Quotes About Society

Poverty is less a matter of income than of prospects. While the incomes of the poor have steadily risen through Great Society largesse, their prospects have plummeted as families have broken into dependent fragments.

The main task of a free society is to civilize the struggle for power. Slavery of the acquiescent majority to the ruthless few is the hereditary state of mankind; freedom, a rarely acquired characteristic.

It is a great shock at the age of 5 or 6 to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.

This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality.

Progress might have been all right once, but it's gone on too long.

Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork?

So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings, goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and make sharper the contest between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.

The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property.

The public! why, the public's nothing better than a great baby.

The public! the public! How many fools does it take to make up a public?

The public have neither shame nor gratitude.

It is to the middle class we must look for the safety of England.

Questioning is not the mode of conversation among gentlemen.

If anything is poisoning our lives and weakening our society, it is reality - and not the fabrication of television writers and producers.

It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of society against the injustice of the other part.

When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces. Women just go right on cooking.

In almost any society, I think, the quality of the non-conformists is like to be just as good as, and no better than that of the conformists.

The first duty of a human being is to assume the right relationship to society-more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.

The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air - it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world, and others no right.

The trappings of a monarchy would set up an ordinary commonwealth.

Nations have passed away and left no traces, And history gives the naked cause of it - One single simple reason in all cases; They fell because their peoples were not fit.

The principle of procrastinated rape is said to be the ruling one in all the great bestsellers.

Outside, among your fellows, among strangers, you must preserve appearances, a hundred things you cannot do; but inside, the terrible freedom!