Quotes About Society

Society has made it so I have to get paid in order to do basic things like eat and be indoors and not be naked. Once that's happened, morality's bound to get slippery.

We have not made the Revolution, the Revolution has made us.

The state is therefore everyone; the rules within the state are laws which safeguard the welfare of all and which must originate from the welfare of all.

All democracies demand common public education because nothing makes people so much alike as the same education.

Many a man thinks he has given proof of wisdom when he says, "There is nothing new under the sun." There is nothing more false. Modern science shows that nothing is stationary, that in society, just as in external nature, a continuous development is discoverable.

As things stand today capitalist civilization cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism.

True virtue consists in the care for the common weal, it can only flourish where the commonwealth at the same time advances the interests of the individual, where he cannot damage the commonwealth without damaging himself.

What torture, this life in society! Often someone is obliging enough to offer me a light, and in order to oblige him I have to fish a cigarette out of my pocket.

Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.

Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence.

Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws.

When the sun of culture is low, even dwarves will cast long shadows

Nachdem er sich in der anarchistischen Partei unmöglich gemacht hatte, blieb ihm nichts mehr übrig, als ein nützliches Mitglied der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft zu werden und in die Sozialdemokratie einzutreten.

There are less than 1 per cent of anorexic girls, but there more than 30 per cent of girls in France - I don't know about England - that are much, much overweight. And it is much more dangerous and very bad for the health.

The works of the past appear to the scholar as pictures in a gallery - an array of discrete entities. The temptation to construe this array as an organic and continuous growth is well-nigh irresistible to those who confine their interest to the historical records of creative expression. What is ignored in this imagery are the intervening areas in which men act and react as social beings.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.

In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.

On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects.