quotations about society
The organization of society is the slavery of individuals, and its disorganization brings freedom.
ANSELME BELLEGARRIGUE
Au fait! Au fait! Interprétation de l'idée démocratique
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
It is in the nature of society to secure and defend the conditions of its own existence even against its members.
REINHARD BENDIX
Truth and Ideology
Those who are actually in society, are not as ridiculous as those who are trying to get in.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
Society goes on punishing, just as the human mother does, just as devotedly, often less effectually. For Society has not the personal power of the human mother, the inexhaustible sympathy, the insight that goes with love, the divine patience, the untiring zeal, the hope that can conquer despair. Society is vast, impersonal, unsympathetic, in many ways blind. It strikes ruthlessly. It is so unfeeling that when it strikes one of its children it does not know that it strikes itself. In this regard, how plain is the difference between Society, mother of us all, and the human mother. For the human mother feels every blow she gives her child. Often she feels it far more keenly than the child can feel it. And she feels it long after the child has forgotten.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Society: The Perfect Mother", Reactions and Other Essays Discussing Those States of Feeling and Attitude of Mind That Find Expression In Our Individual Qualities
A picture is made up of so many square inches of painted canvas; but if you should look at these one at a time, covering the others, until you had seen them all, you would still not have seen the picture. There may, in all such cases, be a system or organization in the whole that is not apparent in the parts. In this sense, and in no other, is there a difference between society and the individuals of which it is composed; a difference not residing in the facts themselves but existing to the observer on account of the limits of his perception. A complete view of society would also be a complete view of all the individuals, and vice versa; there would be no difference between them.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
No one would speak much in society if he were aware how often we misunderstand others.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Man, in society, is like a flower blown in its native bud; it is there alone his faculties expanded in full bloom shine out, there only they reach their proper use.
WILLIAM COWPER
attributed, Day's Collacon
Man was formed for society and is neither capable of living alone, nor has the courage to do it.
WILLIAM BLACKSTONE
Commentaries on the Laws of England
The social body persists although the component cells may change.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
Absolute want is felt by few, and those who feel it, are without influence on society.
FISHER AMES
"The New Romans", Works of Fisher Ames
Society is like a stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you get a lot of scum on top.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
The nature of a society is largely determined by the direction in which talent and ambition flow--by the tilt of the social landscape.
ERIC HOFFER
The Temper of Our Time
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
The only true and natural foundations of society are the wants and the fears of individuals.
WILLIAM BLACKSTONE
Commentaries on the Laws of England
Society exists to transcend itself, and the progressive force of all evolution is the poetic imagination, the teleological instinct that moves with the organic principle of all evolution, to take possession of new forms of life, new fields of consciousness.
JULIAN BECK
Theandric: Julian Beck's Last Notebooks
Leave the bustle and tumult of society to those who have not talents to occupy themselves without them.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies from the Papers of Thomas Jefferson
Society is the union of men and not the men themselves.
CHARLES DE MONTESQUIEU
De l'Esprit
He that has no society is in a state but one degree removed from insanity.
WILLIAM GODWIN
Fleetwood
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