The sanity of society is a balance of a thousand insanities.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Nominalist and Realist," Essays
Society is inside of man and man is inside society, and you cannot even create a truthfully drawn psychological entity on the stage until you understand his social relations and their power to make him what he is and to prevent him from being what he is not. The fish is in the water and the water is in the fish.
ARTHUR MILLER, "The Shadows of the Gods"
The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools?
HENRIK IBSEN, An Enemy of the People
Man seeketh in society comfort, use, and protection.
FRANCIS BACON, Advancement of Learning
Hitherto, every form of society has been based ... on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.
KARL MARX, The Communist Manifesto
[A] new society cannot be created by reproducing the repugnant past, however refined or enticingly repackaged.
NELSON MANDELA, Nobel lecture, 1993
The citizen's life is made possible only by due performance of his function in the place he fills; and he cannot wholly free himself from the beliefs and sentiments generated by the vital connections hence arising between himself and his society.... To cut himself off in thought from all his relationships of race, and country, and citizenship -- to get rid of all those interests, prejudices, likings, superstitions, generated in him by the life of his own society and his own time -- to look on all the changes societies have undergone and are undergoing, without reference to nationality, or creed, or personal welfare; is what the average man cannot do at all, and what the exceptional man can do very imperfectly.
HERBERT SPENCER, The Study of Sociology
We must reform society before we can reform ourselves.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, preface to Misalliance
Individual commitment to a group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.
Society is not merely a select body of spiritual or intellectual persons, but a great organism composed of all kinds of members, a net containing bad and good.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON, A City Set on a Hill
- Society than solitude is worse
- And man to man is still the greatest curse.
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD, Ovid to His Wife
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.
EMILY BRONTE, Wuthering Heights
- Society is now one polish'd horde,
- Form'd of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.
We are all civilized people, which means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behavior.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
Just as there is no society or group that is not a collective view of persons, so there is no individual who may not be regarded as a particular view of social groups. He has no separate existence; through both the hereditary and the social factors in his life a man is bound into the whole of which he is a member, and to consider him apart from it is quite as artificial as to consider society apart from individuals.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, Human Nature and the Social Order
Any decent society must generate a feeling of community. Community offsets loneliness. It gives people a vitally necessary sense of belonging. Yet today the institutions on which community depends are crumbling in all the techno-societies. The result is a spreading plague of loneliness.
ALVIN TOFFLER, The Third Wave
- Sanity means the wholeness of the consciousness.
- And our society is only part conscious, like an idiot.
When virtual reality gets cheaper than dating, society is doomed.
There is a society in the deepest solitude.
ISAAC D'ISRAELI, Literary Character of Men of Genius
Gold is the key to society; but poverty its barrier.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY, Proverbs
A society regulated by a public sense of justice is inherently stable.
JOHN RAWLS, A Theory of Justice
Society knows perfectly well how to kill a man and has methods more subtle than death.
ANDRE GIDE, Autumn Leaves
Under any system of society ... the family holds the future in its bosom.
CHARLES FRANKLIN THWING, The Family: An Historical and Social Study
Justice is the great end of civil society.
DAVID DUDLEY FIELD, speech, Mar. 1885
What passed for society was a loud, giddy whirl of thieves and pretentious hustlers, a dull sideshow full of quacks and clowns and philistines with gimp mentalities.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON, The Rum Diary
- Society is a chain of obligations, and its links must support each other;
- The branch cannot but wither, that is cut from the parent vine.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER, Proverbial Philosophy
Society is in a process of evolution. Man is yet primitive. All that has gone before is a preparation for better things to come, but we are moving rapidly, and, I believe, securely, toward nobler things.
ELBERT HUBBARD, The American Bible
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