Quotes About Society

If the modern world were a patient in my care..." She shook her head. "I would diagnose it suicidal.

Dinner theater is anti-culture.

The American male at the peak of his physical powers and appetites, driving 160 big white horses across the scenes of an increasingly open society, with weekend money in his pocket and with little prior exposure to trouble and tragedy, personifies an accident going to happen.

I also find it interesting that a lot of people in their 30s are not married and don't have kids. There are a lot of people in this age bracket that are out there dating and trying to find love. And I never thought that at my age I would be.

The impulse of the American woman to geld her husband and castrate her sons is very strong.

An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There's a punishment for it, and it's usually crucifixion.

The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the town lets wither a time and die.

Whereas in the past a worker lived in his or her work, he or she now works in order to live outside his or her work.

P]eople are not reducible to the commodities they consume.

There are . . . no masses; there are only ways of seeing [other] people as masses.

Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption.

But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal Impulses and preferences

The social state is at once so natural, so necessary, and so habitual to man, that… he never conceives himself otherwise than as a member of a body.

The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of masses.

Everyone who receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit.

As for charity, it is a matter in which the immediate effect on the persons directly concerned, and the ultimate consequence to the general good, are apt to be at complete war with one another.

The generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal.

The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character had abounded and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and courage which it contained.

And it is not difficult to show, by abundant instances, that to extend the bounds of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual, is one of the most universal of all human propensities.

Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thought and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without.

That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of our time.

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.