quotations about society
Justice is the great end of civil society.
DAVID DUDLEY FIELD
speech, March 1885
Society therefore is as ancient as the world.
VOLTAIRE
A Philosophical Dictionary
A participation in rights and advantages forms the bond of political society; an institution prior, in the intention of nature, to the families and individuals from whom it is constituted.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
Society is a chain of obligations, and its links must support each other;
The branch cannot but wither, that is cut from the parent vine.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
Man must have some recognized stake in society and affairs to knit him lovingly to his kind, or he is wont to revenge himself for wrongs real or imagined.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
I do not think there is anything deserving the name of society to be found out of London.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Table Talk
Put me to sleep or take me away
I don't want to be a part of this sick society
NASUM
"Escape"
The societies to which I have been exposed seemed to me largely machines for the suppression of women.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
All the Pretty Horses
A society composed of none but the wicked could not exist; it contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and without a flood, would be swept away from the earth by the deluge of its own iniquity.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Society is all around
Aw, hear the beautiful sound
Of all the high-pitched squeals
Ecstatic brilliance at its finest
KURT VILE
"Society Is My Friend"
A people is but the attempt of many
To rise to the completer life of one--
And those who live as models for the mass
Are singly of more value than they all.
ROBERT BROWNING
Luria
Every society has the criminals it deserves.
EMMA GOLDMAN
Red Emma Speaks
We are all civilized people, which means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behavior.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
foreword, Sweet Bird of Youth
Society is divided into two classes--the shearers and the shorn; we should always be with the former against the latter.
NAPOLEON
attributed, Day's Collacon
Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Coming of Age
Hitherto, every form of society has been based ... on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.
KARL MARX
The Communist Manifesto
Society is the theatre, obligatory for the emancipation and development of the creative power in man. To reject social life is to deprive ourselves of the power of profiting by the experience of the past and the present.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
It happens from time to time in every complex and active society, that certain persons feel the complexity and insistence as a tangle, and seek freedom in retirement, as Thoreau sought at Walden Pond. They do not, however, in this manner escape from the social institutions of their time, nor do they really mean to do so; what they gain, if they are successful, is a saner relation to them.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
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