SOCIETY

Related Subjects: Capitalism, Club, Community, Conventionality, Custom, Environment, Fashion, Isolation, Snob, Socialism

1. A society consists of a certain number of individuals living in a particular way in a particular place, at a particular time; nothing else.—W. H. AUDEN, I Believe
   

2. Like unto nature, society, social nature, busies itself with insects, with the flowers of a day, with trifles, fancies, and, like it, also vomits fire and flame from its everlasting crater.—BALZAC, The Girl With the Golden Eyes
   

3. Each sphere still throws its spawn into a superior one. The son of a rich grocer is made a notary, the son of a lumber merchant becomes a lawyer.—BALZAC, The Girl With the Golden Eyes
   

4. None of us liveth to himself.—Bible, Romans 14:7
   

5. To stay experimentation in things social and economic is a grave responsibility. Denial of the right to experiment may be fraught with serious consequences to a nation. It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory and try novel
   social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.—JUSTICE BRANDEIS
   

6. The democrat believes that society is built from the bottom, the aristocrat thinks society is suspended from the top. The democrat says: Legislate for all the people, for he believes that the prosperity of the masses will find its way up through the classes that rest upon the masses. The aristocrat, believing that society is suspended from the top, says, and he says it honestly—for he believes it: Legislate for the well-to-do and then be patient and wait until their prosperity leaks through to those below.WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN
   

7. The first condition of social happiness and prosperity must be the sense of the Common Life.—EDWARD CARPENTER, Pagan & Christian Creeds
   

8. While there is a lower class, I am in it.
   While there is a criminal element, I am of it.
   While there is a soul in jail, I am not free.—EUGENE V. DEBS
   

9. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.—EMERSON, Self-Reliance
   

10. Something is wrong when people suffer for food, clothing and shelter in the midst of abundant resources. Something is wrong when one-quarter or one-third of our workers cannot find work to do. Something is wrong when the family that grows cotton cannot afford clothing or mattresses, when the men who make automobiles cannot buy them, when the men who build houses cannot afford to live in even the cheapest new one.—MORDECAI EZEKIEL, Jobs For All
    

11. Our whole social life is in essence but a long striving for the victory of justice over force.—GALSWORTHY
    

12. I owe a debt to society.
    How much?
    How much does society owe me?
    A great deal too much.
    Will it ever pay?
    Never!
    (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity)—PAUL GAUGUIN, Intimate Journals
    

13. To educate men who must be condemned to poverty is to make them restive; to base on a state of most glaring social inequality political institutions under which men are theoretically equal, is to stand a pyramid on its apex.—HENRY GEORGE, Progress and Poverty
    

14. In almost every one, if not in every one, of the greatest political controversies of the last fifty years, whether they affected the franchise, whether they affected commerce, whether they affected religion, whether they affected the bad and abominable institution of slavery, or what subjects they touched, these leisured classes, these educated classes, these titled classes have been in the wrong.—GLADSTONE
    

15. The great disasters of society are never started by subversives anyway. Subversives merely cash the check after good and patriotic, but mistaken, men have opened the account for them.—SAMUEL GRATTON, I'd Rather Be Right
    

16. A terrible syllogism holds me in its clutches, and since I cannot refute the proposition that all men have the right to eat, I must submit to all the consequences. It has long been judged and condemned, this old social order. Let justice be done upon it! Let it be destroyed, this old world in which innocence perished and selfishness prospered, where man caused man to starve! Let it be wrecked from base to summit, this whited sepulchre full of lies and injustice! And blessed be the grocers who will make paper bags out of my poems for coffee or tobacco for the poor old women who in the present world of injustice perhaps have to go without such luxuries—vivat justitia, pereat mundus!—HEINE
    

17. The three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night.—VICTOR HUGO, Les Miserables
    

18. The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom—they are the pillars of society.—IBSEN, Pillars of Society
    

19. I took with me certain simple criteria with which to measure. That which made for more life, for physical and spiritual health, was good; that which made for less life, which hurt, dwarfed and distorted life, was bad.—JACK LONDON, People of the Abyss
    

20. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.—KARL MARX, Manifesto of the Communist Party
    

21. I believe, in fact, that the adventure of humanity is essentially an adventure of groups. It is also an adventure of individuals in conflict with groups or with each other.—JULES ROMAINS, I Believe
    

22. But the eternal longing for a new order, a more just and more human order will never be suppressed. A thousand times extinguished it will leap into flame a thousand and one times.—ROMAIN ROLLAND, I Will Not Rest
    

23. In spite of our efforts and in spite of our talk, we have not weeded out the overprivileged and we have not effectively lifted up the underprivileged. Both of these manifestations of injustice have retarded happiness.—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, Message to Congress, Jan. 4, 1935
    

24. Do not waste your time on social questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty. What is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.—BERNARD SHAW
    

25. Every person who owes his life to civilized society and who has enjoyed since his childhood its very costly protections and advantages should appear at reasonable intervals before a properly qualified jury to justify his existence, which should be summarily and painlessly terminated if he fails to justify it and it develops that he is a positive nuisance and more trouble than he is worth. Nothing less will really make people responsible citizens.—BERNARD SHAW
    

26. It is becoming almost impossible to doubt that unless we somehow manage to get together in a conscious effort to make things much better than they have ever been before, things will get intolerably worse.—JOHN STRACHEY, I Believe
    

27. Morality, love, friendship and justice—all these are forms of expressing mutual aid. Mankind develops and progresses only on the condition that it obeys these fundamental laws, otherwise it perishes.—SUN YAT-SEN, Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary
    

28. Society is divided into two classes; the shearers and the shorn. We should always be with the former against the latter.—TALLEYRAND
    

29. It seems clear to me that God designed us to live in society—just as He has given the bees the honey; and as our social system could not subsist without the sense of justice, He has given us the power to acquire that sense.—VOLTAIRE, Society in the fashionable sense
    

30. Casual social intercourse is like dram-drinking, a mere stimulant that whips the nerves but does not nourish.—ALDOUS HUXLEY, Essays
    

31. Society is no comfort
    To one not sociable.—SHAKESPEARE, Cymbeline
    

32. Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other.—THOREAU, Walden
    

33. There is
    One great society alone on earth;
    The noble living and the noble dead.—WORDSWORTH, The Prelude