Quotes About Society

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.

Original art emanates in the mind ... and lessons society's confusion from self indulgence, avarice and greed to trust, hope and love.

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.

One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame we have killed off so much real shame as well.

If it were proved to me that in making war, my ideal had a chance of being realized, I would still say "no" to war. For one does not create a human society on mounds of corpses.

Si pudiese volver a vivir mi vida, no elegiría por cierto el ser escritor y ver pasar mis días en una sociedad retrógrada en que la aventura yace debajo de la cama, como un perro. Necesitaría una aventura-león. Me haría físico teórico para vivir en el corazón ardiente del romanticismo verdadero.

Women have been called queens for a long time, but the kingdom given them isn't worth ruling.

People don't have fortunes left them in that style nowadays men have to work and women to marry for money. It's a dreadfully unjust world.

This love of money is the curse of America, and for the sake of it men will sell honor an honesty, till we don't know whom to trust.

Lords of Disgrace Bachelors for life!

Ole Golly: You know what? You're an individual, and that makes people nervous. And it's gonna keep making people nervous for the rest of your life.

Zi zhi tong jian (Comprehensive mirror for aid in governance), the famous annalistic history on the period written between 1067 and 1084 A.D.,

This book should be sent to the White House, and to our earnest Attorney General, and to everyone in this country able to read—which may, however, alas, be a most despairing statement. We love—the white Americans, I mean—the notion of the little woman behind the great man: perhaps one day, Louise Meriwether will give us her version of What Every Woman Knows.

We are a mirror of our times.

Rules meant order. Without them they'd be killing each other. It began with butting in, with parking in disabled spaces, with smoking in elevators. And it ended in murder.

A brave man in a brave country. It was easy to be brave, when the country was also brave. But what happened if it wasn't? If it was corrupt, and grotesque, and greedy, and violent?

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

The banality of evil. It wasn't the frothing madman. It was the conscientious us.

The goal of any healthy society was to keep people safe to express sometimes unpopular views.

I had three chairs in my house: one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society." "My favorite quote from Thoreau is also from Walden," said Gamache. "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

The madness of crowds was a terrible thing to see. The madness of police with clubs and guns was even worse.

Arguing as a now senior Sûreté officer that there was absolutely no reason a member of the public should have a handgun. And certainly not an assault-style weapon. They were only designed, and intended, to shoot humans.

A populist feeding anger and fear is more likely to get elected.

A populace he saw not as either victim or threat, but as brothers and sisters. Equals, to be respected and protected. And sometimes arrested.