quotations about society
It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
GEORGE ORWELL
1984
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"
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
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
I live in the crowds of jollity, not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Rasselas
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
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
Society is a sphere that demands all our energies, and deserves all that it demands.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
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"
The great always sell their society to the vanity of the little.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
Society is no comfort
To one not sociable.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Cymbeline
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
Society's failed us, Society's gonna pay
One way or another they'll feel our pain
ROGER MIRET & THE DISASTERS
"The Boys"
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"
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
Society makes. Then society rewards and punishes her handiwork.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Prisoners of Prejudice", Reactions and Other Essays
Socially we are woven into the fabric of society, where every man is like one thread in a piece of cloth. No single thread has a right to say, "I will stay here no longer," and draw out. No man has a right to make a hole in the well-woven fabric of society.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
God designed men to grow as trees grow in open pastures, full-boughed all around; but men in society grow like trees in forests, tall and spindling, the lower ones overshadowed by the higher, with only a little branching, and that at the top. They borrow of each other the power to stand; and if the forest be cleared, and one be left alone, the first wind which comes uproots it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
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