Quotes About Society

Man loves man so much that when he flees the city, it is still to seek the crowd, that is, to rebuild the city in the country.

You must shock the bourgeois.

Theory of the true civilization. It is not to be found in gas or steam or table turning. It consists in the diminution of the traces of original sin.

What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.

You know, very few people really want to become individuals," he says. "People claim they do, but they don't. They want to retain the invisibility of childhood anonymity forever. But that's not possible except in a police state. In an ordinary life, you have to become yourself.

You know, there's something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We're all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish.

was odd that the French were so dignified in death but in life acted like shits squealing on each other.

Focusing on the dead women enables Americans to ignore the dead men, and ignoring the dead men enables the United States to ignore the failure of its free-trade schemes, which in Juarez are producing poor people and dead people faster than any other product.

More students have a better knowledge of pop culture than of the Constitution.

Almost everyone is born a genius and buried an idiot.

The ladies usually go for the biggest damn fool they can find; that is why the human race stands where it does today: we have bred the clever and lasting Casanovas, all hollow inside, like the chocolate Easter bunnies we foster upon our poor children.

The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.

War is a game in which princes seldom win, the people never

The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living: they never flatter us to our faces, nor slander us behind our backs, nor intrude upon our privacy, nor quit their shelves until we take them down.

People who cannot restrain their own baser instincts, who cannot treat one another with civility, are not capable of self-government... without virtue, a society can be ruled only by fear, a truth that tyrants understand all too well

Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within the existing institutions he will be likely to make trouble.

I sometimes think that the Russian character is the end of kindness, you know? The end of everything that is nice and good in this world.

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world.

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

But the animal has no veil. Dogs better treated than Afghan women. (Même l'animal n'a de voile. Chien mieux traité que l'afghane ?)

People conjugate to the present; politics to other tenses. (Peuple conjugue au présent; - Politique aux autres temps.)

Luxury ruins republics; poverty, monarchies.

In the state of nature...all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of the law.

Society is the union of men and not the men themselves.