Society Quotes - Page 16

• We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.

  Milton Friedman

  Lazy, Liberty, Paying Taxes

  88 Copy quote

• What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

  Henry David Thoreau

  Love, Inspiring, Peace

  Henry David Thoreau, Joseph O. Valentine, Thoreau Society (2001). “Thoreau on Land: Nature's Canvas”, p.79, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  71 Copy quote

  Show source

• Terrorists in 6 weeks have been able to command 300 million North Americans to do away with the entirety of their civil liberties that took 700 years to advance from the Magna Carta onward. The terrorists have already won the political and ideological war with one terrorist act. It is mindboggling that we are that weak as a society.

  Rocco Galati

  War, Years, Political

  45 Copy quote

• The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic.

  Erich Fromm

  Home, Average, Sick

  16 Copy quote

• Boys, you must strive to find your own voice, because the longer you wait to begin the less likely you are to find it at all.

  Robin Williams

  Carpe Diem, Boys, Dead Poets Society

  "Ficitonal character: John Keating". "Dead Poets Society", www.imdb.com. 1989.

  70 Copy quote

  Show source

• Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.

  Robert Frost

  Inspirational, Life, Change

  North of Boston (1914) "Black Cottage"

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• To speak of ‘limits to growth’ under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Attempts to ‘green’ capitalism, to make it ‘ecological’, are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.

  Murray Bookchin

  Nature, Warrior, Breathing

  "Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future". Book by Murray Bookchin, 1990.

  81 Copy quote

  Show source

• Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century.

  Greg Egan

  Use, Century, Caffeine

  15 Copy quote

• The great society is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goods than with the quantity of their goods.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Men, Quality, Goods

  7 Copy quote

• An armed society is a polite society.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Atheist, Gun, Libertarian

  Robert A. Heinlein (1960). “Beyond This Horizon”, Roc

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• The collapse of good conscience and the absence of accountability and public scrutiny have led to crimes against humanity and violations of international law.

  Nelson Mandela

  Law, Accountability, Humanity

  Nelson Mandela (2011). “Nelson Mandela By Himself: The Authorised Book of Quotations”, p.14, Pan Macmillan

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• Society lives by faith, and develops by science.

  Henri Frederic Amiel

  Faith, This Society, Live By

  10 Copy quote

• Good-looking individuals are treated better than homely ones in virtually every social situation, from dating to trial by jury.

  Martha Beck

  Dating, Looking For Love, Trials

  26 Copy quote

• Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

  George Orwell

  Anger, Practice, Demand

  "The Art of Donald McGill". Critical essay by George Orwell, 1941.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Our society is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units.

  Valerie Solanas

  Community, Units, Collections

  Manifesto by Valerie Solanas, 1967.

  67 Copy quote

  Show source

• Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.

  Thomas Szasz

  Strong, Mistake, Men

  The Second Sin "Science and Scientism" (1973)

  50 Copy quote

  Show source

• These families, you know, are our upper crust, not upper ten thousand.

  James F. Cooper

  Thousand, Knows, Ten

  7 Copy quote

• No one can doubt, that the convention for the distinction of property, and for the stability of possession, is of all circumstances the most necessary to the establishment of human society, and that after the agreement for the fixing and observing of this rule, there remains little or nothing to be done towards settling a perfect harmony and concord.

  David Hume

  Agreement, Perfect, Doubt

  David Hume (2003). “A Treatise of Human Nature”, p.349, Courier Corporation

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is nothing that Nature seems to have inclined us to as much as society.

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  Seems

  10 Copy quote

• Solitude is impractical, and society fatal. We must keep our head in the one and our hands in the other. The conditions are met, if we keep our independence, yet do not lose our sympathy.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Sympathy, Hands, Solitude

  4 Copy quote

• The control man has secured over nature has far outrun his control over himself.

  Ernest Jones

  Men, Outrun, Secured

  Richard Isadore Evans, Carl Gustav Jung, Ernest Jones (1964). “Conversations with Carl [Gustav] Jung and reactions from Ernest Jones”, Princeton, N.J., Van Nostrand

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,--not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements, and modes of culture only!

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Children, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.408, Penguin

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• No man's nature is able to know what is best for the social state of man; or, knowing, always able to do what is best.

  Plato

  Men, Knowing, Able

  Plato (1872). “Laws. Appendix: Lesser Hippias. First Alcibiades. Menexenus. Index of persons and places”, p.388

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is an unfinished society that we offer the world-a society that is forever committed to change, to improvement and to growth, that will never stagnate in the certitude of ideology or the finalities of dogma.

  Robert Kennedy

  Forever, Growth, World

  Robert F. Kennedy (1962). “"We Must Meet Our Duty and Convince the World that We are Just Friends and Brave Enemies". (1. Ed.)”

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every community is an association of some kind and every community is established with a view to some good; for everyone always acts in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.

  Aristotle

  Thinking, Views, Order

  7 Copy quote