society.

James Fenimore Cooper

Socialism, on the contrary, extends its function to the description of society as it should be, and the discovery of the means of making it what it should be.

Benjamin Tucker

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

Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.

Joseph Schumpeter

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

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

Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.

In every interview I have ever read or seen or taken part in, the final question in our future-oriented society is always, What next?

Jessica Savitch

Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

Far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents.

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.

To overturn orthodoxy is no easier in science than in philosophy, religion, economics, or any of the other disciplines through which we try to comprehend the world and the society in which we live.

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.