Quotes About Society

The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to.

New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.

The care of human life and happiness, and their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of a good government.

Courts love the people always, as wolves do the sheep

The rich alone use imported articles, and on these alone the whole taxes of the General Government are levied...and its surplus applied to canals, roads, schools, etc., the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings.

The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.

Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not the fundamental right to labour the earth returns to the unemployed.

It was one of the rules which above all others made Doctr. Franklin the most amiable of men in society, never to contradict anybody.

The opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction.

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.

We seem not to perceive that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independent nation is to another.

That one generation of men in civil society have no right to make acts to bind another, is a truth that cannot be confused.

Say nothing of my religion. It is known to my God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one. —Thomas Jefferson.

It is safer to have a whole people respectably enlightened than a few in a high state of science and the many in ignorance.

On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct.

Is ours a government of the people, by the people, for the people, or a kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?

Now I should rather suppose there is no reason for it: it is the fashion to be unhappy. To have a reason for being so would be exceedingly commonplace: to be so without any is the province of genius.

Technology and comfort - having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.

What good would politics be, if it didn't give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.

What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and his contemporaries

Even the piquant can forfeit popularity if tied to something intellectual.