quotations about society
Society is no comfort
To one not sociable.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Cymbeline
No more pay and lots of leisure
In this low society
Low society
I'm just doing what I can
In this low society
But I'm an incidental man
HEAVEN 17
"Low Society"
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"
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
JOHN F. KENNEDY
Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961
Society ... is nothing more than the war of a thousand petty opposed interests, an eternal strife of all the vanities, which, turn in turn wounded and humiliated one by the other, intercross, come into collision, and on the morrow expiate the triumph of the eve in the bitterness of defeat. To live alone, to remain unjostled in this miserable struggle, where for a moment one draws the eyes of the spectators, to be crushed a moment later -- this is what is called being a nonentity, having no existence. Poor humanity!
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
Hitherto, every form of society has been based ... on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.
KARL MARX
The Communist Manifesto
Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
And therefore God created only one single man, not, certainly, that he might be a solitary bereft of all society, but that by this means the unity of society and the bond of concord might be more effectually commended to him, men being bound together not only by similarity of nature, but by family affection. And indeed He did not even create the woman that was to be given him as his wife, as he created the man, but created her out of the man, that the whole human race might derive from one man.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God
Society is addicted to growth, and that's having terrible consequences for the planet and, increasingly, for us as well. We have to change our collective and individual behavior and give up something we depend on--power over our environment. We must restrain ourselves, like an alcoholic foreswearing booze. That requires honesty and soul-searching.
RICHARD HEINBERG
"Systemic Change Driven by Moral Awakening Is Our Only Hope", EcoWatch, August 14, 2017
Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate oddfellow society.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Walden
There is a society in the deepest solitude.
ISAAC D'ISRAELI
Literary Character of Men of Genius
Society,
Pay your taxes stand in line help them plan for your demise.
PENNYWISE
"Society"
Those who suffer their happiness to depend on the futile pleasures of society, instead of the resources of their own minds, resemble birds, who, with the power of soaring into the pure regions of the sky, descend, and loiter amid the dust of the earth, at the risk of being snared or destroyed by every vagrant urchin.
LADY BLESSINGTON
attributed, Day's Collacon
In society men protect themselves by protecting one another.
EMPEROR FOHI
attributed, Day's Collacon
No social stability without individual stability.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
No one has yet been found resolute enough in dogmatizing to deny that Nature made man equal; that society has destroyed this equality is a truth not more incontrovertible.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
letter to Elizabeth Hitchener, July 25, 1811
How to gain the advantages of society, without at the same time losing ourselves, is a question of no slight difficulty. The wise man often follows the crowd at a little distance, in order that he may not come suddenly upon it, nor become entangled with it, and that he may with some means of amusement maintain a clear and quiet pathway.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
Justice is the great end of civil society.
DAVID DUDLEY FIELD
speech, March 1885
Man seeketh in society comfort, use, and protection.
FRANCIS BACON
Advancement of Learning
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