Quotes About Society

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and a common hatred of its neighbors.

Thus a man was born into a fixed relation to certain gods as surely as he was born into a relation to his fellow-men and his religion... was simply one side of the general scheme of conduct prescribed for him by his position as a member of society.

Religion did not exist for the saving of souls but for the preservation and welfare of society, and in all that was necessary to this end every man had to take his part, or break with the domestic and political community to which he belonged.

One lesson of the Luddite rebellion specifically, and the Industrial Revolution generally, is that maintaining the prosperity of those closed communities—their pride in workmanship as well as their economic well-being—can only be paid for by those outside the communities: by society at large.

In a society in which everyone is assumed and expected to be economically self-sufficient, as an example, doesn't economic dependency almost automatically mean poverty? No attention is given to such issues.)

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.

There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.

The fact that the root of Fourth Generation war is a political, social, and moral phenomenon, the decline of the state, means there can be no purely military solution to Fourth Generation threats. Military force is incapable, by itself, of restoring legitimacy to a state.

I don't think that anyone outside Paris can understand love and murder as we do. But Emile loves Paris, and loving Paris is a murderous education. ("Anthropology: What Is Lost In Rotation")

The wealthy curled darlings of our nation.

Report of fashions in proud Italy,Whose manners still our tardy apish nationLimps after in base imitation.

Society is no comfortTo one not sociable.

For in the fatness of these pursy timesVirtue itself of vice must pardon beg.

There live not three good men unhanged in England, and one of them is fat and grows old.

Why, let the stricken deer go weep,The hart ungalled play;For some must watch, while some must sleep:So runs the world away.

The age is grown so picked that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe.

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

'Twas never merry world Since lowly feigning was called compliment.

What infinite heart's easeMust kings neglect that private men enjoy!And what have kings that privates have not too,Save ceremony, save general ceremony?And what art thou, thou idol ceremony?What kind of god art thou, that suffer'st moreOf mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?What are thy rents? what are thy comings-in?O ceremony! show me but thy worth.

O, what a world of vile ill-favor'd faultsLooks handsome in three hundred pounds a year!

Is it a world to hide virtues in?

Live to be the show and gaze o' the time.

Mad world! mad kings, mad composition!

Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country, as the behavior of the country is most mockable at the court.