Society Quotes

1. "There is a real diversity of talent and background on the A list so as to better reflect our society in all walks. There are people who have been candidates before, Councillors, Doctors, business leaders, charity campaigners."
Author: Adam Rickitt

2. "If everyone were a parasite on society, that would just be too many artists to support. That's why I'm glad I have friends and relatives. Someday, I might even be grateful to have them."
Author: Bauvard

3. "Subjecting oneself to a great work of art stings the pride of autonomy. Familiarization calls for a throbbing concentration on background techniques – the ways of nature, society, culture; observing life becomes the sacrifice of it. Laughing at masterpieces and lachrymose towards practicality, the man impervious to beauty drinks his saliva and cries into soup bowls – his body the source of all vital nourishment. Tea and toast he saves for his superiors, serving his way to a house with a swimming pool filled from his ducts. The high saline content making lifeguards unnecessary, his only child is one day found floating the wrong side up. In despondency the man turns to a seascape by Turner. Surely, God must have been a little sad to shed such a vast thimbleful of creation and sigh so many waves. The man feels akin to Turner's fisherman with his lantern – a maritime Diogenes searching for an honest sublimity."
Author: Bauvard

4. "We're a complacent society, hard to get riled up in the first place, and then when we do, it's misdirected."
Author: Bill Maher

5. "Everything established, settled, everything to do with home and order and the common ground, has crumbled into dust and has been swept away in the general upheaval and reorganization of the whole of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that's left is the bare, shivering human soul, stripped to the last shred, the naked force of the human psyche for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself."
Author: Boris Pasternak

6. "Innocents, the meat in a ghastly sandwich between an uncaring society and a vengeful state."
Author: Bryce Courtenay

7. "I discovered very quickly that criticism is a form of optimism, and that when you are silent about the shortcomings of your society, you're very pessimistic about that society. And it's only when you speak truthfully about it that you show your faith in that society."
Author: Carlos Fuentes

8. "None of us can be proof against the influences that proceed from the persons he associates with. Wherefore, in books and men, let us look out for the best society, that which yields a bracing and wholesome influence. We all know the person for whose company we are the better, though the talk is only about fishing or embroidery."
Author: Charlotte Mason

9. "Your love will never conquer what this society raised them to be."
Author: Con Template

10. "There is a darkness in you. In all of us, probably. Beasts we keep chained. Ordinary men have to keep the chains strong, for if we let the beast loose then society will turn upon us with fiery vengeance. Kings though...well, who is there to turn upon them? So the chains are made of straw. It is the curse of kings, Helikaon, that they can become monsters. And they invariably do."
Author: David Gemmell

11. "It affects every aspect of our lives, is often said to be the root of all evil, and the analysis of the world that it makes possible - what we call 'the economy' - is so important to us that economists have become the high priests of our society. Yet, oddly, there is absolutely no consensus among economists about what money really is."
Author: David Graeber

12. "She had not died there. A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which society would measure the quick motions of man."
Author: E.M. Forster

13. "I do feel that I've managed to make something I could maybe call my world…over time…little by little. And when I'm inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to make such a world probably means that I'm a weak person, that I bruise easily, don't you think? And in the eyes of society at large, that world of mine is a puny little thing. It's like a cardboard house: a puff of wind might carry it off somewhere."
Author: Haruki Murakami

14. "Do you know what we are those of us who count as pillars of society? We are society's tools, neither more nor less."
Author: Henrik Ibsen

15. "Though they love people, the Christians are enemies of our life, our gods and our crimes; hence she fled from me, as from a man who belongs to our [Roman] society, and with whom she would have to share a life counted criminal by Christians...I should not have stopped her from believing in her Christ, and would myself have reared an altar to Him in the atrium. What harm could one more god do me? Why might I not believe in Him, - I who do not believe over much in the old gods? ...It would not be difficult for me even to renounce other gods, for no reasoning mind believes in them at present. But it seems that all this is not enough yet for the Christians. It is not enough to honor Christ, one must also live according to His teachings; and here thou art on the shore of a sea which they command thee to wade through.Quo Vadis"
Author: Henryk Stanczyk

16. "What man does for his own desires and comforts affects the complex total-of-life, the ecology, and his short-term gains can bring long-term disadvantages. The Machines taught us to set up a human society which would minimize that, but the near-disaster of the early Twenty-first Century has left mankind suspicious of innovations."
Author: Isaac Asimov

17. "She never indulged in reveries or tried to be clever in her conversation; she seemed to have drawn a line in her mind beyond which she never went. It was quite obvious that feelings, every kind of relationship, including love, entered into her life on equal terms with everything else, while in the case of other women love quite manifestly takes part, if not in deeds, then in words, in all the problems of life, and everything else is allowed in only in so far as love leaves room for it. The thing this woman esteemed most was the art of living, of being able to control oneself, of keeping a balance between thought and intention, intention and realization. You could never take her unawares, by surprise, but she was like a watchful enemy whose expectant gaze would always be fixed on you, however hard you tried to lie in wait for him. High society was her element, and therefore tact and caution prompted her every thought, word, and movement."
Author: Ivan Goncharov

18. "That punishment, the public punishment of disgrace, should in a just measure attend his share of the offence is, we know, not one of the barriers which society gives to virtue."
Author: Jane Austen

19. "A society which discards those who are weak and non-productive risks exaggerating the development of reason, organisation, aggression and the desire to dominate. It becomes a society without a heart, without kindness - a rational and sad society, lacking celebration, divided within itself and given to competition, rivalry and, finally, violence."
Author: Jean Vanier

20. "Remove God from the world of ideas. Remove government, politics from society. Keep sex, humor, utilities. Let private property go."
Author: John Cage

21. "Although changing our society by calling it back to a safer morality is a noble goal, that has never been Christ's goal for His church. The church has but one mission in this world: to lead people destined to spend eternity in hell to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ and an eternity in heaven. If people die in a communist government or a democracy, under a tyrant or a benevolent dictator, believing homosexuality is right or wrong, or believing abortion is a woman's fundamental right to choose or simply mass murder, that has no bearing on where they will spend eternity. If they never knew Christ and never embraced Him as their Lord and Savior, they will spend eternity in hell."
Author: John F. MacArthur Jr.

22. "I remained a socialist for several years, even after my rejection of Marxism; and if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important than equality; that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree."
Author: Karl Popper

23. "However, please allow me to say that the fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world."
Author: Kenzaburo Oe

24. "Ritualised child sexual abuse is about abuse of power, control and secrecy. Ten years ago many people found it difficult to believe that fathers actually raped their children, yet survivors of such abuses spoke out and eventually began to be listened to and believed. Ritual abuse survivors, when they try to speak out about their experiences, face denial and disbelief from society and often fear for their lives from the abusers."
Author: Laurie Matthew

25. "I am often asked why I started to write poetry. The answer is that my motivation sprang from a visceral need to creatively articulate the experiences of the black youth of my generation, coming of age in a racist society."
Author: Linton Kwesi Johnson

26. "I meant that the Chinese people are not aware of their own entrapment. They believe they live in a free society, but don't realize how much they are being monitored and controlled, how much the information they receive is restricted and warped, until they step out of line, that is, and feel the heavy hand of the state fall on them."
Author: Ma Jian

27. "The mandate I have received and for which I will speak with heart and head to implement over the next seven years had its four pillars - an inclusive citizenship, equality and participation and respect in a creative society creating an excellence in everything we Irish do."
Author: Michael D. Higgins

28. "An anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the practice of ecological principles."
Author: Murray Bookchin

29. "It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society."
Author: Murray Rothbard

30. "This society [Jesuits] has been a greater calamity to mankind than the French Revolution, or Napoleon's despotism or ideology. It has obstructed the progress of reformation and the improvement of the human mind in society much longer and more fatally.{Letter to Thomas Jefferson, November 4, 1816. Adams wrote an anonymous 4 volume work on the destructive history of the Jesuits}"
Author: Napoleon

31. "We owe our children – the most vulnerable citizens in any society – a life free from violence and fear."
Author: Nelson Mandela

32. "Like casinos, large corporate entities have studied the numbers and the ways in which people respond to them. These are not con tricks - they're not even necessarily against our direct interests, although sometimes they can be - but they are hacks for the human mind, ways of manipulating us into particular decisions we otherwise might not make. They are also, in a way, deliberate underminings of the core principle of the free market, which derives its legitimacy from the idea that informed self-interest on aggregate sets appropriate prices for items. The key word is 'informed'; the point of behavioural economics - or rather, of its somewhat buccaneering corporate applications - is to skew our perception of the purchase to the advantage of the company. The overall consequence of that is to tilt the construction of our society away from what it should be if we were making the rational decisions classical economics imagines we would, and towards something else."
Author: Nick Harkaway

33. "In a fair and just society you can't create laws based on how you feel at the worst moment in your life."
Author: Norris Henderson

34. "Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can't get into it do that."
Author: Oscar Wilde

35. "Financial institutions, the corporate world and civil society - all must uphold high standards of probity in their working. Only a genuine partnership between the Government and its people can bring about positive change to create a just society."
Author: Pratibha Patil

36. "Slaves are governed by the fear of man, and, whenever the fear of man replaces the fear of God in a society, slavery reappears and increases."
Author: R.J. Rushdoony

37. "For, like almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action, but now, after first being 'for' society and then 'against' it, I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities. What a phrase - still it's a good phrase and a good view of life, and a man shouldn't accept any other; that much I've learned underground. Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility."
Author: Ralph Ellison

38. "Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his past apprehension of truth; and his alert acceptance of it, from whatever quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations to society, his Christianity, his world may at any time be superseded and decease."
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

39. "We need to have a modicum of faith in people's common sense, creativity and will to survive and prosper even in the face of great difficulties and obstacles. If people could keep society running in the aftermath of the Black Death, they could keep it running after the U.S. government defaulted on its debt."
Author: Robert Higgs

40. "When anyone studies a little or pays a little attention to the rules of Islamic government, Islamic politics, Islamic society and Islamic economy he will realize that Islam is a very political religion. Anyone who will say that religion is separate from politics is a fool; he does not know Islam or politics."
Author: Ruhollah Khomeini

41. "I don't mean to be like some old guy from the olden days who says, "I walked thirty miles to school every morning, so you kids should too." That's a statement born of envy and resentment. What I'm saying is something quite different. What I'm saying is that by having very little, I had it good. Children need a sense of pulling their own weight, of contributing to the family in some way, and some sense of the family's interdependence. They take pride in knowing that they're contributing. They learn responsibility and discipline through meaningful work. The values developed within a family that operates on those principles then extend to the society at large. By not being quite so indulged and "protected" from reality by overflowing abundance, children see the bonds that connect them to others."
Author: Sidney Poitier

42. "I find the science behind major natural events almost more interesting than the way in which those same events wreak their effects on human society."
Author: Simon Winchester

43. "The completion of the Iraqi cabinet with the appointment of three critical ministers is also confirmation of continued movement toward a just and democratic society in Iraq."
Author: Spencer Bachus

44. "Any society that doesn't take care of its weaker younger members is not one to be proud of."
Author: Stephanie March

45. "I knew that coming from a family with an unhealthy social origins, things would be harder for me. Nonetheless, in my heart, hope never died. However, over time, I had learned that trying never died either. Trying was one thing I always had to do more than others, because, in the self-proclaimed society of equals, we were made to be less equal than many of the families around us."
Author: Teodor Flonta

46. "Once [a cat] has given its love, what absolute confidence, what fidelity of affection! It will make itself the companion of your hours of work, of loneliness, or of sadness. It will lie the whole evening on your knee, purring and happy in your society, and leaving the company of creatures of its own society to be with you."
Author: Théophile Gautier

47. "The huge problem in our society is the enormous ignorance of the ideas that underlie modern art."
Author: Thom Mayne

48. "Perfidious society masturbators"
Author: Thomas Bernhard

49. "For the ethical, political activism was seductive because it seemed to offer the possibility that one could improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one's perceptions and transforming one's self. For the unconscionable, political reactivism was seductive because it seemed to protect one's holdings and legitimize one's greed. But both sides were gazing through a kerchief of illusion."
Author: Tom Robbins

50. "But this man Brown - it was difficult to place him at once. He talked, spreading his fingers out with the volubility of a man who will in the end become a bore. And Eleanor wandered about, holding a cup, telling people about her shower-bath. He wished they would stick to he point. Talk interested him. Serious talk on abstract subjects. 'Was solitude good; was society bad?' That was interesting; but they hopped from thing to thing. When the large man said, 'Solitary confinement is the greatest torture we inflict,' the meagre old woman with the wispy hair at once piped up, laying her hand on her heart, 'It ought to be abolished!' She visited prisons, it seemed."
Author: Virginia Woolf

Society Quotes Pictures