Quotes About Society

To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

Civilization is just a slow process of learning to be kind.

Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and the sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

A sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.

The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.

If the poor man cannot always get meat, the rich man cannot always digest it.

Speech is civilization itself.

You never say a word of yourself, dear Lady Grey. You have that dreadful sin of anti-egotism.

Debate is masculine; conversation is feminine.

I think that a society cannot live without a certain number of irrational beliefs. They are protected from criticism and analysis because they are irrational.

We may live without friends; we may live without books; But civilized man cannot live without cooks.

The more corrupt the state, the more laws.

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression that the loss of courage extends to the entire society.

I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form.

If England treats her criminals the way she has treated me, she doesn't deserve to have any.

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

Culture, with us, ends in headache.

Demagogues and agitators are very unpleasant, but they are incidents to a free and constitutional country, and you must put up with these inconveniences or do without many important advantages.

A wise fellow who is also worthless always charms the rabble.

It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Democracy is the government of the people, by the people, for the people.