Quotes About Society

tragedy, comedy, and the Parthenon were not so much expressions of native genius as reflections of lots of money.

Sometimes citizens can do as much harm to their commonwealth by violating custom and tradition as by breaking laws.

America, then, is only as good as the citizens of any era who choose to preserve and to nourish it for one more generation. Republics are so often lost not over centuries but within a single decade.3

The larger themes of the new signature progressivism were identity politics, radical environmentalism, and redistributionism.

And a free state that does not employ armies of unproductive snoops, spies, and politically correct commissars does not have its most daring and innovative minds crippled or its economy hobbled by costly hordes of unproductive trimmers.

Rather, China rightly expected that the American media would parrot its accusations, which privately even the communist apparat in Beijing likely does not believe. If it did trust its own propaganda, Beijing certainly would not send over three hundred thousand of its best students to American universities to live in jeopardy in an inherently racist society.

Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.

But secondly you say 'society must exact vengeance, and society must punish'. Wrong on both counts. Vengeance comes from the individual and punishment from God.

Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this is recognised: that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it has advanced.

The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius...

Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.

The holy law of Jesus Christ governs our civilisation, but it does not yet permeate it.

From a political point of view, there is but one principle, the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty

The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral.

First problem. To produce wealth. Second problem. To distribute it.

Homo homini monstrum

In short, between men and women you want... Equality. Equality! You can't mean it. Man and woman are two different creatures. I said equality. I didn't say identity.

Oh! if the good hearts had the fat purses, how much better everything would go!

The beginning as well as the end of all his thoughts was hatred of human law, that hatred which, if it be not checked in its growth by some providential event, becomes, in a certain time, hatred of society, then hatred of the human race, and then hatred of creation, and reveals itself by a vague and incessant desire to injure some living being, it matters not who.

The real threat to society is darkness. Humanity is our common lot. All men are made of the same clay. There is no difference, at least here on earth, in the fate assigned to us. We come of the same void, inhabit the same flesh, are dissolved in the same ashes. But ignorance infecting the human substance turns it black, and that incurable blackness, gaining possession of the soul, becomes Evil.

Teach the ignorant as much as you can. Society is to blame for not giving free education: it is responsible for the darkness it creates. the soul in darkness sins, but the real sinner is he who caused the darkness

This conflict between right and fact has endured since the origins of society. To bring the duel to an end, to consolidate the pure ideal with the human reality, to make the right peacefully interpenetrate the fact, and the fact the right, this is the work of the wise.

What is the true story of Fantine? It is the story of society's purchase of a slave. A slave purchased from poverty, hunger, cold, loneliness, defencelessness, destitution. A squalid bargain: a human soul for a hunk of bread. Poverty offers and society accepts.

He said, moreover, Teach those who are ignorant as many things as possible; society is culpable, in that it does not afford instruction gratis; it is responsible for the night which it produces. This soul is full of shadow; sin is therein committed. The guilty one is not the person who has committed the sin, but the person who has created the shadow. It will be perceived that he had a peculiar manner of his own of judging things: I suspect that he obtained it from the Gospel.