Quotes About Society

People are born and married, and live and die, in the midst of an uproar so frantic that you would think they would go mad of it.

I shouldn't ca' fo' the disgrace of bein' poo' if it wasn't fo' the inconvenience.

in Altruria every one works with his hands, so that the hard work shall not all fall to any one class; and this manual labor of each is sufficient to keep the body in health, as well as to earn a living. After the three, hours' work, which constitutes a day's work with us, is done, the young people have all sorts of games and sports, and they carry them as late into life as the temperament of each demands.

Nothing more repulsive than to watch the country of Goethe and Beethoven revert to the barbarism of Stuart England and Bourbon France

To sit a fine Christian gentleman down in close proximity to an unsavoury crowd of prostitutes was bad enough. Even worse was to allow him to be humiliated intellectually by the afore-mentioned rabble. (When you must have know perfectly well that it is not given to mere policemen, as it is to street-walkers, to think coherently on their feet).

The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.

In his own way the modernist becomes as irrelevant as the fundamentalist. The fundamentalist has something to say to his world, but he has lost the ability to say it. The modernist knows how to speak to his age, but he has nothing to say.

Scoundrels will be corrupt and unconcerned citizens apathetic under even the best constitution.

Moralistic culture views government as a positive force, one that values the individual but functions to the benefit of the general public. Discussion of public issues and voting are not only rights but also opportunities to better the individual and society alike. Furthermore, politicians should not profit from their public service.

If there are no absolutes by which to judge society, then society is absolute.

The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men opportunity to work out happiness for themselves.

The great hope of society is in individual character.

The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out happiness for themselves.

The way earlier societies seem obviously absurd and cruel gives a kind of horror at the forces that must be at work in our own, but suggests that any society must have dramatically satisfying and dangerous conventions; and people can put up with almost any political conditions, either because they are lazy or because they are ambitious.

Then all meaning was in the group . . . today . . . all is in the individual.

Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books — even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.

All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.

Conservatives should be adamant about the need for the reappearance of Judeo-Christianity in the public square.

I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.

To buy very good wine nowadays requires only money. To serve it to your guests is a sign of fatigue.

All that is good is not embodied in the law; and all that is evil is not proscribed by the law. A well-disciplined society needs few laws; but it needs strong mores.

Back in the thirties we were told we must collectivize the nation because the people were so poor. Now we are told we must collectivize the nation because the people are so rich.

Democracy can itself be as tyrannical as a dictatorship, since it is the extent, not the source, of government power that impinges on freedom.

Nor is it the least advantage to health, accruing from such a way of life, that it expose those who follow it to fewer temptations to vice, than persons who live in crowded society.