Society Quotes

Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society.

~ Muhammad Yunus

Patriarchy is a fundamental imbalance underlying society And it's one we rarely address because it's so universal. But as I get older, I see that peace is a product of balance.

~ Ani Difranco

Modern society, based as it is on the division of labor, can be preserved only under conditions of lasting peace.

~ Ludwig Von Mises

Let him who expects one class of society to prosper in the highest degree, while the other is in distress, try whether one side; of the face can smile while the other is pinched.

~ Thomas Fuller

We've been trained since kindergarten: Be nice, be kind, share, put on a smile. So we're conditioned to squash our natural selfish instincts, and that's the right thing for society.

~ Bryan Cranston

Anthropologists have found evidence of romantic love in 170 societies. They've never found a society that did not have it.

~ Helen Fisher

There is something about a Luger that separates it from all other handguns, and Luger devotees and Luger society members speak of it in romantic terms that must sound plain nuts to those who consider themselves level-headed.

~ Dick Cavett

I'm very much a romantic. I'm highly attuned to an older sensibility, which I believe is alive and well. We're not that far ahead of the Romantic Age in society.

~ Rufus Wainwright

The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society - more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.

~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

We live in a society that celebrates familial connection above any other kind of relationship. We are shown photos of our great-grandparents and encouraged to marvel over facial similarities. We are told to take pride in our bloodlines, celebrate our ancestry.

~ Lynn Coady

The ultimate relationship between justice and law will be an eternal subject for speculation and analysis. But it may be said that in a democratic society, law is the form which free men give to justice.

~ Robert Kennedy

Anything that has a relationship with pleasure, we reject it. Eating, they talk about cholesterol; making love, they talk about AIDS; you talk about smoking, they talk about cancer. It's a very sick society that rejects pleasure.

~ Marjane Satrapi

I used to define success as being able to produce any result you wanted, whether it was a relationship, weight-loss, being a millionaire, impacting the culture, changing society, whatever it might be - it might be homelessness, whatever - and lately, I've redefined success as 'fulfilling your soul's purpose.'

~ Jack Canfield

The only yardstick for success our society has is being a champion. No one remembers anything else.

~ John Madden

The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot - indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.

~ Joseph Brodsky

Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.

~ Octavio Paz

Not too many people know it, but when I was in junior high, I was a pretty tough kid and was the leader of a street gang. Well, OK, it was less a street gang than an Ecology Club. We were pretty intimidating, though, and had our own meeting room until we got run out of there by a bunch of thugs from the Poetry Society.

~ W. Bruce Cameron

By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar.

~ David Whyte

Society's dark hull drifts further and further away. It is this place - the place of our separation, our distinction - that much of his poetry occupies.

~ Tomas Tranströmer

If we desire a society in which men are brothers, then we must act towards one another with brotherhood. If we can build such a society, then we would have achieved the ultimate goal of human freedom.

~ Bayard Rustin

The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property.

~ John Locke

Men of genius are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a stone.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

~ Isaac Asimov

In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change - as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again.

~ Zygmunt Bauman

Normal social behavior requires that we be able to recognize identities in spite of change. Unless we can do so, there can be no human society as we know it.

~ Kenneth L. Pike

I would change policy, bring back natural grass and nickel beer. Baseball is the belly-button of our society. Straighten out baseball, and you straighten out the rest of the world.

~ Bill Lee

Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.

~ Robert Frost

I chose America as my home because I value freedom and democracy, civil liberties and an open society.

~ George Soros

It is better for a woman to compete impersonally in society, as men do, than to compete for dominance in her own home with her husband, compete with her neighbors for empty status, and so smother her son that he cannot compete at all.

~ Betty Friedan

Ants can live together in solidarity and forget themselves in the community. In a normative capitalist society, everyone is an egoist. In the ants' civilization, you are part of the group; you don't live for yourself alone.

~ Bernard Werber

This avidity alone, of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society.

~ David Hume

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.

~ Edward Sapir

We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.

~ Margaret Mead

I think we have grave problems. I am very much concerned about environmental questions, even though in Finnish society, we are not facing the most urgent problems.

~ Harri Holkeri

The goal must be to expand ourselves beyond one field of focus and use our improved access to information to solve the very real and extreme economic, environmental, and resource challenges we face as an interconnected, global society.

~ Naveen Jain

Climate change is not a discrete issue; it's a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We're chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent.

~ Alex Steffen

For me, adventures are a vehicle for travelling deep into the fabric of society, coming to know the environmental conditions that shape people's lives and viewing the present in the context of history.

~ Tim Cope

It is economically irrational to exclude large environmental costs from the balance sheets of the producers and the consumers. You are only kidding yourself if you export those costs on to society as a whole.

~ John Holdren

Legal discrimination between the sexes is, in almost every instance, founded on outmoded views of society and the pre-scientific beliefs about psychology and physiology. It is time to sweep away these relics of the past and set further generations free of them.

~ Shirley Chisholm

The existing legal constitution is nothing but the product of a revolution. Revolution is the act of political creation in the history of classes, while constitutional legislation is the expression of the continual political vegetation of a society.

~ Rosa Luxemburg