quotations about society
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
attributed, Provolution: A Guide to Changing the World Through Personal Evolution
It can be lonely up at the top
Above your problems and your stress
And if there's trouble then we will take a pill
To find a high society
ENON
"High Society"
I live in the crowds of jollity, not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Rasselas
Look around you: what you have done to society, you have done it first within your soul; one is the image of the other. This dismal wreckage, which is now your world, is the physical form of the treason you committed to your values, to your friends, to your defenders, to your future, to your country, to yourself.
AYN RAND
Atlas Shrugged
Society is a sphere that demands all our energies, and deserves all that it demands.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
The fabric of our complex society is woven too tightly to permit any part of it to be damaged without damaging the whole.
JOE BIDEN
Promises to Keep
Too much society makes a man frivolous; too little, a savage.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.
OSCAR WILDE
An Ideal Husband
The great always sell their society to the vanity of the little.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
In the days of witchcraft it used to be believed that if one person secretly made a waxen image of another and stuck pins into the image, its counterpart would suffer tortures, and that if the image was melted the person would die. This superstition is almost realized in the relation between the private self and its social reflection. They seem to separate but are darkly united, and what is done to the one is done to the other.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
What's society built on
It's built on, built on bluff,
Built on bluff, built on trust,
What's society built on
It's built on, built on words,
Built on words, built on work
STEREOLAB
"Motoroller Scalatron"
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
speech on the occasion of the 24th Anniversary of Emancipation in Washington, D.C., "Southern Barbarism", April 16, 1888
Society makes. Then society rewards and punishes her handiwork.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Prisoners of Prejudice", Reactions and Other Essays
In whatever society,
There invariably,
Will seem to be,
Just a few men,
Keen to rule;
Overwhelming,
The majority,
Will assent and
Allow them to do so.
STEREOLAB
"Outer Accelerator"
What impresses men is not mind, but the result of mind. And the greatest of these results is this wonderful spectacle of society, which is ever new, and yet ever the same; in which accidents pass and essence remains; in which one generation dies and another succeeds, as if they were birds in a cage, or animals in a menagerie; of which it seems almost more than a metaphor to treat the parts as limbs of a perpetual living thing, so silently do they seem to change, so wonderfully and so perfectly does the conspicuous life of the new year take the place of the conspicuous life of last year.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
How to gain the advantages of society, without at the same time losing ourselves, is a question of no slight difficulty. The wise man often follows the crowd at a little distance, in order that he may not come suddenly upon it, nor become entangled with it, and that he may with some means of amusement maintain a clear and quiet pathway.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
In his long evolutionary history, man has scored few greater successes than his creation of human society. For it is on that primeval achievement that he has built those special qualities of mind and of behaviour which, in his own view at least, separate him from lower forms of life. If we sometimes tend to overlook this fact it is only because we have lived so long under the protective ambience of society that we have come to take its benefits for granted.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
The man who lives alone is apt to forget the individuality of others; the man who lives in society is apt to forget his own.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
No more pay and lots of leisure
In this low society
Low society
I'm just doing what I can
In this low society
But I'm an incidental man
HEAVEN 17
"Low Society"
Hitherto, every form of society has been based ... on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.
KARL MARX
The Communist Manifesto