Quotes about society
Haruki Murakami - Dance Dance Dance
Latter-day capitalism. Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match. Like pulling on a Missoni sweater over Trussardi slacks and Pollini shoes, you can now enjoy hybrid styles of morality. It's the way
Anthony T. Hincks -
Never deviate off the path that society has set for you. Otherwise you may find yourself in a place that you like.
G. Michael Hopf - Those Who Remain
Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.
Osamu Dazai - The Setting Sun
I have no desire for others to take it on themselves to analyze my thoughts. I am without thoughts. I have never, not even once, acted on the basis of any doctrine or philosophy.I am convinced that those people whom the world considers good and respects are all liars and fakes. I do not trust the world.
Eric Hoffer -
There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.
John Stuart Mill - On Liberty
Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.
Stefan Molyneux -
I refuse to let the standards of evil people chip away at my capacity for integrity.
Debasish Mridha -
People will not remember what you did for living,they will remember how you touched them with kindness and loving.
Stefan Molyneux -
We are supposed to call poison medicine and we wonder why we're always sick.
John Rawls - A Theory of Justice
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a gr
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world, but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man
Erich Fromm - Escape from Freedom
If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one's individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructability; if one's name is known to one's contemporaries and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one's life has meaning
Fulton J. Sheen -
The danger today is in believing there are no sick people, there is only a sick society.
Charles Bukowski - Women
Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it
Erma Bombeck -
When humor goes, there goes civilization.
Haruki Murakami - After Dark
I do feel that I’ve managed to make something I could maybe call my world…over time…little by little. And when I’m inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to make such a world probably means that I’m a weak person, that I bruise easily, don’t you think? And in the eyes of society at large, that world of mine is a puny little thing. It’s like a cardboard house: a puff of wind might carry it off somewhere.
John Stuart Mill - On Liberty
In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral c
Jeffrey Eugenides - The Marriage Plot
Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.
Jostein Gaarder - Sophie's World
If you believed in Christianity or Islam it was called 'faith', but if you believed in astrology or friday the thirteenth it was Superstition!
Guy Debord -
Il est le soleil qui ne se couche jamais sur l'empire de la passivité moderne. Il recouvre toute la surface du monde et baigne indéfiniment dans sa propre gloire.
Guy Debord -
Le spectacle est la principale production de la société actuelle.
Guy Debord -
Le but n'est rien, le développement est tout. Le spectacle ne veut en venir à rien d'autre qu'à lui-même.
Patrick Rothfuss - The Name of the Wind
... for most practical purposes, Tarbean had two parts: Waterside and Hillside. Waterside is where people are poor. That makes them beggars, thieves and whores. Hillside is where people are rich. That makes them solicitors, politicians and courtesans.
Ellen Goodman -
Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
Osho -
You have to be grateful to existence that it has chosen you to be a passage for a few beautiful children. But you are not to interfere in their growth, in their potential. You are not to impose yourself upon them. They are not going to live in the same times, they are not going to face the same problems. They will be part of another world. Don´t prepare them for this world, this society, this time, because then you will be creating troubles for them. They will find themselves unfit, unqualified.
C. JoyBell C. -
The unhappiest people in this world, are those who care the most about what other people think.
Bill Hicks -
Go back to bed, America. Your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control again. Here. Here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed, America. Here is American Gladiators. Here is 56 channels of it! Watch these pituitary retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go, America! You are free to do what we tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment
The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.
Alan Bennett - Getting On
We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.
Marcel Duchamp -
All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.
Karl Pilkington -
I think people would live a bit longer if they didn't know how old they were. Age puts restrictions on things.
Sherwood Smith - Crown Duel
Despite how entertaining certain stories were, at the bottom of every item of gossip there was someone getting hurt.
Mitch Albom - Tuesdays with Morrie
Look, no matter where you live, the biggest defect we human beings have is our shortsightedness. We don’t see what we could be. We should be looking at our potential, stretching ourselves into everything we can become. But if you’re surrounded by people who say ‘I want mine now,’ you end up with a few people with everything and a military to keep the poor ones from rising up and stealing it.
Sheri S. Tepper - Wizard's Eleven
He told us that nations of men fell into disorder, so nations of law were set up instead. He told us that nations of law then forgot justice and let the law become a Game, a Game in which the moves and the winning were more important than truth. He told us to seek justice rather than the Game.
Oscar A. Romero - The Violence of Love
The church must suffer for speaking the truth, for pointing out sin, for uprooting sin. No one wants to have a sore spot touched, and therefore a society with so many sores twitches when someone has the courage to touch it and say: “You have to treat that. You have to get rid of that. Believe in Christ. Be converted.
Jess C. Scott - The Other Side of Life
Nin knew how much humans loved money, riches, and material things—though he never really could understand why. The more technologically advanced the human species got, the more isolated they seemed to become, at the same time. It was alarming, how humans could spend entire lifetimes engaged in all kinds of activities, without getting any closer to knowing who they really were, inside.
Edmund Burke -
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.
Herman Melville - The Whale
But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound.
Hannah Harrington - Speechless
All of them are the same type; girls with overprocessed hair and too much makeup and way too much access to Daddy’s credit cards. Girls who, if you took away the designer labels, hair dye and cover-up, wouldn’t be more than average-looking, but with all that stuff look too plastic to be pretty.
Edward Abbey - Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
The novel should tell the truth, as I see the truth, or as the novelist persuades me to see it. And one more demand: I expect the novelist to aspire to improve the world. ... As a novelist, I want to be more than one more dog barking at the other dogs barking at me. Not out of any foolish hope that one novelist, or all virtuous novelists in chorus, can make much of a difference for good, except in the long run, but out of the need to prevent the human world from relaxing into something worse. To
C.S. Lewis - The Screwtape Letters
[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist's shop.
Toba Beta - Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
It wasn't science and technology that cause a slow progress, but collective knowledge of the society and market demands.
V.C. Andrews - Flowers in the Attic
People make the rules of society, not God.
John Steinbeck - Cannery Row
Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature.
Christine de Pizan - The Book of the City of Ladies
How was she created? I'm not sure if you realize this, but it was in God's image. How can anybody dare to speak ill of something which bears such a noble imprint?
Jack Kerouac -
It’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are – and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world … It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.
Cornel West -
Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.
Robert E. Howard -
Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
Bill Gates -
Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
The soul is healed by being with children.
Albert Camus -
Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.
Karen Blixen - Out of Africa
A visitor is a friend, he brings news, good or bad, which is bread to the hungry minds in lonely places. A real friend who comes to the house is a heavenly messenger, who brings the panis angelorum.
Lailah Gifty - Akita
Until a man love God, can he love his neighbour.
Idries Shah - Sufi Thought and Action
The Sufis regard systems which treat everyone alike as mechanical and degenerate.
John Holt - Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better
Only to the degree that people have what they need, that they are healthy and unafraid, that their lives are varied, interesting, meaningful, productive, joyous, can we begin to judge, or even guess, their nature. Few people, adults or children, now live such lives.
Inga Muscio - Cunt: A Declaration of Independence
Do not, under any circumstances, put this book down and turn on the teevee.The teevee debilitates our culture.
François-René de Chateaubriand -
Quand on parle des vices d’un homme, si on vous dit : “Tout le monde le dit” ne le croyez pas ; si l’on parle de ses vertus en vous disant encore : “Tout le monde le dit”, croyez-le.
Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
We know that for mankind to move forward, changes must be made. However, if an old man is wise only by his gray hair, yet it is inevitable that this wisdom will also become impaired by age, then it can be deduced that we cannot expect the very old or very young to make progressive strides to better society, it must be up to the men and women still in the prime of their lives to re-learn and teach the changes needed to be made.
Craig D. Lounsbrough -
We look around us and we find ourselves confused as to why the world has fallen into such deep darkness. And standing in this descending darkness, what we need to realize is that the farther we move from God, the darker everything gets. And no light of man can illuminate that kind of darkness.
Abhijit Naskar - Human Making is Our Mission: A Treatise on Parenting
Keep in mind my friend, if an answer is not rational, then it is not an answer, but a delusion.
A.H. Septimius - Crowns Of Amara: The Return Of The Oracle
Men of honour will always outstay men of undeserved rank.
A.Y.C.C -
How can our words ever truly be our own? Since we started growing all we've been taught is to care how we represent our persona and how we should communicate appropriately and how we portrait ourselves as acceptable human beings. what we've been taught, thats everything. We didn't shape our own minds, so how can our words really be our own?
Idries Shah - Caravan of Dreams
Any society which enjoins its members to adhere to both of these (politeness and truth) is a fraud.
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."..."There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality."..."But they used to take morphia and cocaine."..."Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178."..."Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug."..."Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant."..."All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects."..."Tak
Jean Anouilh - Antigone
I spit on your happiness! I spit on your idea of life--that life that must go on, come what may. You are all like dogs that lick everything they smell. You with your promise of a humdrum happiness--provided a person doesn't ask much of life. I want everything of life, I do; and I want it now! I want it total, complete: otherwise I reject it! I will not be moderate. I will not be satisfied with the bit of cake you offer me if I promise to be a good little girl. I want to be sure of everything thi
Katherine Dunn - Geek Love
Can you be happy with the movies, and the ads, and the clothes in the stores, and the doctors, and the eyes as you walk down the street all telling you there is something wrong with you? No. You cannot be happy. Because, you poor darling baby, you believe them.
Ha-Joon Chang - Economics: The User's Guide
The issue of false consciousness is a genuinely difficult problem that has no definite solution. We should not approve of an unequal and brutal society because surveys show that people are happy. But who has the right to tell those oppressed women or starving landless peasants that they shouldn’t be happy, if they think they are? Does anyone have the right to make those people feel miserable by telling them the ‘truth’? There are no easy answers to these questions, but they definitely tell us th
Simi Sunny -
To be honest, I love watching some of the old cartoons and new ones that are popular. It's another way to make me happy and reminisce the good old times. Plus, it makes me forget the recreational world around me. If only the economy would let loose and not tire everyone out. I'm just saying. People have an inner child somewhere. I have one, too. So it's cool to have an inner child at times. It can brighten your day and see another view in life.
Lukasz Laniecki - You Have The Right Not To Make Your Parents Proud. A Book Of Quotes
The time to build your future is in your teenage years and your 20s, but equally, in your 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond.
Eunice Baumann-Nelson Ph.D PENOBSCOT -
If a child hasn't been given spiritual values within the family setting, they have no familiarity with the values that are necessary for the just and peaceful functioning in society.
Lacey Sturm -
We should teach our kids that they're blessing and not a burden and that they're valuable beyond what they can imagine - in God's eyes, in the world's eyes - that they're purpose is so important to fulfill and it's gonna make a difference in the world. And they're the only ones that can make the difference that they can make, in the way that they can make it. That's why we all have different fingerprints. And I feel like the message is not clear enough. It's not clear because they go to school a
Orson Scott Card -
There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.
Swati Kumar - The Great Indian Dilemma
It is said that there is never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart. The shroud that covers this free spirit is woven by the complex threads of society.
Nana Awere Damoah - Through the Gates of Thought
I grew up in an environment where the onus of raising a child was not on the parents alone but of the entire community. The logic is in that a child who becomes a burden or an armed robber becomes a threat not only to the parents but to a whole society!
Unarine Ramaru -
The biggest insult to any parent is a child that lives up to society standards and not his or her full potential.
Urie Bromfenbrennner - The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design
If the children and youth of a nation are afforded opportunity to develop their capacities to the fullest, if they are given the k nowledge to understand the world and the wisdom to change it, then the prospects for the future are bright. In contrast, a society which neglects its children, however well it may function in other respects, risks eventual disorganization and demise.
William Golding -
Girls say to me, very reasonably, 'why isn't it a bunch of girls? Why did you write this about a bunch of boys?' Well, my reply is I was once a little boy - I have been a brother, a father, I am going to be a grandfather. I have never been a sister, or a mother, or a grandmother. That's one answer. Another answer is of course to say that if you - as it were - scaled down human beings, scaled down society, if you land with a group of little boys, they are more ike a scaled-down version of society
Simon Pegg - Nerd Do Well
Remember when only a few people had mobile phones. Generally regarded as an object of derision, you would occasionally see business types clutching those ridiculous grey bricks to their faces and mutter to yourself 'what a prick.' Nowadays, an eyebrow hardly even flutters when we see a ten-year-old child happily texting away. You probably wouldn't notice anyway; you'd be too busy downloading an app that could definitively pinpoint who it was that had just farted in your tube carriage.
Grant Morrison - and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Hu
We tell our children they're trapped like rats on a doomed, bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet with dwindling resources, with nothing to look forward to but rising sea levels and imminent mass extinctions, then raise a disapproving eyebrow when, in response, they dress in black, cut themselves with razors, starve themselves, gorge themselves, or kill one another.
Jean-Paul Sartre -
It’s the well-behaved children that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don’t say a word, they don’t hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on, they make society pay dearly.
Alasdair Gray - Poor Things
Nature gives children great emotional resilience to help them survive the oppressions of being small, but these oppressions still make them into slightly insane adults, either mad to seize all the power they once lacked or (more usually) mad to avoid it.
Nature Shreshtha -
Children teach us more than our elders because they are real reflector of our society.
Nature Shreshtha -
Children teach us more than our elders because they are a real reflector of our society.
Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls
Because a child is bound to grow, society is intent upon cultivating the child’s mind to mature into a very specific type of responsible person. Children take great pleasure in small things that have no practical purpose in their dreamy world where they can be as wild as wind. Each year a part of the child dies, as it is burden with adult responsibilities.
E. Nesbit - The Railway Children
There was a pleasant party of barge people round the fire. You might not have thought it pleasant, but they did; for they were all friends or acquaintances, and they liked the same sort of things, and talked the same sort of talk. This is the real secret of pleasant society.
Gift Gugu Mona -
We need to protect and care for our children because when society fails to protect its children, there will be no one else to learn from.
Lesley Pearse -
The illusion of beauty - the rule of comparisons.
Nyona Matende -
When the society missteps, it's the youth who first fall sideways.
honeya -
We all have sinned so far in our lives and might continue too but still we all love talking about others sins, Elaborating, exaggerating, laughing, commenting, cursing... And we all enjoy it hahaha
C. Wright Mills - The Sociological Imagination
Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.
Jane Austen - Mansfield Park
Maria was married on Saturday. In all important preparations of mind she was complete, being prepared for matrimony by a hatred of home, by the misery of disappointed affection, and contempt of the man she was to marry. The bride was elegantly dressed and the two bridesmaids were duly inferior. Her mother stood with salts, expecting to be agitated, and her aunt tried to cry. Marriage is indeed a maneuvering business.
Lucas Sterk -
In this world we are all pretenders, and Society is our game
Idries Shah - Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way
Forms are vehicles and instruments, and vehicles and instruments cannot be called good or bad without context.
Haruki Murakami - Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Every person should decide for himself how happy, or unhappy, our society might be.
Solange nicole -
Today's society is wanting in such a way that Honor, Integrity, Trust, Compassion, Empathy are left for the homeless and their pets.
Vishwas Chavan -
If every citizen can get rid of indiscipline syndrome, we have immense potential to build more productive, conflict-free, harmonious and peaceful communities, societies, cities, nations and world.
Michael Foley - The Age Of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes It Hard To Be Happy
The 1970s was the decade of liberation, of anger at injustice and demands for recognition and rights. But over time, the demand for specific rights degraded into a generalized sense of entitlement, the demand for specific recognition into a generalized demand for attention and the anger at specific injustice into a generalized feeling of grievance and resentment. The result is a culture of entitlement, attention-seeking and complaint.
Hanif Kureishi - The Buddha of Suburbia
You see, I have come to believe in self-help, individual initiative, the love of what you do, and the full development of all individuals. I am constantly disappointed by how little we expect of ourselves and of the world.
Honoré de Balzac - The Wild Ass's Skin
Journalism, look you, is the religion of modern society.