quotations about society
I live in the crowds of jollity, not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Rasselas
It can be lonely up at the top
Above your problems and your stress
And if there's trouble then we will take a pill
To find a high society
ENON
"High Society"
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
attributed, Provolution: A Guide to Changing the World Through Personal Evolution
Too much society makes a man frivolous; too little, a savage.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.
OSCAR WILDE
An Ideal Husband
I suppose Society is wonderfully delightful.
To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.
OSCAR WILDE
A Woman of No Importance
Look around you: what you have done to society, you have done it first within your soul; one is the image of the other. This dismal wreckage, which is now your world, is the physical form of the treason you committed to your values, to your friends, to your defenders, to your future, to your country, to yourself.
AYN RAND
Atlas Shrugged
The fabric of our complex society is woven too tightly to permit any part of it to be damaged without damaging the whole.
JOE BIDEN
Promises to Keep
Society is a sphere that demands all our energies, and deserves all that it demands.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
speech on the occasion of the 24th Anniversary of Emancipation in Washington, D.C., "Southern Barbarism", April 16, 1888
The great always sell their society to the vanity of the little.
CHAMFORT
The Cynic's Breviary
Gold is the key to society; but poverty its barrier.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
In whatever society,
There invariably,
Will seem to be,
Just a few men,
Keen to rule;
Overwhelming,
The majority,
Will assent and
Allow them to do so.
STEREOLAB
"Outer Accelerator"
Socially we are woven into the fabric of society, where every man is like one thread in a piece of cloth. No single thread has a right to say, "I will stay here no longer," and draw out. No man has a right to make a hole in the well-woven fabric of society.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
God designed men to grow as trees grow in open pastures, full-boughed all around; but men in society grow like trees in forests, tall and spindling, the lower ones overshadowed by the higher, with only a little branching, and that at the top. They borrow of each other the power to stand; and if the forest be cleared, and one be left alone, the first wind which comes uproots it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
In the days of witchcraft it used to be believed that if one person secretly made a waxen image of another and stuck pins into the image, its counterpart would suffer tortures, and that if the image was melted the person would die. This superstition is almost realized in the relation between the private self and its social reflection. They seem to separate but are darkly united, and what is done to the one is done to the other.
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
Human Nature and the Social Order
Society is no comfort
To one not sociable.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Cymbeline
Society is the only field where the sexes have ever met on terms of equality, the arena where character is formed and studied, the cradle and the realm of public opinion, the crucible of ideas, the world's university, at once a school and a theatre, the spur and the crown of ambition, and the tribunal which unmasks pretension and stamps real merit.
WENDELL PHILLIPS
Fraternity Lecture, October 4, 1859
What's society built on
It's built on, built on bluff,
Built on bluff, built on trust,
What's society built on
It's built on, built on words,
Built on words, built on work
STEREOLAB
"Motoroller Scalatron"
Justice is the great end of civil society.
DAVID DUDLEY FIELD
speech, March 1885