Society Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Society triumphs over many. They wish to regenerate the world with their institutions, with their moral philosophy, with their love. Then they sink to living from breakfast till dinner, from dinner till tea, with a little worsted work, and to looking forward to nothing but bed.
When shall we see a life full of steady enthusiasm, walking straight to its aim, flying home, as that bird is now, against the wind — with the calmness and the confidence of one who knows the laws of God and can apply them?

Florence Nightingale

I hold it to be one of the distinguishing excellences of elective over hereditary successions that the talents which nature has provided in sufficient proportion, should be selected by the society for the govenment of their affairs, rather than that this should be be transmitted through the loins of knaves and fools passing from the debauches of the table to those of the bed.

Thomas Jefferson

A lady once expressed herself in society - the very words show that they were uttered with fervour and under the pressure of a great many secret emotions: "Yes, a woman must be pretty if she is to please the men. A man is much better off. As long as he has five straight limbs, he needs no more!"

And this is something that I emphasize wherever I go — democracy does not stop on Election Day. For a real democracy to work, and for a society to thrive and continually improve, it requires that people continue to participate. And there have to be laws in place to protect that space and facilitate people's ability to participate.

We set ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, i. e., all organized and systematic violence, all use of violence against people in general. We do not expect the advent of a system of society in which the principle of subordination of the minority to the majority will not be observed.
In striving for socialism, however, we are convinced that it will develop into communism and, therefore, that the need for violence against people in general, for the subordination of one man to another, and of one section of the population to another, will vanish altogether since people will become accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social life without violence and without subordination.

Books seem to me to be pestilent things, and infect all that trade in them...with something very perverse and brutal. Printers, binders, sellers, and others that make a trade and gain out of them have universally so odd a turn and corruption of mind that they have a way of dealing peculiar to themselves, and not conformed to the good of society and that general fairness which cements mankind.

I think that its an artist's responsibility to have a point of view. Society takes its cue from popular art. People need something to look to, something to provoke them into questioning whether they completely hate something or completely love something.

The virtues of society are the vices of the saints.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In a pure society, the subject of marriage would not be so often avoided,--from shame and not from reverence, winked out of sight,and hinted at only; but treated naturally and simply,--perhaps simply avoided like the kindred mysteries. If it cannot be spoken of for shame, how can it be acted of? But, doubtless, there is far more purity, as well as more impurity, than is apparent.

Henry David Thoreau

Conversation in society is found to be on a platform so low as to exclude science, the saint, and the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The more humanity owes him, the more society denies him. Every door is shut against him, even when he has a right to its being opened: and if he ever obtains justice, it is with much greater difficulty than others obtain favors.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Is it not a terrible thing to be forced by society to do things which all of us as individuals regard as abominable crimes?

Albert Einstein

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

We believe that part of the answer lies in pricing energy on the basis of its full costs to society. One reason we use energy so lavishly today is that the price of energy does not include all of the social costs of producing it. The costs incurred in protecting the environment and the health and safety of workers, for example, are part of the real costs of producing energy-but they are not now all included in the price of the product.

Every class of society has its cant of lamentation, which is understood or regarded by none but themselves; and every part of life has its uneasiness, which those who do not feel them will not commiserate. An event which spreads distraction over half the commercial world, assembles the trading companies in councils and committees, and shakes the nerves of a thousand stockjobbers, is read by the landlord and the farmer with frigid indifference.

In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. … I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.

In a living society every day is a day of judgment; and its recognition as such is not the end of all things but the beginning ofa real civilization.

George Bernard Shaw

No society is immune from the darkest impulses of man. And too often religion has been used to tap into those darker impulses as opposed to the light of God. Three years ago in our state of Wisconsin, back in the United States, a man went to a Sikh temple and, in a terrible act of violence, killed six innocent people — Americans and Indians. And in that moment of shared grief, our two countries reaffirmed a basic truth, as we must again today — that every person has the right to practice their faith how they choose, or to practice no faith at all, and to do so free of persecution and fear and discrimination.

Nature has made us a present of a broad capacity for entertaining ourselves apart, and often calls us to do so, to teach us that we owe ourselves in part to society, but in the best part to ourselves.

Michel de Montaigne

J. J. did not always flee from men, but he has always loved solitude. He enjoyed himself with the friends he velieved he had, but he enjoyed himself still more alone. He valued their society, but he sometimes needed to withdraw, and he would perhaps have preferred to live always alone than always with them.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

We live in far too permissive a society. Never before has pornography been this rampant. And those films are so badly lit!

Today in many places we hear a call for greater security. But until exclusion and inequality in society and between peoples is reversed, it will be impossible to eliminate violence.

For years to come the debris of a convulsed world will beset our steps. It will require a purpose stronger than any man and worthy of all men to calm and inspirit us. A sane society whose riches are happy children, men and women, beautiful with peace and creative activity, is not going to be ordained for us. We must make it ourselves.

There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom,, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.