Quotes
Quotes about Society
The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.
In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
The wise man sometimes flees from society from fear of being bored.
Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.
He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society.
Society is like a large piece of frozen water; and skating well is the great art of social life.
The Don Quixote of one generation may live to hear himself called the savior of society by the next.
Society is like air; very high up, it is sublimated--too low down, a perfect choke-damp.
Society is joint action and cooperation in which each participant sees the other partner's success as a means for the attainment of his own.
Society is only possible on these terms, that the individual finds therein a strengthening of his own ego and his own will.
Man is a luxury loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rational or too serious to be tempted by baubles.
What the intellectual craves above all else is to be taken seriously, to be treated as a decisive force in shaping history. He is far more at home in a society that weighs his every word and keeps close watch on his attitudes then in a society that cares not what he says or does. He would rather be persecuted than ignored.
A society that refuses to strive for superfluities is likely to end up lacking in necessities.
Our modern society is engaged in polishing and decorating the cage in which man is kept imprisoned.
The pillars of truth and the pillars of freedom--they are the pillars of society.
The sort of dependence that results from exchange, i.e., from commercial transactions, is a reciprocal dependence. We cannot be dependent upon a foreigner without his being dependent on us. Now, this is what constitutes the very essence of society. To sever natural interrelations is not to make oneself independent, but to isolate oneself completely.
In a society in which it is a moral offense to be different from your neighbor your only escape is never to let them find out.
People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict.
...everything is too important ever to be entrusted to professional experts, because every organization of such professionals and every established social organization becomes a vested-interest institution more concerned with its efforts to maintain itself or advance its own interests than to achieve the purpose that society expects it to achieve.
Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers.
We must beware of trying to build a society in which nobody counts for anything except a politician or an official, a society where enterprise gains no reward and thrift no privileges.
Society is like a lawn where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiling verdure of a velvet surface.
The nature of a society is largely determined by the direction in which talent and ambition flow--by the tilt of the social landscape.
Every change in conditions will make necessary some change in the use of resources, in the direction and kind of human activities, in habits and practices. And each change in the actions of those affected in the first instance will require further adjustments that will gradually extend through the whole of society. Every change thus in a sense creates a "problem" for society, even though no single individual perceives it as such; it is gradually "solved" by the establishment of a new overall adjustment.
Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant.
