Quotes About Society

NOW THAT ceaseless exposure has calloused us to the lewd and the vulgar, it is instructive to see what still seems wicked to us.

Springfield in 1938 was not a center for plastic surgery. In Springfield, you wore your face as it was.

Thanks to evolution, half of all Americans don't believe in evolution.

If individuality has no play, society does not advance; if individuality breaks out of all bonds, society perishes.

Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.

Another doctrine repugnant to civil society, is that whatsoever a man does against his conscience, is sin; and it dependeth on the presumption of making himself judge of good and evil. For a man's conscience and his judgement are the same thing, and as the judgement, so also the conscience may be erroneous.

It is in the laws of a commonwealth, as in the laws of gaming: Whatsoever the gamesters all agree on, is injustice to none of them.

And therefore this is another error of Aristotle's politics, that in a well-ordered commonwealth, not men should govern, but the laws. What man, that has his natural senses, though he can neither write nor read, does not find himself governed by them he fears, and believes can kill or hurt him when he obeyeth not? Or that believes the law can hurt him; that is, words and paper, without the hands and swords of men?

The Value, or Worth of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power . . .

But when I think of how many there are to whose designs it will be advantageous that these principles should be false, when I see that those who maintain contrary doctrines are not corrected, even though they have been punished by a civil war, when I see that the best minds are nourished by the seditious doctrines of the ancient Greeks and Romans, I fear that this writing of mine will be numbered with Plato's Republic, More's Utopia, Bacon's New Atlantis, and similar amusements of the mind.

El hombre es un lobo para el hombre

That a man be willing, when others are so too, as farre-forth, as for Peace, and defence of himselfe he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himselfe.

Ella para él y él para el Estado

As George Orwell might have said, with socialism all men are created equal, only some are more equal than others.

For every millionaire who owns a $1,000 suit, there are at least six owners who have annual incomes in the $50,000 to $200,000 range but who are not millionaires.

There is a fundamental reason beyond Mr. Friend's perceived social and educational deficiencies that explains why he became a UAW: His parents taught him the ways of the UAW.

Some are whigs, liberals, democrats, call them what you please. Others are tories, serviles, aristocrats, &c. The latter fear the people, and wish to transfer all power to the higher classes of society; the former consider the people as the safest depository of power in the last resort; they cherish them therefore, and wish to leave in them all the powers to the exercise of which they are competent.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.

Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

Those who expect to be both ignorant and free, expect what never was and never will be.

We are afraid of the known and afraid of the unknown. That is our daily life and in that there is no hope, and therefore every form of philosophy, every form of theological concept, is merely an escape from the actual reality of what is. All outward forms of change brought about by wars, revolutions, reformations, laws and ideologies have failed completely to change the basic nature of man and therefore of society.

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.

A nation which expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, expects that which never was and never will be.