Quotes About Society

Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.

The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.

Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct....

Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?

Experience teaches that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to reach a higher standard than their constitution will allow, fall victims to neurosis. It would have been better for them if they could have remained less perfect.

I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.

In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites.

what we know to be useless, but expect civilization to value, is beauty;

The individual citizen can prove with dismay in this war what occasionally thrust itself upon him already in times of peace, namely, that the state forbids him to do wrong not because it wishes to do away with wrongdoing but because it wishes to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco.

The communal life of human beings had, therefore, a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love.

This is how men ought to be, in order to be happy and to make others happy; but you have to reckon on their not being like that

Cilv?ku lielais vairums str?d? tikai nepieciešam?bas spiesti, un no š? cilv?ka dabisk? riebuma pret darbu izriet pašas smag?k?s soci?l?s probl?mas.

Individual liberty is not an asset of civilization.

We are saying much the same thing when we derive the antithesis between civilization and sexuality from the circumstance that sexual love is a relationship between two individuals in which a third can only be superfluous or disturbing, whereas civilization depends on relationships between a considerable number of individuals.

We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism.

Expressando-o de modo sucinto, existem duas características humanas muito difundidas, responsáveis pelo fato de os regulamentos da civilização só poderem ser mantidos através de certo grau de coerção, a saber, que os homens não são espontaneamente amantes do trabalho e que os argumentos não têm valia alguma contra suas paixões.

It has long been our contention that ' dread of society [soziale Angsty is the essence of what is called conscience.

It has long been our contention that ' dread of society [soziale Angst] is the essence of what is called conscience.

But it is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it. Society

I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all.

But it is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it. Society thus brands what is unpleasant as untrue, denying the conclusions of psychoanalysis with logical and pertinent arguments. These arguments originate from affective sources, however, and society holds to these prejudices against all attempts at refutation.

Civilization and Its Discontents is one of the last of Freud's books, written in the decade before his death and first published in German in 1929.

On découvrit alors que l'homme devient névrosé parce qu'il ne peut supporter le degré de renoncement exigé par la société au nom de son idéal culturel, et l'on en conclut qu'abolir ou diminuer notablement ces exigences signifierait un retour à des possibilités de bonheur.   Il est encore une autre cause de désillusion.