quotations about society
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.
EMILY BRONTË
Wuthering Heights
Justice is the great end of civil society.
DAVID DUDLEY FIELD
speech, March 1885
Society therefore is as ancient as the world.
VOLTAIRE
A Philosophical Dictionary
Society is addicted to growth, and that's having terrible consequences for the planet and, increasingly, for us as well. We have to change our collective and individual behavior and give up something we depend on--power over our environment. We must restrain ourselves, like an alcoholic foreswearing booze. That requires honesty and soul-searching.
RICHARD HEINBERG
"Systemic Change Driven by Moral Awakening Is Our Only Hope", EcoWatch, August 14, 2017
Society is the theatre, obligatory for the emancipation and development of the creative power in man. To reject social life is to deprive ourselves of the power of profiting by the experience of the past and the present.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Put me to sleep or take me away
I don't want to be a part of this sick society
NASUM
"Escape"
The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power or means to coerce others.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
Society is a more level surface than we imagine. Wise men or absolute fools are hard to be met with, as there are few giants or dwarfs.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
Every society has the criminals it deserves.
EMMA GOLDMAN
Red Emma Speaks
Man must have some recognized stake in society and affairs to knit him lovingly to his kind, or he is wont to revenge himself for wrongs real or imagined.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
Society ... is nothing more than the war of a thousand petty opposed interests, an eternal strife of all the vanities, which, turn in turn wounded and humiliated one by the other, intercross, come into collision, and on the morrow expiate the triumph of the eve in the bitterness of defeat. To live alone, to remain unjostled in this miserable struggle, where for a moment one draws the eyes of the spectators, to be crushed a moment later -- this is what is called being a nonentity, having no existence. Poor humanity!
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
Individual societies begin in harmonious adaptation to the environment and, like individuals, quickly get trapped into nonadaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences. When the individual's behavior and consciousness get hooked to a routine sequence of external actions, he is a dead robot, and it is time for him to die and be reborn. Time to "drop out," "turn on," and "tune in."
TIMOTHY LEARY
The Politics of Ecstasy
Those that angle in the waters of society catch only carps.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Man delights in society far more than do bees or herds.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
I do not think there is anything deserving the name of society to be found out of London.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Table Talk
No one has yet been found resolute enough in dogmatizing to deny that Nature made man equal; that society has destroyed this equality is a truth not more incontrovertible.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
letter to Elizabeth Hitchener, July 25, 1811
We are all civilized people, which means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behavior.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
foreword, Sweet Bird of Youth
A society composed of none but the wicked could not exist; it contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and without a flood, would be swept away from the earth by the deluge of its own iniquity.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
As long as men are men, a poor society cannot be too poor to find a right order of life, nor a rich society too rich to have need to seek it.
R. H. TAWNEY
The Acquisitive Society
Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Coming of Age