Quotes About Society

We need to defend against weaknesses within and enemies without, using the tools of civil society and hard power. We don't have to pick one over the other.

By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

As long as the shackles of wealth and property bind us, we will remain accursed forever and never attain the altar of humanity, which is life's ultimate goal.

The exact measure of the progress of civilization is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force.

All legislative experiments in the way of making forcible distribution of the wealth produced in any country have failed.

In a condition of society and under an industrial organization which places labor completely at the mercy of capital, the accumulations of capital will necessarily be rapid, and an unequal distribution of wealth is at once to be observed.

For a free country to continue thriving, there have to be regular reforms, because any society, any economy that stays in place, you're going to see repeated attempts to exploit the openings for twisting policy to the advantage of those who already have wealth and power.

'Egalitarians' who complain about inequality view the wealth of the wealthiest as bad in itself: it disfigures society. They would enact a wealth tax to extirpate the offending wealth.

Don't accumulate if you do not need. The excess of wealth in your hands is for the society, and you are the trustee for the same.

Capitalism has proven to be the only system that works, but the problem with capitalism is that extreme wealth ends up in the hands of a few people.

Inherited wealth, that is not what America is based upon.

I used to work for an SOE. The wealth I created didn't belong to me. In other words, I was only managing money for the country and the people.

Scientists have argued that research is good for health, wealth, and society, and the government has trusted them on that.

Some members of the ruling class are making a concerted effort to expand the wealth gap.

We love wealth, and we hate poor people. I know people who work in TV news who have actually been told to do stand-ups rather than put interviews with poor people on the air. We physically don't want to look at them.

The 19th-century pure capitalist model of society was a pyramid, concentrations of enormous wealth in a small group at the top, a not very big middle-class in the middle, and an enormous percentage of the population in the bottom part of the pyramid.

That's the problem with very high taxes - they don't redistribute wealth; they redistribute people.

Fortunes are made, and disappear, over the lifetime of a single generation. Today, a person in essence takes his wealth from society just for the duration of his or her lifetime. The next generation has to create it anew.

One of the great political and economic challenges of our time is figuring out the balance between wealth that benefits society and wealth that distorts.

The very existence of government at all, infers inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior to those who are not, so long as he is the repository of power, and the child inherits the wealth of the parent as a controlling law of society.

No matter how we name and dissect inequality, we must keep explaining the larger downside of such concentrated extreme wealth.

It is true, there was no public-school system, and the reason for it was very plain. The wealth of the upper classes enabled them to have private tutors.

There's always a tension between those who would like to garner wealth, and they contribute a lot to society. There's also those who say, 'I believe in the common good. I want that to be enlarged.' They contribute a lot to society. The tension, the debate, between these two views is extremely important to our progress.