Quotes on society

Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.

Author: Edward Abbey

But the development of human society does not go straight forward; and the epic process will therefore be a recurring process, the series a recurring series - though not in exact repetition.

Author: Lascelles Abercrombie

Property is not the sacred right. When a rich man becomes poor it is a misfortune, it is not a moral evil. When a poor man becomes destitute, it is a moral evil, teeming with consequences and injurious to society and morality.

Author: Lord Acton

American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.

Author: Henry Adams

Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.

Author: John Adams

The platform of an Ethical Society is itself the altar; the address must be the fire that burns thereon.

Author: Felix Adler

The Ethical Society, therefore, is like a Church in maintaining, and emphasizing the importance of maintaining the custom of public assemblies on Sunday.

Author: Felix Adler

A junkie is someone who uses their body to tell society that something is wrong.

Author: Stella Adler

No emancipation without that of society.

Author: Theodor Adorno

Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.

Author: Theodor Adorno

An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.

Author: Theodor Adorno

He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.

Author: Theodor Adorno

A good person can make another person good; it means that goodness will elicit goodness in the society; other persons will also be good.

Author: Bhumibol Adulyadej

We who have been born and nurtured on this soil, we, whose habits, manners, and customs are the same in common with other Americans, can never consent to - be the bearers of the redress offered by that Society to that much afflicted.

Author: Richard Allen

If it is widely assumed that the new President cannot move forward simply because of a narrow victory, there can easily develop a sense of unease and uncertainty, adversely affecting every sector of American society, our economy and the perception of other nations.

Author: Richard Allen

In a rational society we would want our presidents to be teachers. In our actual society we insist they be cheerleaders.

Author: Steve Allen

In emerging democracies like Russia, in authoritarian states like Iran or even Yugoslavia, journalists play a vital role in civil society. In fact, they form the very basis of those new democracies and civil societies.

Author: Christiane Amanpour

A great man is different from an eminent one in that he is ready to be the servant of the society.

Author: B. Ambedkar

Our society is not perfect and this will come as no surprise to many of you.

Author: Barbara Amiel

Business, labor and civil society organizations have skills and resources that are vital in helping to build a more robust global community.

Author: Kofi Annan

The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin.

Author: David Antin

There is probably no oral society that fails to mark the spatial distinction of left and right, peculiar as this distinction may be.

Author: David Antin

I don't want what I am saying to sound like a prophecy or anything like an analysis of modern society... these are only feelings I have, and I am the least speculative man on earth.

Author: Michelangelo Antonioni

We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean.

Author: Michelangelo Antonioni

Adolescence is society's permission slip for combining physical maturity with psychological irresponsibility.

Author: Terri Apter

In much of society, research means to investigate something you do not know or understand.

Author: Neil Armstrong

At one of the annual conventions of the American Society for Aesthetics much confusion arose when the Society for Anesthetics met at the same time in the same hotel.

Author: Rudolf Arnheim

Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

Author: Matthew Arnold

The greatest failure is that although we have created institutions, we have not created a civil society.

Author: Paddy Ashdown

When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

Author: Isaac Asimov

It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

Author: Isaac Asimov

I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.

Author: Lee Atwater

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.

Author: W. Auden

Exclusiveness in a garden is a mistake as great as it is in society.

Author: Alfred Austin

If you ask me to summarise our mission, I would put it this way: We were a military regime that sought to lay the foundations for freedom and liberty in a complex society.

Author: Ibrahim Babangida

A society that does not correctly interpret and appreciate its past cannot understand its present fortunes and adversities and can be caught unawares in a fast changing world.

Author: Ibrahim Babangida

At the same, we need to remain sensitive to the reality that we are still an African society in which the majority of the people and communities live under severe deprivations and afflictions that are no fault of theirs.

Author: Ibrahim Babangida

Our choice of a reform framework dictated that we looked at the fundamental assumptions that had driven Nigeria's economy, society and policy hitherto and to seek ways of either abandoning or transcending those assumptions and their supporting institutions.

Author: Ibrahim Babangida

And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best?

Author: Thomas Babington

Ours is an open and accepting society, and has historically provided an avenue for lawful immigration to all those willing to accept the responsibilities of citizenship.

Author: Spencer Bachus

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

That made me think I could contribute more to society by looking at people on the autopsy table and feeding back the findings so that lots of people could benefit, rather than just treating patients one at a time.

Author: Michael Baden

Solitude is better than the society of evil persons.

Author: Abu Bakr

Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations.

Author: Mikhail Bakunin

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

Author: James Baldwin

Our society is the product of several great religious and philosophical traditions. The ideas of the Greeks and Romans, Christianity, Judaism, humanism and the Enlightenment have made us who we are.

Author: Jan Balkenende

Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.

Author: Honore Balzac

We are now integrated into American society and I don't like the word fashionable, because fashionable means that it's going to pass. It's not like that anymore.

Author: Antonio Banderas

Most of them are pretty down records, pretty unhappy, pretty confused. Which only reflects how people in general were feeling, I mean really the sense that you get is society running down.

Author: Lester Bangs

As far as a truly radical conscience, you have to take it as part of a larger thing, that it was sort of historical inevitability that with the coming of a leaguer society people would start to use drugs a lot more then they had before.

Author: Lester Bangs

The runway symbolizes something in society that's very intimidating to women.

Author: Tyra Banks

When I was about to break a world record and become well known, my mother used to say that for her the important thing was for me to become a doctor - a career which had not been possible in her generation and in her society. Sport was something to be set aside.

Author: Roger Bannister

I am against marriage, and I don't give a fig for society.

Author: Brigitte Bardot

You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

Author: John Barlow

The Internet: transforming society and shaping the future through chat.

Author: Dave Barry

Though gay lifestyles have certainly moved into the open, there's little evidence that society has become more open in its basic attitudes or that entertainers should feel cozy in emerging from the velvet underground.

Author: Peter Bart

Our Prophet was a radical too- he fought against the injustices of his community and challenged the feudal order of his society, so they called him a radical. So what? We should be proud of that!

Author: Abu Bashir

What is a society without a heroic dimension?

Author: Jean Baudrillard

Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.

Author: Jean Baudrillard

Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.

Author: Simone Beauvoir

Law represents the effort of man to organize society; governments, the efforts of selfishness to overthrow liberty.

Author: Henry Beecher

Certainly I get a lot personally out of it as well, there's the recognition and things like that but mostly I try to take that as an opportunity to explain why I hope we could see more projects like Apache out there and why it's a good thing for society.

Author: Brian Behlendorf

I am strongly convinced that the people or society is the best and the most unerring critic.

Author: Vissarion Belinsky

But we don't have an example of a democratic society existing in a socialist economy - which is the only real alternative to capitalism in the modern world.

Author: Peter Berger

Even in a society as tightly controlled as Singapore's, the market creates certain forces which perhaps in the long run may lead to democracy.

Author: Peter Berger

Even if one is interested only in one's own society, which is one's prerogative, one can understand that society much better by comparing it with others.

Author: Peter Berger

We live in a kissy society.

Author: Michael Bergin

The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.

Author: Georges Bernanos

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.

Author: Edward Bernays

There is no magic. There is no secret. You need your sleep. A lot of our society tries to get by, but the truth is it is up to each individual to get their optimal sleep amount. If you get less than that you can get by temporarily, but it's only temporary.

Author: Richard Berry

Fascism is not in itself a new order of society. It is the future refusing to be born.

Author: Aneurin Bevan

The devastating punch we took on September 11th still reverberates throughout American society.

Author: Joe Biden

Land: A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure.

Author: Ambrose Bierce

Australia has an increasingly multicultural society.

Author: Julie Bishop

The people who do not get jobs are often the most vulnerable in our society, and joblessness is a terrible plight for anyone who suffers from it.

Author: Tim Bishop

It seems to me morally a decent society will try to take some of the increased benefit and use that to alleviate the pain of the few who are bearing the cost that made it possible.

Author: Tim Bishop

If society will not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodeled.

Author: Elizabeth Blackwell

I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.

Author: Ruben Blades

Friendship! Mysterious cement of the soul, Sweet'ner of life, and solder of society.

Author: Robert Blair

But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.

Author: Harold Bloom

When you come in to court as a plaintiff or as a defendant, it is terribly important that you look up at the bench and feel that that person represents you and will understand you, that that person is reflective of our community and of our society.

Author: Michael Bloomberg

After World War II society had to settle back for a moment before it picked up the 20th century.

Author: Stella Blum

Similarly, thought is a system. That system not only includes thought and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society - as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times.

Author: David Bohm

This kind of overall way of thinking is not only a fertile source of new theoretical ideas: it is needed for the human mind to function in a generally harmonious way, which could in turn help to make possible an orderly and stable society.

Author: David Bohm

A corporation is organized as a system - it has this department, that department, that department... they don't have any meaning separately; they only can function together. And also the body is a system. Society is a system in some sense. And so on.

Author: David Bohm

I never leaf through a copy of National Geographic without realizing how lucky we are to live in a society where it is traditional to wear clothes.

Author: Erma Bombeck

The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama.

Author: Edward Bond

All you now do is pursue your private objectives within society. Instead of us being a community, everybody is asked to seek their own personal ends. It's called competition. And competition is antagonism.

Author: Edward Bond

A person's worth is quite independent of their usefulness to society.

Author: Kjell Bondevik

We must never relinquish the vision of a humane society and a humane world.

Author: Kjell Bondevik

Everyone in society should be a role model, not only for their own self-respect, but for respect from others.

Author: Barry Bonds

The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.

Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.

Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

A society deadened by a smothering network of laws while finding release in moral chaos is not likely to be either happy or stable.

Author: Robert Bork

Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.

Author: Robert Bork

Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.

Author: Randolph Bourne

Society cannot share a common communication system so long as it is split into warring factions.

Author: Bertolt Brecht

Congress acknowledged that society's accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment.

Author: William Brennan, Jr.

It is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever produced.

Author: Tom Brokaw

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

Author: Jacob Bronowski

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.

Author: Emily Bronte

The stage of the development of the productive forces determines the political and ideological superstructure of society which are crystallized into a system of social organization.

Author: Earl Browder

Because capitalist society has expanded the productive forces so enormously, the social conditions under which it arose lag behind and become fetters holding back the further growth of productive forces.

Author: Earl Browder

I am as frustrated with society as a pyromaniac in a petrified forest.

Author: A. Brown

When you live in a place, you're not just taking from it, you're contributing to it. In America I would never be able to make myself a person who could contribute. I wasn't interested in that society; I was interested in this society.

Author: Bryan Brown

We have an open society. No one will come and take me away for saying what I am saying. But they don't have to, if they can control how many people hear it. And that's how they do it.

Author: Jackson Browne

Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.

Author: Thomas Browne

Remember, social progress only happens when those in society's privileged classes choose to give up their status.

Author: Tammy Bruce

The wise person often shuns society for fear of being bored.

Author: Jean Bruyere

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.

Author: Pearl Buck

The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. For to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves-and the better the teacher, the better the student body.

Author: Warren Buffett

If no other knowledge deserves to be called useful but that which helps to enlarge our possessions or to raise our station in society, then Mythology has no claim to the appellation.

Author: Thomas Bulfinch

There can be no doubt that the practice of opening legislative sessions with prayer has become part of the fabric of our society.

Author: Warren Burger

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.

Author: Edmund Burke

Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never forgives preaching of a new gospel.

Author: Edmund Burke

Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society.

Author: Edmund Burke

Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man.

Author: John Burroughs

There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.

Author: William Burroughs

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.

Author: William Burroughs

I don't tend to think of these characters as losers. I like the struggles that people have, people who are feeling like they don't fit into society, because I still sort of feel that way.

Author: Steve Buscemi

The winner of the hoop race will be the first to realize her dream, not society's dream, her own personal dream.

Author: Barbara Bush

If more people were actively engaged in advocating their positions I think we'd have a better society.

Author: Jeb Bush

I was training to be a lawyer... I was president of the law society at Glasgow University, and my bass guitarist was my secretary of my law society; the lead guitarist and writer worked at the law firm that I worked.

Author: Gerard Butler

Relativism should be confronted where it damages fundamental human rights, because we're not relativists if we believe that the human being should be at the centre of society and the rights of every human being should be respected.

Author: Rocco Buttiglione

One needs to know what the hierarchy of values are from which one takes inspiration, and in a democratic society this is the subject of continuous democratic debate.

Author: Rocco Buttiglione

Society is now one polished horde, formed of two mighty tries, the Bores and Bored.

Author: Lord Byron

I think we need to just be very clear about what we're trying to do in Afghanistan. Frankly, we're not trying to create the perfect democracy. We're never going to create some ideal society. We are simply there for our own national security.

Author: David Cameron

I have the satisfaction of knowing I did something useful for society.

Author: John Cameron

Nuclear physics is interesting but it is unlikely to help society.

Author: John Cameron

Over the past few years, many of us have increasingly begun to question the direction and meaning of our society as it has developed over the past several centuries.

Author: Alex Campbell

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

Author: Albert Camus

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

Author: Albert Camus

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

Author: Albert Camus

We live in a society that blames everybody else for what's wrong.

Author: Max Cannon

There's a reason why every human society has fiction. It teaches us how to be 'good,' to behave in a way that is for the benefit of the whole community.

Author: Orson Card

It seems that we have it backward in our society. We tend to look up to people who are under a great deal of stress, who can handle loads of stress, and those who are under a great deal of pressure.

Author: Richard Carlson

Before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks.

Author: Stokely Carmichael

Cinema will always have an important role to play in society.

Author: Leslie Caron

Early in 1888 one or two of us got together to establish our own Sheffield Socialist Society.

Author: Edward Carpenter

The first duty of society is to give each of its members the possibility of fulfilling his destiny. When it becomes incapable of performing this duty it must be transformed.

Author: Alexis Carrel

Before I do anything, I think, well what hasn't been seen. Sometimes, that turns out to be something ghastly and not fit for society. And sometimes that inspiration becomes something that's really worthwhile.

Author: Jim Carrey

Tolerance is the price we pay for living in a free, pluralistic society.

Author: Robert Casey

Solitude shows us what should be; society shows us what we are.

Author: Robert Cecil

The Iraqi people are living a long-running tragedy because of the legacy of the old regime, the Americans and their actions that are unsuitable for Iraqi society, and the weakness of national resolve.

Author: Ahmed Chalabi

Society is composed of two great classes those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.

Author: Nicolas Chamfort

Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.

Author: Raymond Chandler

Although my book is banned I am still allowed to go to China and travel. There is no longer the kind of control that Mao used to have-there have been deep fundamental changes in society.

Author: Jung Chang

The great hope of society is in individual character.

Author: William Channing

I did it to myself. It wasn't society... it wasn't a pusher, it wasn't being blind or being black or being poor. It was all my doing.

Author: Ray Charles

Women are the real architects of society.

Author: Cher