Society Quotes - Page 37

• Society is a kind of parent to its members. If it, and they, are to thrive, its values must be clear, coherent and generally acceptable.

  Milton Sapirstein

  Parent, Kind, Members

  Milton R. Sapirstein (1955). “Paradoxes of Everyday Life: A Psychoanalyst's Interpretations”

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• What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything he tries to get and succeeds in getting; what he gains is civil liberty and the proprietorship of all he possesses.

  Jean-Baptiste Rousseau

  Men, Trying, Liberty

  "Du Contrat Social" by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, translated by G. D. H. Cole, 1913.

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• Time and time again I have been persuaded that a huge potential of goodwill is slumbering within our society. It's just that it's incoherent, suppressed, confused, crippled and perplexed.

  Vaclav Havel

  Confused, Goodwill, Perplexed

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• We praise like frogs, Swear like frogs, Turn midgets into heroes, and heroes into scum: We never stop and think.

  Nizar Qabbani

  Hero, Thinking, Scum

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• Class war is not the cause of social progress; it is a disease developed in the course of social progress. The cause of the disease is the inability to subsist, and the result of the disease is war.

  Sun Yat-sen

  War, Class, Progress

  Dr. Sun Yat-Sen (1928). “San Min Chu I”

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• We will be able to achieve a just and prosperous society only when our schools ensure that everyone commands enough shared background knowledge to be able to communicate effectively with everyone else.

  Edward Hirsch

  School, Able, Enough

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• The reading public is intellectually adolescent at best, and it is obvious that what is called ''significant literature'' will only be sold to this public by exactly the same methods as are used to sell it toothpaste, cathartics and automobiles.

  Raymond Chandler

  Reading, Literature, Significant

  Raymond Chandler, Tom Hiney, Frank MacShane (2002). “The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959”, p.65, Grove Press

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• Every ruler is harsh whose laws is new.

  Aeschylus

  Leadership, Law, Harsh

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• Self-recognition is necessary to know one's road, but, knowing the road, the price of the mistakes and perils is worth paying. The following of that road will be all the discipline one needs. Discipline does not mean being molded by outside forces, but sticking to one's road against the forces that would deflect or bury the soul. People speak of finding one

  Randolph Bourne

  Mistake, Mean, Self

  Randolph Bourne (1992). “The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918”, p.133, Univ of California Press

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• Misery is evil; quarreling, a misfortune. There is only one possibility of avoiding both: a clear division of society. [Otherwise] the strong tyrannize the weak, the intelligent frighten the stupid, the inferior resist the superior, and the young mock the old.

  Xunzi

  Strong, Stupid, Intelligent

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• Evolution as such is no longer a theory for a modern author. It is as much a fact as that the earth revolves around the sun.

  Ernst Mayr

  Atheism, Earth, Sun

  Ernst Mayr (2007). “What Makes Biology Unique?: Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline”, p.100, Cambridge University Press

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• everything is too important ever to be entrusted to professional experts, because every organization of such professionals and every established social organization becomes a vested-interest institution more concerned with its efforts to maintain itself or advance its own interests than to achieve the purpose that society expects it to achieve.

  Carroll Quigley

  Organization, Effort, Important

  Carroll Quigley (1979). “The evolution of civilizations: an introduction to historical analysis”, Liberty Fund Inc.

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• To gauge the understanding and insight that metaphysics provides is to ask whether, in the final analysis, it helps us to cope with our world and harmonize our existence with nature, humanity, and ourselves, and leads to greater freedom and self-realization. Metaphysics is only the beginning. The end is human progress.

  Rudolph Rummel

  Our World, Self, Understanding

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• Rejoicing not in the many but in the probity of the few, we toil for truth alone.

  William of Conches

  Toil, Rejoice, Probity

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• Every private in the French army carries a Field Marshall wand in his knapsack.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Leadership, Army, Fields

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• There may be many who will gladly face death in the battlefield, but few who will face a hostile society.

  Thiruvalluvar

  May, Faces, Hostile

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• Society having ordained certain customs, men are bound to obey the law of society, and conform to its harmless orders.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Men, Order, Law

  William Makepeace Thackeray (1871). “Miscellanies: The book of snobs. Sketches and travels in London. Denis Duval and other stories”, p.4

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• The eyes of the social herd, who always observe little things, and generally form from them their opinions of great affairs.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Eye, Littles, Opinion

  Benjamin Disraeli (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of Benjamin Disraeli (Illustrated)”, p.4092, Delphi Classics

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• It is with a company as it is with a punch, everything depends upon the ingredients of which it in composed.

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Ingredients, Company, Depends

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• Society will be obeyed; if you refuse obedience, you must take the consequences. Society has only one law, and that is custom. Even religion itself is socially powerful only just so far as it has custom on its side.

  Philip Gilbert Hamerton

  Powerful, Law, Sides

  Philip Gilbert Hamerton (1875). “The Intellectual Life”, p.195

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• According to man's environment, society has made as many different types of men as there are varieties in zoology. The differences between a soldier, a workman, a statesman, a tradesman, a sailor, a poet, a pauper and a priest, are more difficult to seize, but quite considerable as the differences between a wolf, a lion, an ass, a crow, a sea-calf, a sheep, and so on.

  Honore de Balzac

  Men, Sheep, Sea

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• I never mingled with men, but I came home less of a man than I went out.

  Johannes Tauler

  Home, Men

  Gottesfreund (im Oberland.), Rulman Merswin, Johannes Tauler (1857). “The history and life of the Reverend Doctor John Tauler of Strasbourg: with twenty-five of his sermons (Temp. 1340)”, p.204

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• If experience teaches anything, it is that what the community undertakes to do is usually done badly. This is due in part to the temptation to corruption that such enterprises involve, but even more, perhaps, to the lack of personal interest on the part of those engaged in them.

  Suzanne La Follette

  Community, Temptation, Done

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• Society is the master, and man is the servant.

  George Augustus Henry Sala

  Men, Masters, Servant

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• The future of human society. Had it made an irrevocably false start? The compass error that gets harder to correct with every mile you go?

  Sybille Bedford

  Errors, Compass, Made

  Sybille Bedford (2017). “A Favourite of the Gods and A Compass Error”, p.280, New York Review of Books

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