Society Quotations

Quotes about society.

Sourced

• "A person who cannot live in society, or does not need to because he is self-sufficient, is either a beast or a god."
  • Aristotle, Politics

• "What is not good for the beehive, cannot be good for the bees."
  • Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

• "Man seeketh in society comfort, use, and protection."
  • Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605)

• "The history of society is the history of the inventive labors that man alter man, alter his desires, habits, outlook, relationships both to other men and to physical nature, with which man is in perpetual physical and technological metabolism."
  • Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx (1978)

• I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.
  • Rubén Blades, in a conference at Harvard University reported by Anne Stewart (AP: Cambridge, Mass.), "Not everyone enthusiastic about the future of TV", Bangor Daily News, 18 February 1993

• What times! What manners!
  • Cicero, in Catilinam

• "The only living socities are those which are animated by inequality and injustice."
  • Paul Claudel, Conversations dans le Loir-et-Cher

• It is the retention by twentieth-century, Atom-Age men of the Neolithic point of view that says: You stay in your village and I will stay in mine. If your sheep eat our grass we will kill you, or we may kill you anyhow to get all the grass for our own sheep. Anyone who tries to make us change our ways is a witch and we will kill him. Keep out of our village.
  • Carleton S. Coon, The Story of Man

• "In human society the warmth is mainly at the bottom."
  • Noel Jack Counhian, Age (1986)

• "It's not sex and drug advice these kids need, so much as help in acquiring a world view, in motivating them to take responsibilty and enabling them to build proper relationships."
  • George Curry, Daily Mail (1996)

• "The virtues of society are the vices of the saint."
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, First Series (1841)

• "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members."
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance (1841)

• "In the affluent society, no sharp distinction can be made between luxuries and necessaries."
  • J.K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958)

• "I do not think there is anything deserving the name of society to be found out of London."
  • William Hazlitt, Table-Talk (1822)

• "We have really lost in our society the sense of the sacredness of life."
  • Basil Hume, The Observer Review (1995)

• "We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity - a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world."
  • Nelson Mandela, Inaugural Address (1994)

• "A society made up of the individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable. The pressure of ideas would simply drive it frantic."
  • H.L. Mencken, Minority Report (1956)

• "When society requires to be rebuilt, there is no use in attempting to rebuild it on the old plan."
  • John Stuart Mill, Dissertations and Discussions (1859)

• "The men with the muck-rakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck, and to look upward to the celestial crown above them."
  • Theodore Roosevelt, address on the laying of the cornerstone of the House Office Building, Washington, D.C. (1906-04-14)

• "No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable."
  • Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)

• "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 Soceity (1921)

• They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations.
  • Margaret Thatcher 23 September 1987, as quoted in an interview by Douglas Keay, Woman's Own, 31 October 1987, pp. 8–10. A transcript of the interview at the Margaret Thatcher Foundation website differs in several particulars, but not in substance.

• "It is impossible, in our condition of Soceity, not to be sometimes a Snob."
  • William Makepeace Thackeray, The Book of Snobs (1848)
• "Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate oddfellow society."
  • Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

• "To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy."
  • Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance (1893)

• "Society can imprison one's happiness"
  • Katherine Szabo and Jenna Huskic, The Q Bus

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• Società Anonima Navigazione Aerea