Quotes About Society

Most vices may be committed very genteelly: a man may debauch his friend's wife genteelly: he may cheat at cards genteelly.

Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.

It is also a matter of greater consensus than ever that the high and equal status of human beings entitles them to some basic political freedoms, such as the rights to speak and to be free from torture. When it comes to what share people ought to get of the good things in life, however, consensus is much harder to achieve.

Une langue implique obligatoirement l'existence d'un groupe culturel, plus ou moins considérable, avec sa mentaliteé.

Society and State in Ancient Mesopotamia (Moscow, 1959; in Russian with English resume).

Again and again both Westerners and non-Westerners point to individualism as the central distinguishing mark of the West.

What people have in common is "more the sense of a common enemy [or evil] than the commitment to a common culture." Human society is "universal because it is human, particular because it is a society.

Like the Chinese, the Japanese see international politics as hierarchical because their domestic politics are.

To describe America as a "nation of immigrants" is to stretch a partial truth into a misleading falsehood, and to ignore the central fact of America's beginning as a society of settlers.

One, by his own confession to me, that can put on two several faces, and look his enemies in the face with as much love as his friends. But, good God! what an age is this, and what a world is this! that a man cannot live without playing the knave and dissimulation.

Though he be a fool, yet he keeps much company, and will tell all he sees or hears, and so a man may understand what the common talk of the town is.

An artist simply cannot trust any public emblem of merit.

Oh, the bright young people who come here, with their bright, lively imaginations. They do nothing all day long but think of ways to kill. It's a terribly placid society, really. But, why shouldn't it be? All its aggressions are vented from nine to five. Still, I think it does something to our minds. Imagination should be used for something other than pondering murder, don't you think?

Indeed, it is sobering to think that the Great American Novel to come will have so little to do with the famous "American Dream" but will have to be far nearer a contemporary Les Misérables.

Will sex between humans ever lose its endlessly repeated history?

Do you think a city can control the way the people live inside it? I mean, just the geography, the way the streets are laid out, the way the buildings are placed?

It is the novelist's duty to attack society, for its false complacency, for its repressive rigidity, and for its self-righteous insensitivity. Society is women. Therefore, the novelist must attack and punish women in his works.

The clean, clear ending that society keeps looking for is impossible to find.

I think of myself as somebody who is interested in the differences, the differences between straight society and gay, the differences between male and female, but all of those presuppose a set of similarities on which those differences have to be marked out. Beginnings and endings are the hardest parts for thinkers who utilize such structures.

There is so much knowledge available today that there can be no such thing anymore as a classical education that we can expect more than a relatively few people to share.

The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society's values, can force it to change.

The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear.

The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates an inner experience for them. But historically it's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectators experience should be identical to, or have anything to do with, the artist's. That idea comes from an over-industrialized society which has learned to distrust magic.

Men will bear many things from a kept mistress, which they would not bear from a wife.