Quotes About Society

It was a great moral improvement when men ceased to kill or eat their fellowmen, and merely made them slaves. A similar development on a larger scale may be seen today, when a nation victorious in war no longer exterminates the enemy, but enslaves it with indemnities.

Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity. A society

Men readily listen to Utopias, and are easily induced to believe that in some wonderful manner everybody will become everybody's friend, especially when someone is heard denouncing the evils now existing,... which are said to arise out of the possession of private property. These evils, however, arise from quite another source—the wickedness of human nature.

men and women have gambled in every age. In every age men have been dishonest and governments have been corrupt;

Man is woman's last domestic animal

Since practical ability differs from person to person, the majority of such abilities, in nearly all societies, is gathered in a minority of men. The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history.

Morals are the rules by which a society exhorts (as laws are the rules by which it seeks to compel) its members and associations to behavior consistent with its order

All forms of governments destroy themselves, by carrying their basic principles to excess. Democracies become too free in politics, in economics, in morals – even in literature and art, until at last even the dogs in our homes, rise up on their hind legs and demand their rights. Disorder grows to such a point that society will then abandon all its liberty to anyone who can restore order.

Here Ibn Hawqal, about 970, found some 300 mosques, and 300 schoolteachers who were highly regarded by the inhabitants "in spite of the fact," says the geographer, "that schoolteachers are notorious for their mental deficiency and light brains.

Social evolution is an interplay of custom with origination.

apparently there was no reason now why a man should not do as he pleased, so long as he remained within the law. A disintegrating individualism had weakened the Athenian character

Communism brought a certain security to all who survived the diseases and accidents due to the poverty and ignorance of primitive society; but it did not lift them out of that poverty. Individualism brought wealth, but it brought, also, insecurity and slavery; it stimulated the latent powers of superior men, but it intensified the competition of life, and made men feel bitterly a poverty which, when all shared it alike, had seemed to oppress none.V

Frequently an enterprising individual would leave the family haven, adventure beyond the traditional boundaries, and by hard labor reclaim land from the forest, the jungle or the marsh; such land he guarded jealously as his own, and in the end society recognized his right, and another form of individual property began.

No civilization has found life tolerable without narcotics

Wherever philosophy arises, the moral health of the nation decays.

When abundance comes, and the danger subsides, social cohesion is lessened, and individualism increases; communism ends where luxury begins.

As the life of a society becomes more complex, and the division of labor differentiates men into diverse occupations and trades, it becomes more and more unlikely that all these services will be equally valuable to the group;

Heaven and utopia are buckets in a well: when one goes down the other goes up; when religion declines Communism grows.

But "in a more divided state of society," where the division of labor into unequally important functions elicits and enlarges the natural inequality of men, communism breaks down because it provides no adequate incentive for the exertion of superior abilities.

Law is necessary because men are subject to passions; if all men were reasonable, law would be superfluous.

custom is the natural selection of those modes of action that have been found most convenient in the experience of the group.

Utopias of equality are biologically doomed[.]

Laws against free speech are subversive of all law; for men will not long respect laws which they may not criticize.

There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present