Motivational Quotes

Society

Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly as he thinks.

- Lin Yu-tang

Best Quotes about Society

No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.

Ionesco, Eugene

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

Marx, Karl

To be social is to be forgiving.

Frost, Robert

One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.

Sontag, Susan

The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being -- which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs -- where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.

Lippmann, Walter

You can tell how high a society is by how much of its garbage is recycled.

Tahanie

We can imagine a society in which no one could survive as a social being because it does not correspond to biologically determined perceptions and human social needs. For historical reasons, existing societies might have such properties, leading to various forms of pathology.

Chomsky, Noam

If everybody is rewarded just for being alive, you get the same sort of effect as you do when you reward every student just for being enrolled. You destroy not only education, you destroy society by giving A's to everyone. This is a philosophical consideration that bothers me very much as I sit in the United States Senate and see the great budget allocations going through.

Hayakawa, S. I.

Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!

Minsky, Marvin

10.

What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures.

Schlegel, Friedrich

11.

Nor was civil society founded merely to preserve the lives of its members; but that they might live well: for otherwise a state might be composed of slaves, or the animal creation... nor is it an alliance mutually to defend each other from injuries, or for a commercial intercourse. But whosoever endeavors to establish wholesome laws in a state, attends to the virtues and vices of each individual who composes it; from whence it is evident, that the first care of him who would found a city, truly deserving that name, and not nominally so, must be to have his citizens virtuous.

Aristotle

12.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom -- these are the pillars of society.

Ibsen, Henrik

14.

We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named fair competition and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.

Carlyle, Thomas

15.

Society is composed of two great classes, those that have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

16.

The great society is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goods than with the quantity of their goods.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

17.

The happiness of society is the end of government.

Adams, John

18.

Compare society to a boat. Her progress through the water will not depend upon the exertion of her crew, but upon the exertion devoted to propelling her. This will be lessened by any expenditure of force in fighting among themselves, or in pulling in different directions.

George, Henry

19.

American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.

Adams, Henry Brooks

20.

Society always consists in the greatest part, of young and foolish persons.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

21.

Sobriety, severity, and self-respect are the foundations of all true sociality.

Thoreau, Henry David

22.

Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.

Inge, Dean William R.

23.

There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.

Thatcher, Margaret

24.

I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.

Bronte, Emily

25.

Society lives by faith, and develops by science.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

26.

A free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

27.

Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

Societies that do not eat people are fascinated by those that do.

Wright, Ronald

29.

A system in which the two great commandments are to hate your neighbor and to love your neighbor's wife.

Macaulay, Thomas B.

30.

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.

Skinner, B(urrhus) F(rederic)

31.

A civilized society that can no longer feel outrage, can no longer be civilized.

32.

It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggression.

Freud, Sigmund

33.

Man's characteristic privilege is that the bond he accepts is not physical but moral; that is, social. He is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience superior to his own, the superiority of which he feels. Because the greater, better part of his existence transcends the body, he escapes the body's yoke, but is subject to that of society.

Durkheim, Emile

34.

Society is divided into two classes, the shearers and the shorn.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

35.

Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.

Baldwin, James

36.

Our society is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units.

Solanis, Valerie

37.

Any relations in a social order will endure, if there is infused into them some of that spirit of human sympathy which qualifies life for immortality.

Russell, George W.

38.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

Never speak disrespectfully of Society. Only people who can't get into it do that.

Wilde, Oscar

40.

Society is always trying in some way to grind us down to a single flat surface.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

41.

Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.

Beauvoir, Simone De

42.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.