Quotes About Society

Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations...

The mass State has no intention of promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives, rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual.

To be normal is the ideal aim for the unsuccessful.

Only man as an individual human being lives; the state is just a system, a mere machine for sorting and tabulating the masses. Anyone, therefore, who thinks in terms of men minus the individual, in huge numbers, atomizes himself and becomes a thief and a robber to himself. He is infected with the leprosy of collective thinking and has become an inmate of that insalubrious stud-farm called the totalitarian State. Our

Words like "Society" and "State" are so concretized that they are almost personified. In the opinion of the man in the street, the "State," far more than any king in history, is the inexhaustible giver of all good; the "State" is invoked, made responsible, grumbled at, and so on and so forth. Society is elevated to the rank of a supreme ethical principle; indeed, it is even credited with positively creative capacities.

Every Roman was surrounded by slaves. The slave and his psychology flooded ancient Italy, and every Roman became inwardly, and of course unwittingly, a slave. Because living constantly in the atmosphere of slaves, he became infected through the unconscious with their psychology. No one can shield himself from such an influence.

A sane and normal society is one in which people habitually disagree, because general agreement is relatively rare outside the sphere of instinctive human qualities.

in so far as society is itself composed of de-individualized human beings, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individualists.

Culture lies beyond the purpose of nature.

In fact, the terrors that stem from our elaborate civilization may be far more threatening than those that primitive people attribute to demons. The

The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual.

the psychological effect of the statistical world picture: it displaces the individual in favor of anonymous units that pile up into mass formations.

in our civilized life, we have stripped so many ideas of their emotional energy, we do not really respond to them any more. We

what is the fate of great nations but a summation of the psychic changes in individuals?

In accordance with the prevailing tendency of consciousness to seek the source of all ills in the outside world, the cry goes up for political and social changes which, it is supposed, would automatically solve the much deeper problem of split personality. Hence it is that whenever this demand is fulfilled, political and social conditions arise which bring the same ills back again in altered form.

Civilized man ... is in danger of losing all contact with the world of instinct- a danger that is still further increased by his living an urban existence in what seems to be a purely man-made environment. This loss of instinct is largely responsible for the pathological condition of contemporary culture.

Mass psychology is egoism raised to an inconceivable power, for its goal is immanent and not transcendent.

People cannot stand too much reality.

El público culto -flor y nata de nuestra civilización actual- hállase un tanto separado de sus raíces y en vías de perder su conexión con la tierra.

the affectivity of the extraverted woman possesses a certain lability and shallowness because it is adapted to the ordinary life of human society.

It is, unfortunately, only too clear that if the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of the individuals in need of redemption.

It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else. Nothing has a more diverse and alienating effect upon society than this moral complacency and lack of responsibility, and nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement more than the mutual withdrawal of projections.

psychotherapists are familiar with the collectively adapted person who has everything and does everything that could reasonably be required as a guarantee of health, but yet is ill.

Kdo to ale vlastnÄ› je ten stát? Je to nahromadÄ›ní vÅ¡ech bezvýznamných, z nichž se skládá. Kdybychom jej mohli personifikovat, získali bychom individuum, ?i spíÅ¡e monstrum, které by stálo v duchovním i etickém ohledu daleko pod úrovní vÄ›tÅ¡iny jednotlivc?, jež ho tvoÃ…â"¢í, neboÃ…Â¥ stát pÃ…â"¢edstavuje nejvýÅ¡e umocnÄ›nou psychologii masy.