Society Quotes

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.

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.

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.

How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young?

In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning.

It is not a fragrant world.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.

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

Man is the animal that intends to shoot himself out into interplanetary space, after having given up on the problem of an efficient way to get himself five miles to work and back each day.

One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition.

Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.

Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.

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

Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.

The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenceless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenceless against ourselves.

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.

The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Our is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.

The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.