Society Quotes

He had a reputation in society as a man with a lively wit, whose gaiety was pleasant and formidable – which all gaiety must be in a society which would despise you if, while amusing it, you did not make it tremble a little. (A Woman's Vengeance)

~ Jules Barbey D'aurevilly

Jesus revealed a face of God that bothered society profoundly! (Carlos Mesters, p. 122)

~ Mev Puleo

Mystery is a commodity for society that willing to buy it.

~ Toba Beta

The child tends to be stripped of all social influences but those of the market place, all sense of place, function and class is weakened, the characteristics of region and clan, neighborhood or kindred are attenuated. The individual is denuded of everything but appetities, desires and tastes, wrenched from any context of human obligation or commitment. It is a process of mutilation; and once this has been achieved, we are offered the consolation of reconstituting the abbreviated humanity out of the things and the goods around us, and the fantasies and vapors which they emit. A culture becomes the main determinant upon morality, beliefs and purposes, usurping more and more territory that formerly belonged to parents, teachers, community, priests and politics alike.

~ Jeremy Seabrook

This is a diseased world in which it is impossible for anyone to be fully human. One way or another, everyone who lives in the modern world is sick or maladjusted.

~ David T. Dellinger

Ideas about a person's place in society, his role, lifestyle, and ego qualities will lose their hold as the cohesive forces in society disintegrate. Subculture values will proliferate to such a bewildering extent that a whole new class of professionals will arise to control them. Such a Transmutation Technology will deal in fashions, in ways of being. Lifestyle consultants will become the new priests of our civilizations. They will be the new magicians.

~ Peter J. Carroll

[N]ew technology enables new kinds of group-forming.

~ Clay Shirky

Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.

~ Clay Shirky

That which is good for the society is not necessarily good for the individual. That which is good for the individual is good for the society.

~ Richard Diaz

Society is not just the product of its individual members, it is also the product of its constituent groups.

~ Clay Shirky

We often take for granted the notion that some people are insiders, while others are outsiders. But such a notion is a social contrivance, that, like virtually every public construct, is a legacy of a primordial and tribal mentality.

~ Jamake Highwater

To her amazement, she realized that the way of life of these people was nothing more than an indeterminate fiction, casually knotted together at particular points that were used again and again. With four or five remarks, and a couple of facial expressions, she had mastered it with no problem at all.

~ Gerhard Amanshauser

In a profession, members are only partly guided by service to the public.

~ Clay Shirky

[B]ecause the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organized way. New social tools are altering this equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action.

~ Clay Shirky

The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust, nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts.

~ John Rawls

And a human being whose life is nurtured in an advantage which has accrued from the disadvantage of other human beings, and who prefers that this should remain as it is, is a human being by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer, and the scavengers of the deep sea.

~ James Agee

In a world where critical thinking skills are almost wholly absent, repetition effectively leapfrogs the cognitive portion of the brain. It helps something get processed as truth. We used to call it unsubstantiated buy-in. Belief without evidence. It only works in a society where thinking for one's self is discouraged. That's how we lost our country.

~ Laura Bynum

What about the contacts your mum had?” his dad asked.“I rang and spoke to four very polite computers who gave me all these options and then cut out on me. Then I tried the post office, because they were advertising, and I spoke to another computer. Very rude, that one. Don’t think it recognized ‘Are you shitting me?’ as an option.”“You know why that is?”“Why is that, Dominic?” Tom had asked drolly, because he knew he was going to be told why.“Because we don’t live in a society anymore, Tom. We live in an economy. We’re not citizens. We’re customers. That’s what this government’s done to us.

~ Melina Marchetta

You have a spark of anarchy in your spirit and that's not to be tolerated. Nothing wild or honest is tolerated her! It has to be extinguished...

~ Tennessee Williams

Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.

~ Joseph Conrad

Our standards of morality are begotten of the past needs of society, but is society to remain always the same?

~ Kakuzō Okakura

I always think the opening moments of a party are the hardest, before everyone has had enough to drink.

~ Stephanie Clifford

I find it a challenge to cooperate in a society where it's considered moral to critique a résumé yet immoral to critique morality.

~ Criss Jami

Most of us waste this extraordinary thing called life. We have lived forty or sixty years, have gone to the office, engaged ourselves in social activity, escaping in various forms, and at the end of it, we have nothing but an empty, dull, stupid life, a wasted life.Now, please has created this pattern of social life. We take pleasure in ambition, in competition, in acquiring knowledge or power, or position, prestige, status. And that pursuit of pleasure as ambition, competition, greed, envy, status, domination, power is respectable. It is made respectable by a society which has only one concept: that you shall lead a moral life, which is a respectable life. You can be ambitious, you can be greedy, you can be violent, you can be competitive, you can be a ruthless human being, but society accepts it, because at the end of your ambition, you are either so called successful man with plenty of money, or a failure and therefore a frustrated human being. So social morality is immorality.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it. -Andrew Young, author, civil rights activist, US congressman, mayor, and UN ambassador (b. 1932)

~ Andrew Young

In short, the right given to one man to inflict corporal punishment on another is one of the ulcers of society, one of the most powerful destructive agents of every germ and every budding attempt at civilization, the fundamental cause of its certain and irretrievable destruction.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families, miss; bless your heart, what you would think to be phenomenons, quite ... Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great families ... and you have no idea ... what games goes on!

~ Charles Dickens

The measure of a society is its compassion.

~ Kristin Hannah

This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don't owe each other anything. On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly pay. We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities. But it's a false dichotomy. States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would rec­ognize today.

~ David Graeber

The male orientation of classical Athens was inseparable from its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.

~ Camille Paglia

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everybody in good society holds exactly the same opinions.

~ Oscar Wilde

His act was rather that of a harmless lunatic than an enemy. We were not so new to the country as not to know that the solitary life of many a plainsman had a tendency to develop eccentricities of conduct and character not always easily distinguishable from mental aberration. A man is like a tree: in a forest of his fellows he will grow as straight as his generic and individual nature permits; alone, in the open, he yields to the deforming stresses and tortions that environ him.

~ Ambrose Bierce

Human security depends on a system where each rational individual calculates that it is more profitable not to rebel.

~ Mark Gough

As history has repeatedly suggested, nothing is more effective for demolishing traditional legal protections than the combined claims that a crime is uniquely dangerous, and that those behind it have exceptional powers of resistance. [On witchburning in France during the 16th Century.]

~ Sarah Bakewell

The commonwealth is sick of their own choice,Their over-greedy love has surfeited.An habitation giddy and unsureHath he that buildeth on the vulgar heart.

~ William Shakespeare

Hidden Highlands was maybe a little richer but not that different from many of the other small, wealthy and scared enclaves nestled in the hills and valleys around Los Angeles. Walls and gates, guardhouses and private security forces were the secret ingredients of the so-called melting pot of southern California.

~ Michael Connelly

...there is nothing so dangerous in its consequences as injustice to individuals- whether it arise from prejudice of color or from any other source, that a wrong done to one man is a wrong to society and to the world.

~ John Rollin Ridge

A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repressive and murderous society.

~ Edward Abbey

The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.

~ John Maynard Keynes

Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.

~ John Berger