Quotes About Society

66 quotes

Rousseau traced civil society back to a single act of nerve: the first man who enclosed a piece of ground, declared it his, and found people simple enough to believe him. Voltaire saw religion as a partner to the law in any settled society, with the laws covering manifest crimes and religion covering secret ones. Charles Darwin put the question of poverty to institutions rather than nature: if the misery of the poor is caused by our institutions, great is our sin. Confucius held that to be wealthy and honored in an unjust society is a disgrace.

Other writers looked at society from closer up. Byron divided polite company into two mighty tribes, the Bores and the Bored. Oscar Wilde regretted living in an age of surfaces. Victor Hugo warned that wiping out an abuse is not enough without changing people's whole outlook. Bill Clinton argued that our differences matter, but our common humanity matters more.
German philosopher

Of man there is little here: therefore do their women masculinize themselves. For only he who is man enough will save the woman in woman.

— Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Author, novelist, writer

There certainly was some great mismanagement in the education of those two young men. One has got all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it.

— Pride and Prejudice

French novelist, poet, dramatist and politician

To wipe out abuse is not enough; you have to change people's whole outlook. The mill is no longer standing, but the wind's still there, blowing away.

— Les Misérables

French novelist, critic and essayist

... rejoicing in a peace which brings only an increase of anxiety,...

— Swann's Way

American writer and biochemist

So, in a Civil Service where smooth and sociable performance was more useful than an individualistic competence, Enderby went up the scale quickly, and was at the Commissioner level when Baley himself was nothing more than a C-5.

— The Caves of Steel

British writer and physician

My correspondence has certainly the charm of variety, and the humbler are usually the more interesting. This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie.

— The Adventure Of The Noble Bachelor

5th-century BCE Chinese philosopher and politician

To be wealthy and honored in an unjust society is a disgrace.

— The Analects

44th President of the United States

It [is] that courage that Africa most desperately needs.

— Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

French novelist

One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.

— Madame Bovary

French existentialist philosopher

People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?

— Nausea

English poet and artist

Expect poison from the standing water.

— The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Bohemian writer from Prague

However, Gregor had become much calmer. All right, people did not understand his words any more, although they seemed clear enough to him, clearer than previously, perhaps because had gotten used to them

— The Metamorphosis

Russian dramatist and author

The sufferings which may be observed nowadays - they are so widespread and so vast - but people speak nevertheless about a certain moral improvement which society has achieved…

— The Three Sisters

German-born philosopher

Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

— Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy

Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist

If only a world-wide consciousness could arise that all division and fission are due to the splitting of opposites in the psyche, then we should know where to begin.

— The Essential Jung: Selected Writings

German-born Dutch Jewish diarist and Holocaust victim

What I condemn are our system of values and the men who don't acknowledge how great, difficult, but ultimately beautiful women's share in society is.

— The Diary of a Young Girl

French playwright and actor

There is nothing I detest so much as the contortions of these great time-and-lip servers, these affable dispensers of meaningless embraces, these obliging utterers of empty words, who view every one in civilities

— The Misanthrope

German playwright, poet, philosopher and historian

When the mechanic has to mend a watch he lets the wheels run out; but the living watchworks of the state have to be repaired while they act, and a wheel has to be exchanged for another during its revolutions.

— On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Russian poet, playwright, and novelist

Light-minded society mercilessly persecutes in reality what it allows in theory

— The Moor of Peter the Great

American singer-songwriter

It seemed I'd always been chasing after something, anything that moved -a car, a bird, a blowing leaf -anything that might lead me into some more lit place, some unknown land downriver. I had not even the vaguest notion of the broken world I was living in, what society could do with you.

— Chronicles, Vol. 1