Society Quotes

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.
– Daniel Patrick Moynihan
War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.
– Lewis Mumford
These terrorist actions, prepared in cold blood, against the people, the society and the institutions of the United States are unprecedented in history.
– Ferenc Madl
The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.
– Herbert Marcuse
The Senate is the last primitive society in the world. We still worship the elders of the tribe and honor the territorial imperative.
– Eugene J. McCarthy
As the mainstream media has become increasingly dependent on advertising revenues for support, it has become an anti-democratic force in society.
– Robert McChesney
People ask me if I left the lyrics open to ambiguity. Of course I did. I wanted to make a whole series of complex statements. The lyrics had to do with the state of society at the time.
– Don McLean
Schools and libraries are the twin cornerstones of a civilized society. Libraries are only good if people use them, like books only exist when someone reads them.
– Nicholas Meyer
The United States in the 1980s may be the first society in history in which children are distinctly worse off than adults.
– Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Undoubtedly, to protest secured people against terrorism is to protect the right to life in a society of believers that glorifies life and freedom.
– Hosni Mubarak
Society is pressed to its ancient defense against the violent criminal: the fear of swift and severe punishment. Either we take that road now, or we will live in the sickly twilight of a soulless people too weak to drive predators out of their own house.
– Francis T. Murphy
We are shifting from a managerial society to an entrepreneurial society.
– John Naisbitt
Public schools were designed as the great equalizers of our society - the place where all children could have access to educational opportunities to make something of themselves in adulthood.
– Janet Napolitano
I studied English Literature. I wasn't a very good student, but one thing I did get from it, while I was making films at the same time with the college film society, was that I started thinking about the narrative freedoms that authors had enjoyed for centuries and it seemed to me that filmmakers should enjoy those freedoms as well.
– Christopher Nolan
In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent.
– Kathleen Norris
As a student of Carl Sagan's, a Planetary Society Board Member, I came of age during the Voyager missions. I was in the lecture on during the days, when Professor Sagan asked the class which songs we thought were worthy of being sent out of our Solar System, messages in bottles to be cast into the Cosmic Ocean.
– Bill Nye
We truly convinced that the respect and protection of human rights and freedoms are the main pillars of a pluralistic democratic society.
– Fatos Nano
For centuries we have been living in the society where not laws but people ruled, where there was no legal state.
– Nursultan Nazarbayev
Interethnic and spiritual accord is our strategic resource, the basis for progress of our society and state.
– Nursultan Nazarbayev
The State always moves slowly and grudgingly towards any purpose that accrues to society's advantage, but moves rapidly and with alacrity towards one that accrues to its own advantage; nor does it ever move towards social purposes on its own initiative, but only under heavy pressure, while its motion towards anti-social purposes is self-sprung.
– Albert J. Nock
Atheists in our midst are proof that all consciences can be accommodated here, even those that have no ground for holding that conscience is sacred, inalienable, and prior to civil society.
– Michael Novak
No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
– P. J. O'Rourke
Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman's natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.
– Ann Oakley
Corruption, the greatest single bane of our society today.
– Olusegun Obasanjo
The open society, the unrestricted access to knowledge, the unplanned and uninhibited association of men for its furtherance - these are what may make a vast, complex, ever growing, ever changing, ever more specialized and expert technological world, nevertheless a world of human community.
– J. Robert Oppenheimer
Courts of law, and all the paraphernalia and folly of law cannot be found in a rational state of society.
– Robert Owen
Our nation, and our state, have paid a high price in the defense of our nation. Perhaps the only higher price that we as a society could pay is to not send brave men and women into battle and then live in the fear and darkness that tyrants like Saddam Hussein would condemn us to.
– Bill Owens
Despite crime's omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually restores itself, by psychic equilibrium.
– Camille Paglia
The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.
– Boris Pasternak
Modern Society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its lifestyles.
– Pope John Paul II
When freedom does not have a purpose, when it does not wish to know anything about the rule of law engraved in the hearts of men and women, when it does not listen to the voice of conscience, it turns against humanity and society.
– Pope John Paul II
It is better, as far as getting the vote is concerned, I believe, to have a small, united group than an immense debating society.
– Alice Paul
A free society is not an unpoliced society. A free society is a self-policed society.
– Richard Perle
Film, therefore, is part of society, not distant from it, easy to experience for people regardless of class.
– Mark Poster
The more you achieve, the more interest it should spark to go further, because there's so much - and I don't mean monetarily and I don't mean in society. This whole experience of living is so rich!
– Susan Powter
A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at the ugly and the savage and the incongruous aspects of society that he has to express them as brutally and nakedly as possible in order to get relief.
– John Dos Passos
Remove advertising, disable a person or firm from preconising its wares and their merits, and the whole of society and of the economy is transformed. The enemies of advertising are enemies of freedom.
– J. Enoch Powell
I think it's great now that we seem to be in an era where it's OK to be gay and I think that the society in North America has had more of a problem with it than any other society.
– Jason Priestley
I believe however that peace is attainable regardless of the Arabs mentality, society or government.
– Yitzhak Rabin
In order to gain the tools to fully address the broad impact of business on society, economic success is indispensable.
– Lee R. Raymond
We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.
– Ronald Reagan
Generally speaking, there is more wit than talent in the world. Society swarms with witty people who lack talent.
– Antoine Rivarol
The general will rules in society as the private will governs each separate individual.
– Maximilien Robespierre
In a society where the rights and potential of women are constrained, no man can be truly free. He may have power, but he will not have freedom.
– Mary Robinson
We must put an end to both economic freeloading and economic exploitation in America. There must be no place for parasites who draw their sustenance from society without giving anything in return.
– George Lincoln Rockwell
I took the GED, and left the option open to go to school. I did go to business school but left after four months because I just didn't want to be a puppet of society, stuck in an office, craving some sunlight.
– Michelle Rodriguez
America's culture is also defined by the fact that we are a religious people. We recognize our God not only in our Declaration of Independence, but even in our currency. And we are also unique in that we recognize that the family is the fundamental building block of American society.
– Mitt Romney
A young man who had been troubling society with impalpable doctrines of a new civilization which he called the Kingdom of Heaven had been put out of the way; and I can imagine that believer in material power murmuring as he went homeward, it will all blow over now. Yes. The wind from the Kingdom of Heaven has blown over the world, and shall blow for centuries yet.
– George William Russell
Like the use of the word 'concupiscence' in an earlier age to describe sexual desire, the use of the word 'pollution' to describe essential aspects of the productive activities of an industrial society represents an attempt to defame an entirely proper human capacity by means of using an evil sounding name for it.
– George Reisman
The ignorance of French society gives one a rough sense of the infinite.
– Joseph Ernest Renan
Our civic society is really all we have by way of nationhood.
– Cokie Roberts
Does art reflect life? In movies, yes. Because more than any other art form, films have been a mirror held up to society's porous face.
– Marjorie Rosen
It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.
– Murray Rothbard
An inspired, concerned and loving society will dignify man; will find the ways to develop his talent; will put the fruits of his labor and intellect to effective use; will achieve brotherhood; eliminate bigotry and intolerance; will care for the indigent, the delinquent, the sick, the aged; seek the truth and communicate it; respect differences among man.
– James Rouse
We know the pain the president has caused our society and his family and his friends, but we know, too, how much the president has done for this country.
– Charles Ruff
The country and society is strong enough to tell the truth with a straight back.
– Arnold Ruutel
In Iraq, it is impossible, because you have Kurds, Arabs, Shia, Sunni, Christians - such a kind of mosaic society.
– Jalal Talabani
It is not Iran, it cannot be an Islamic society.
– Jalal Talabani
As pressure grows to ease the financial burden on social security, pressure will also grow to eliminate the elderly and infirm to 'free up' more money for the 'fit' and those who contribute more than they take from society.
– Cal Thomas
Politics is the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its opposite halves - sometimes split into quarters - which grind on each other. Not only individuals but states have thus a confirmed dyspepsia.
– Henry David Thoreau
Though it is very important for man as an individual that his religion should be true, that is not the case for society. Society has nothing to fear or hope from another life; what is most important for it is not that all citizens profess the true religion but that they should profess religion.
– Alexis de Tocqueville
Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future.
– Brian Tracy
The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.
– Lionel Trilling
The more we try to get a grip on information, the more it slips through our fingers like a ghost. Information, in fact, is the ghost of meaning, and our society's worship of the ghost signals a continuing loss of meaning.
– Stephen L. Talbott
Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things.
– Ludwig von Mises
In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.
– Raoul Vaneigem
Production and consumption are the nipples of modern society. Thus suckled, humanity grows in strength and beauty; rising standard of living, all modern conveniences, distractions of all kinds, culture for all, the comfort of your dreams.
– Raoul Vaneigem
It's not enough to have economic growth. You have to distribute wealth throughout all of society.
– Tabare Vazquez
Latinos must be proud. We have the same rights in the U.S. as anybody else. Instead of crying and getting upset about visa problems and having our families come join us, go fight for your rights. Make yourself a productive individual in the society.
– Patricia Velazquez
Equilibrium is found when within the process there's a good balance between justice and peace, which makes it clear that there must be reparation for the society and for the victims and that amnesty or pardon cannot take in atrocious crimes.
– Alvaro Uribe Velez
For the first time Colombian society has begun to be very demanding in the sense that it is important to have peace but without impunity. Therefore, that historical path must be observed. It is also important to expect consequences, from those who favored from benevolent processes, who hopefully will not become obstacles for balanced processes.
– Alvaro Uribe Velez
The anxiety in which, for three days, London society existed, cannot be described. Telegrams were sent to America and Asia for news of Phileas Fogg. Messengers were dispatched to the house in Saville Row morning and evening. No news.
– Jules Verne
Trust a nitwit society like this one to think that there are only two categories - fag and straight.
– Gore Vidal
Wars are not acts of God. They are caused by man, by man-made institutions, by the way in which man has organized his society. What man has made, man can change.
– Frederick M. Vinson
The arts are the rain forests of society. They produce the oxygen of freedom, and they are the early warning system when freedom is in danger.
– June Wayne
The security of Society lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of the stability of Society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members.
– Oscar Wilde
When people come out of rehab, they usually go to secondary rehab for another six months and then enter back into society gradually. But I came out and did Top Of The Pops straight away!
– Robbie Williams
There is something utterly nauseating about a system of society which pays a harlot 25 times as much as it pays its prime minister, 250 times as much as it pays its members of Parliament and 500 times as much as it pays some of its ministers of religion.
– Harold Wilson
American society as a whole has a very short memory. There are a lot of things we don't know or have allowed ourselves to forget. I was visiting a high school, Seward High School, in 1987, and one of the students in the classroom thought that slavery had ended in 1960. He was very serious about it.
– August Wilson
Just because society, and government, and whatever was different 100 years ago, doesn't mean that people didn't have sex, pick their nose, or swear.
– Kate Winslet
Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions - Politics, like Rock, Pop, and Camp, has its uses.
– Thomas Wolfe
Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will.
– Virginia Woolf
Humor results when society says you can't scratch certain things in public, but they itch in public.
– Tom Walsh
Should not the Society of Indexers be know as Indexers, Society of, The?
– Keith Waterhouse
One of the sad commentaries on the way women are viewed in our society is that we have to fit one category. I have never felt that I had to be in one category.
– Faye Wattleton
Perhaps Vanderbilt's most important role in the interest of our free society is to give the world educated men and women of character, possessing a fundamental integrity that affects both their thoughts and their actions.
– Joe B. Wyatt
The government is sowing the seeds of division in society. Those in power want us to struggle with one another, but not against them.
– Viktor Yushchenko
Education is a companion which no misfortune can depress, no crime can destroy, no enemy can alienate,no despotism can enslave. At home, a friend, abroad, an introduction, in solitude a solace and in society an ornament.It chastens vice, it guides virtue, it gives at once grace and government to genius. Without it, what is man? A splendid slave, a reasoning savage.
– Joseph Addison
Even as the cell is the unit of the organic body, so the family is the unit of society.
– Ruth Nanda Anshen
The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their public monuments or from their domestic relics. Archaeology is to social nature what comparative anatomy is to organized nature. A mosaic reveals an entire society, just as a skeleton of an ichthyosaur suggests an entire creation. Everything is deducible, everything is linked. The cause allows one to guess the effect, just as each effect allows one to reconstruct a cause. The scientist can resuscitate in this manner even the warts of ancient times. From this comes without doubt the prodigious interest that an architectural description can inspire when the writer's fantasy is faithful to its basic elements. Cannot each person reattach it to its past by rigorous deductions? And as for man, does not the past singularly resemble the future? Tell him what was and is this not almost always the same thing as telling him what will be?
– Honore de Balzac
As long as we have an unjust society, like we do now, we will never have a loving society. If you don’t treat people justly, how can you expect them to love you?
– Jane Elliot
The monopoly capitalists - even while employing purely empirical methods - weave around art a complicated web which converts it into a willing tool. The superstructure of society ordains the type of art in which the artist has to be educated. Rebels are subdued by its machinery and only rare talents may create their own work. The rest become shameless hacks or are crushed.
– Ernesto
One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society ... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
As we approach the new millennium, we see how much remains to be done to give our young and future generations a better world to live in: a more peaceful society with a healthier, cleaner environment and a pattern of sustainable development which seeks to eradicate poverty. Education is the single most powerful means to improve the quality of life... the single most powerful weapon against poverty and intolerance. Education builds a culture of peace ... it empowers human beings, both young and adult, to be effective in their chosen sphere of activity ... education in its essence, opens doors to both personal and social development.
– Federico Mayor
If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society. Its art is the art of social life, and its end is fitness for the world. It neither confines its views to particular professions on the one hand, nor creates heroes or inspires genius on the other. Works indeed of genius fall under no art; heroic minds come under no rule; a University is not a birthplace of poets or of immortal authors, of founders of schools, leaders of colonies, or conquerors of nations. It does not promise a generation of Aristotles or Newtons, of Napoleons or Washingtons, of Raphaels or Shakespeares, though such miracles of nature it has before now contained within its precincts. Nor is it content on the other hand with forming the critic or the experimentalist, the economist or the engineer, though such too it includes within its scope. But a University training is the great ordinary means to an great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life. It is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them.
– John Henry Cardinal Newman
Too many so-called leaders of the movement have been made into celebrities and their revolutionary fervor destroyed by mass media. They become Hollywood objects and lose identification with the real issues. The task is to transform society; only the people can do that—not heroes, not celebrities, not stars. The revolutionary’s place is in the community with the people.
– Huey Newton
If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.
– Jean Piaget
Money is the most egalitarian force in society. It confers power on whoever holds it.
– Roger Starr
[People constantly requesting government intervention] are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.
– Margaret Thatcher
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.
– Alfred North Whitehead