quotations about society
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
Man seeketh in society comfort, use, and protection.
FRANCIS BACON
Advancement of Learning
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
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
The truth is that a vast restructuring of our society is needed if remedies are to become available to the average person. Without that restructuring the good will that holds society together will be slowly dissipated. It is that sense of futility which permeates the present series of protests and dissents. Where there is a persistent sense of futility, there is violence; and that is where we are today.
WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS
Points of Rebellion
Sanity means the wholeness of the consciousness.
And our society is only part conscious, like an idiot.
D. H. LAWRENCE
"Nemesis"
As long as society is absolutely divided as milk is, the cream being at the top and the impoverished milk at the bottom, so long will society be unbalanced, and liable to be thrown into convulsions out of which will spring wars. A circulation throughout keeps it in health.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Society is a sphere that demands all our energies, and deserves all that it demands.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
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
Look around you: what you have done to society, you have done it first within your soul; one is the image of the other. This dismal wreckage, which is now your world, is the physical form of the treason you committed to your values, to your friends, to your defenders, to your future, to your country, to yourself.
AYN RAND
Atlas Shrugged
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
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"
I'm just the subject of discussion now
The one no-one admires
I'm society's victim
I'm not just sufferin' from paranoia
It's invented by you and them
DISCHARGE
"Society's Victim"
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
There is a society in the deepest solitude.
ISAAC D'ISRAELI
Literary Character of Men of Genius
The great always sell their society to the vanity of the little.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
Individual societies begin in harmonious adaptation to the environment and, like individuals, quickly get trapped into nonadaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences. When the individual's behavior and consciousness get hooked to a routine sequence of external actions, he is a dead robot, and it is time for him to die and be reborn. Time to "drop out," "turn on," and "tune in."
TIMOTHY LEARY
The Politics of Ecstasy
If you really wish to become a man of society, you must learn first either to be an imbecile or to hold your tongue.
OCTAVE MIRBEAU
The Diary of a Chambermaid
The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power or means to coerce others.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.
OSCAR WILDE
An Ideal Husband