Motivational Quotes

Society

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

Best Quotes about Society

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

You can tell all you need to about a society from how it treats animals and beaches.

DeFord, Frank

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

Thatcher, Margaret

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Inge, Dean William R.

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

To me, we must learn to spell the word RESPECT. We must respect the rights and properties of our fellowman. And then learn to play the game of life, as well as the game of athletics, according to the rules of society. If you can take that and put it into practice in the community in which you live, then, to me you have won the greatest championship.

Owens, Jesse

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

Wright, Ronald

The greatest difficulty with the world is not its ability to produce, but the unwillingness to share.

Smith, Roy L.

10.

To be social is to be forgiving.

Frost, Robert

11.

The circumstances of human society are too complicated to be submitted to the rigor of mathematical calculation.

Custine, Marquis De

12.

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

Ibsen, Henrik

13.

Society is like a schoolmaster who estimates boys according to their conformity to a standard that is easiest for running a school.

Sedgwick, Henry

14.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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.

18.

Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.

Abbey, Edward

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

22.

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

Adams, Henry Brooks

23.

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.

Skinner, B(urrhus) F(rederic)

24.

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

25.

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

Wilde, Oscar

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

31.

Lippmann, Walter

32.

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

33.

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

Solanis, Valerie

34.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

35.

We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it means danger, revolution, anarchy.

Miller, Henry

36.

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

37.

Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.

Hoffer, Eric

38.

Society in shipwreck is comfort to all.

Syrus, Publilius

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

42.

Society lives by faith, and develops by science.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

43.

The happiness of society is the end of government.

Adams, John

44.

Society is indeed a contract. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

Burke, Edmund

45.

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

Tahanie

46.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

47.

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

48.

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