Society Quotes - Page 32

• On an average day 7 minutes of news happens. Yet there are currently three full-time, 24-hour news networks.

  Jon Stewart

  Average, Three, News

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• Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of 'progress,' but only by viewing history as a neurosis.

  Norman O. Brown

  Psychology, Progress, Neurosis

  Norman O. Brown (2012). “Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History”, p.18, Wesleyan University Press

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• It is impossible, in our condition of Society, not to be sometimes a Snob.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Impossible, Sometimes, Snob

  William Makepeace Thackeray (1869). “Miscellanies: The book of snobs. Sketches and travels in London. Denis Duval”, p.8

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• Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

  H. L. Mencken

  Horse, Jobs, Politics

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.622, Vintage

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• The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.

  H. L. Mencken

  Noses, Demand, Certainty

  H. L. Mencken, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (2010). “H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series”, Hubsta Ltd

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• Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.

  Henry Adams

  Indulge In, Laughing, Vices

  Benjamin Franklin, Ulysses S Grant, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Adams (2016). “Great American Lives: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, and The Education of Henry Adams”, p.1505, Open Road Media

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• In the mouth of Society are many diseased teeth, decayed to the bones of the jaws. But Society makes no effort to have them extracted and be rid of the affliction. It contents itself with gold fillings.

  Khalil Gibran

  Effort, Gold, Teeth

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• A church is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favored and cherished.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Religion, Church, Loyal

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• The art of governing mankind by deceiving them.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Art, Politics, Politician

  Isaac Disraeli, Benjamin Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield) (1858). “Curiosities of Literature”, p.438

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• One wanders to the left, another to the right. Both are equally in error, but, are seduced by different delusions.

  Horace

  Errors, Politics, Different

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• Education must have two foundations --morality as a support for virtue, prudence as a defense for self against the vices of others. By letting the balance incline to the side of morality, you only make dupes or martyrs; by letting it incline to the other, you make calculating egoists.

  Nicolas Chamfort

  Education, Self, Two

  Sébastien-Roch-Nicolas Chamfort (1902). “The Cynic's Breviary: Maxims and Anecdotes from Nicolas de Chamfort”

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• The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished -- it is no longer secure in its instincts.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Party, Errors, Politics

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2004). “Why I am So Wise”, p.79, Penguin UK

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• Six traits of effective leaders: 1. Make others feel important 2. Promote a vision 3. Follow the golden rule 4. Admit mistakes 5. Criticize others only in private 6. Stay close to the action Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire.

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Leadership, Mistake, Character

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• Tis a dainty thing to command, though 'twere but a flock of sheep.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Leadership, Sheep, Literature

  Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Pierre Antoine Motteux (1749). “The history of the renowned don Quixote de la Mancha. Tr. by several hands: and publ. by mr. Motteux. Ozell”, p.55

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• America does to me what I knew it would do: it just bumps me. The people charge at you like trucks coming down on you -- no awareness. But one tries to dodge aside in time. Bump! bump! go the trucks. And that is human contact.

  D. H. Lawrence

  America, People, Trying

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• Adults who still derive childlike pleasure from hanging gifts of a ready-made education on the Christmas tree of a child waiting outside the door to life do not realize how unreceptive they are making the children to everything that constitutes the true surprise of life.

  Karl Kraus

  Education, Children, Doors

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• Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.

  Karl Kraus

  Marriage, Literature, Unions

  Thomas Stephen Szasz, Karl Kraus (1990). “Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry”, p.152, Syracuse University Press

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• When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest.

  Karl Kraus

  Religion, Atheism, Culture

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• I feel sure that coups d'état would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what was happening and not miss anything.

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Funny, War, Missing

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• He knows very little of mankind who expects, by any facts or reasoning, to convince a determined party man.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  Party, Men, Politics

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• The public seldom forgive twice.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  Forgiving

  "Aphorisms on Man" by Johann Kaspar Lavater, (c. 1788).

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• There is one fact that can be established. The only phenomenon which, always and in all parts of the world, seems to be linked with the appearance of writing

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Writing, World, Facts

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• The conviction of tragedy that rises out of his [John Dos Passos's] work is the steady protest of a sensitive democratic conscience against the tyranny and the ugliness of society, against the failure of a complete human development under industrial capitalism.

  Alfred Kazin

  Tragedy, Development, Sensitive

  ALFRED kAZIN (1956). “ON NATIVE GROUNDS An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature”

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• The worst of revolutions is a restoration.

  Charles James Fox

  Restoration, Revolution, Rebellious

  Speech to the House of Commons, December 10, 1785.

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• Sociology and anthropology are not disciplines which take easily to situations where people are able to live out their fantasies, not just in the symbolic action of ritual, but in the concrete theater of society at large.

  Jonathan Raban

  Discipline, People, Able

  Jonathan Raban (2017). “Soft City: Picador Classic”, p.53, Pan Macmillan

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