Quotes About Society

Only the poet has any right to be sorry for the poor, if he has anything to spare when he has thought of the dull, commonplace rich.

The adventurer, by minimum definition, is an individualist. The life of adventure is an unsocial game; therefore in direct contrast with the married, supported life which is nuclear society itself.

every civilization reaches a still point. The progressives can't go forward, and the conservatives can't go back. One demands continual advance, the other longs for yesterday.

In a society that has cast out imaginative tradition, only a few people - three or four thousand out of millions - favoured by their own characters and by happy circumstance, and only then after much labour, have understanding of imaginative things, and yet "the imagination is the man himself".

To be born woman is to know - although they do not speak of it at school - women must labor to be beautiful.

A poor man might count for very little, but he was still free and white, which at least made him better than a free black or a slave, and in a society deeply dominated by class and caste, that was something worth fighting for.

He couldn't understand today. Who can? How can you pay a man a hundred thousand dollars a year to hit a baseball or put a basketball though a hoop—and pay a teacher only twelve thousand a year to teach a kid to become a citizen? Is that waste? Give it some thought.

From such a society a committee might be appointed, whose business it should be to procure all the information they could upon the subject, to receive contributions, to enquire into the characters, tempers, abilities and religious views of the missionaries, and also to provide them with necessaries for their undertakings.

The pure products of Americago crazy—

The tendency of taxation is to create a class of persons who do not labor, to take from those who do labor the produce of that labor, and to give it to those who do not labor

Good government is known from bad government by this infallible test: that under the former the labouring people are well fed and well clothed, and under the latter, they are badly fed and badly clothed.

To be poor and independent is very nearly an impossibility.

To suppose such a thing possible as a society, in which men, who are able and willing to work, cannot support their families, and ought, with a great part of the women, to be compelled to lead a life of celibacy, for fear of having children to be starved; to suppose such a thing possible is monstrous.

The law of nature bids a man not starve in the midst of plenty, and forbids his being punished for taking food wherever he can find it. Your law of nature is sitting at Westminster.

Retired to their tea and scandal, according to their ancient custom.

Let us be very strange and well-bred: Let us be as strange as if we had been married a great while; and as well-bred as if we were not married at all.

Resources, waterways, and climatic zones loom so large in their writings that one can almost forget that people have something to do with the building of cities.

Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces [in 1968]. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.

So without an original or helpful thought in my head, I just sat for some minutes and watched these poor disconnected people shuffle past. Then I did what most white Australians do. I read my newspaper and drank my coffee and didn't see them anymore.

He is a thinker,' wrote Jacquemont in his memoir, 'who finds nothing but solitude in that exchange of words without ideas which is dignified by the name of conversation in the society of this land.

Urdu is an aristocratic language. It was not the language of the working classes. Those who are left—the artisans—speak Karkhana [factory] Urdu. The Urdu of the poets is dead.

I have heard that well-born girls sometimes fall in love with low-born youths and are covered in scandal which neither threats nor punishment can control, so their fathers are obliged to drive them out of the house. The streets are full of innumerable such once-well-bred girls sitting on the pavements.

Indian historian Romila Thapar has called the new 'syndicated Hinduism' of middle class urban India.

A body of merchants had been transformed into the de facto sovereign rulers of much of northern India. As one contemporary observer put it: 'Through many unexpected contingencies, an incorporated society of private traders [has become] a cabinet of Asiatic princes.'65 The result was what Adam Smith would call 'a strange absurdity' – a Company State.66