Quotes About Society

I have often been charged with falsehood and hypocrisy, yet there lives not the man who would more gladly than I speak truthfully and lay bare his heart; but as I have not one idea, one feeling in common with the people who surround me, as the very first word I should speak truthfully would cause a general hue and cry, I have preferred to keep silent, or, if I do speak, to utter only stupid commonplaces which everyone has agreed to believe in.

The whole of society pivots around that force which man has come to uphold as his principal deity - egotism. Under the influence of this jealous deity, man is forced to perceive the world around him only in terms of gross separativeness; his prevailing thoughts ever centred upon the theme of 'i here, and the world out there'.

Do you inquire why, holding these views and possessing some will of my own, i accept so imperfect a proposition? I answer, because I live among men and not among angels.

All the lonely people, where do they all come from?

Customs are more powerful than laws.

An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.

Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

Not only is the self entwined in society it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

No emancipation without that of society.

Normality is death.

If fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

The practical orders of life, while purporting to benefit man, serve in a profit economy to stunt human qualities, and the further they spread the more they sever everything tender.

Theodor Fontane

Der Eindruck, den Effi empfing, war überall derselbe: mittelmäßige Menschen, von meist zweifelhafter Liebenswürdigkeit, die, während sie vorgaben, über Bismarck und die Kronprinzessin zu sprechen, eigentlich nur Effis Toilette musterten, die von einigen als zu prätentios für eine so jugendliche Dame, von andern als zu wenig dezent für eine Dame von gesellschaftlicher Stellung befunden wurde.

In our civilization men are afraid they will not be men enough, and women are afraid they might be considered only women.

Art respects the masses, by standing up to them for what they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.

The creed of evil has been, since the beginnings of highly industrialized society, not only a precursor of barbarism but a mask of good. The worth of the latter was transferred to the evil that drew to itself all the hatred and resentment of an order which drummed good into its adherents so that it could with impunity be evil.

The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.