Quotes About Society

When a woman behaves like a man, why doesn't she behave like a nice man?

The anthropologists are busy, indeed, and ready to transport us back into the savage forest where all human things have their beginnings but the seed never explains the flower.

It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes," except the behavior of those who gave rise to them.

How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be American before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?

We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?

She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.

We asked ourselves whether, in these days of equality in which we live, there are classes unworthy the notice of the author and the reader, misfortunes too lowly, dramas too foul-mouthed, catastrophes too commonplace in the terror they inspire.

If it is the duty of the State to educate, it is the duty of the State also to bear the burden of education, namely, the taxation out of which education is provided.

They made and recorded a sort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the Rights of Man.

I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against an whole people.

The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded.

And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.

Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling it never forgives preaching of a new gospel.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have right that these wants should be provided for, including the want of a sufficient restraint upon their passions.

Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.

Boys wandered about in a condition of unnatural civility

Rock music in its lyrics often talks ahead of the time about what's going on in the country.

Some people really think that great wealth makes crime respectable, and if it is pointed out to a wealthy but dishonest man, that he is merely a common thief, and if in addition, the fact is proved to everybody's satisfaction, his anger is noticeable.

In our industrial and social system the interests of all men are so closely intertwined that in the immense majority of cases a straight-dealing man who by his efficiency, by his ingenuity and industry, benefits himself must also benefit others.

we forget to appreciate what it meant for people to escape from the wages of medieval times to incomes two or three times the medieval level, as most people in Britain, America, France, and the German lands came to enjoy in the 19th century.

Americans consider the sidewalk an anonymous backstage space, whereas for the French it is the stage itself.

The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society.

Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals