Skip to content
 

Society Quotes and Sayings

So shines a good deed in a weary world.
William Shakespeare

Most people are awaiting Virtual Reality; I’m awaiting virtuous reality.
Eli Khamarov

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.
Reuben Blades

One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody.

When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?
Chuck Palahniuk

Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding

One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame, we have killed off so much real shame as well.
Louis Kronenberger

I truly believe that individuals can make a difference in society. Since periods of change such as the present one come so rarely in human history, it is up to each of us to make the best use of our time to help create a happier world.

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

Society knows perfectly well how to kill a man and has methods more subtle than death

Our modern society is engaged in polishing and decorating the cage in which man is kept imprisoned.
Swami Nirmalananda

A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.

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.
George Bernard Shaw

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.

Our democratic capitalist society has converted Eros into an employee of Mammon.
Octavio Paz

Whenever there is a conflict between human rights and property rights, human rights must prevail

The first gold star a child gets in school for the mere performance of a needful task is its first lesson in graft.
Philip Wylie

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute.

I think God’s going to come down and pull civilization over for speeding.
Steven Wright

A nation is only an individual multiplied
Mark Twain

There comes a time when a woman needs to stop thinking about her looks and focus her energies on raising her children. This time comes at the moment of conception. A child needs a role model, not a supermodel.
Astrid Alauda

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.

What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?
Henry David Thoreau

Society is like a stew. If you don’t stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.

It’s a sad and stupid thing to have to proclaim yourself a revolutionary just to be a decent man.
David Harris

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.

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline – it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer

It’ll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers.

Society is always trying in some way to grind us down to a single flat surface.

If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.

People in general are cruel to one another. The only way to have fun to them is to make fun of someone. I hate that. Why can’t someone be different.why can’t someone be themselves without being made fun of? I hate society because of how they judge pe

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

Deliver me from your cold phlegmatic preachers, politicians, friends, lovers and husbands.

Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.
Mary Ellen Kelly

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion?
William Lloyd Garrison

For it is most true that a natural and secret hatred and aversation towards society in any man, hath somewhat of the savage beast.

Society is composed of two great classes – those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.
Sebastien-Roch Nicholas de Chamfort

Man was formed for society.

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

A people is but the attempt of many To rise to the completer life of one– And those who live as models for the mass Are singly of more value than they all.

It is the safest of times, it is the riskiest of times…. What the Dickens is going on here?
Denton Morrison

I’d rather be dead than cool.

Few great men could pass Personnel.
Paul Goodman

It’s getting harder and harder to worry needlessly.
Robert Brault

Those families, you know, are our upper crust, not upper ten thousand.

It would be a service to mankind if the pill were available in slot machines and the cigarette were placed on prescription.
Malcolm Potts, MD

Every man is like the company he is wont to keep.

There is no hope for a civilization which starts each day to the sound of an alarm clock.

For every social wrong there must be a remedy. But the remedy can be nothing less than the abolition of the wrong.

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

The noisy and extensive scene of crowds without company, and dissipation without pleasure.

The time is ripe, and rotten-ripe, for change.
Lowell

The classes and the masses.

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

In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.

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

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

We create an environment where it is alright to hate, to steal, to cheat, and to lie if we dress it up with symbols of respectability, dignity and love.
Whitney Moore, Jr.

I live in the crowds of jollity, not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself.

When people go to work, they shouldn’t have to leave their hearts at home.
Betty Bender

The wise man sometimes flees from society from fear of being bored.

Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century.
Greg Egan

Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.

People have become as processed as food.
Astrid Alauda

He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society.

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

Society is like a large piece of frozen water; and skating well is the great art of social life.

Oh, for the good old days when people would stop Christmas shopping when they ran out of money.

The Don Quixote of one generation may live to hear himself called the savior of society by the next.

Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in.
Peter Medawar

Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.

Mammalia, n.pl. A family of vertebrate animals whose females in a state of nature suckle their young, but when civilized and enlightened put them out to nurse, or use the bottle.
Ambrose Bierce

Very often the quiet fellow has said all he knows.

Choice has always been a privilege of those who could afford to pay for it.
Ellen Frankfort

Society is like air; very high up, it is sublimated–too low down, a perfect choke-damp.

You can’t make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you’re doing is recording it.
Art Buchwald

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

Those persons who are burning to display heroism may rest assured that the course of social evolution will offer them every opportunity.
Havelock Ellis

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.
George Bernard Shaw

The trouble with our age is that it is all signposts and no destination.
The War Cry

It is not a fragrant world.
Raymond Chandler

It isn’t so much that hard times are coming; the change observed is mostly soft times going.
Groucho Marx

We have produced a world of contented bodies and discontented minds.
Adam Clayton Powell

The world has achieved brilliance without conscience.
Omar Bradley

Being human in our modern civilization is being forced into a boxing ring with Nature. And we’re bloodied every time.
M. Robin D’Antan

Speed kills colour… the gyroscope, when turning at full speed, shows up gray.
Paul Morand

We are living in a world today where lemonade is made from artificial flavors and furniture polish is made from real lemons.
Alfred E. Newman

Is it my imagination, or does shipping and handling settle a box of crackers more than it used to?
Robert Brault

Nothing can be more readily disproved than the old saw, “You can’t keep a good man down.” Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down.
John W. Gardner

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
Paul Valery

What’s wrong with this world is, it’s not finished yet. It is not competed to the point where man can put his final signature to the job and say, “It is finished. We made it and it works.”
William Faulkner

Most people are willing to pay more to be amused than to be educated.
Robert C. Savage

Life has been reduced to getting food out of cans.
Martin H. Fischer

Food. Water. Shelter. Air. Sleep. Societal inflation has expanded need into greed. Suddenly the basic survival needs also include a cell phone, cable TV, and French manicured fingernails…. We’ve become the absolute biggest whiners of all human history with the absolute smallest justification for whining.
Charlie Diekatze

When we think of the past, we forget the fools and remember the sage. We reverse the process for our own time.
George Boas

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
Gertrude Stein

Yes, I am positive that one of the great curatives of our evils, our maladies, social, moral, and intellectual, would be a return to the soil, a rehabilitation of the work of the fields.
Charles Wagner

Unhappy is a people that has run out of words to describe what is going on.
Thurman Arnold

You taught me to be nice, so nice that now I am so full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion.
Garrison Keillor

Nowadays you envy a manic-depressive. Half the time he’s happy, the other half he’s right.
Robert Brault

The year is 2006. The world has changed in about 364 significant ways since you started reading this sentence.
Ed Northstrum

Fame is proof that the people are gullible.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I believe that one of the great problems for us as individuals is the depression and the tension resulting from existence in a world which is increasingly less pleasing to the eye.
Lady Bird Johnson

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

The world is so dreadfully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.
Ronald Firbank

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

We get lost in a fog of abstractions and easily forget that man is a bloodhound sniffing out the real.
Robert C. Pollock

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.
Daniel Webster

The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we’re passing one another without a look of recognition.
Henry Miller

Most people know more about their congressmen via smear campaigns than they know about their own neighbor via conversations, and a lot of people know more about Britney Spears via tabloids than they know about their own congressmen via voting booklets. Does anyone else see the problem here?
Brock Fiant

Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.
Aldous Huxley

People haven’t time to learn anything. They buy things ready-made in stores. But since there are no stores where you can buy friends, people no longer have friends.

The human race has had long experience and a fine tradition in surviving adversity. But we now face a task for which we have little experience, the task of surviving prosperity.
Alan Gregg

I never expected to see the day when girls would get sunburned in the places they do now.
Will Rogers

I don’t believe medical discoveries are doing much to advance human life. As fast as we create ways to extend it we are inventing ways to shorten it.
Christiaan Barnard

Society is always engaged in a vast conspiracy to preserve itself – at the expense of the new demands of each new generation.
John Haynes Holmes

The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

Junk mail, junk food, our society is full of junk living, period.
Carrie Latet

Information and communications technology unlocks the value of time, allowing and enabling multi-tasking, multi-channels, multi-this and multi-that.
Li Ka Shing

The men of the technostructure are the new and universal priesthood. Their religion is business success; their test of virtue is growth and profit. Their bible is the computer printout; their communion bench is the committee room.
J.K. Galbraith

If living conditions don’t stop improving in this country, we’re going to run out of humble beginnings for our great men.
Russell P. Askue

With each passing year, one has less to say, and knows better how to say it.
Mignon McLaughlin

The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.
Theodore Roosevelt

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

It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake.
Norman Douglas

There’s a standard formula for success in the entertainment medium, and that is: “Beat it to death if it succeeds.”
Ernie Kovacs

History assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.
Will & Ariel Durant

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
Russell Baker

I’ve been reading a lot lately about Indian captives. One woman who had been captured by the Indians and made a squaw was resentful when she was rescued because she’d found that there was a lot more work to do as the wife of a white man.
Stephen Vincent Benet

Information should be used as food for thought, not poison to the soul.
Shellie R. Warren

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

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.
Cesare Pavese

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.
Randolph Bourne

The things that are wrong with the country today are the sum total of all the things that are wrong with us as individuals.
Charles W. Tobey

The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic… power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age.
Russell Baker
D.H. Mondfleur

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.
Thomas Szasz

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.
George Orwell

It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

The three horrors of modern life – talk without meaning, desire without love, work without satisfaction.
Mignon McLaughlin

Most of our diversions do not so much delay death as accustom us to it.
Mignon McLaughlin

There is no appeal from the ways of the world, which must continue on its own terms or take us all down with it into chaos and confusion.
Mark van Doren

Once the Xerox copier was invented, private diplomacy died. There’s no such thing as secrecy. It’s just a question of whether it’s leaked or revealed openly.
Andrew Young

In nature, there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.
Robert Greene Ingersoll

The number of substitutes for fine and clean thinking the world provides positively gnaws at one’s vitals.
Harold J. Laski

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
Marcus Aurelius

I think societal instinct much deeper than sex instinct – and societal repression much more devastating.
D.H. Lawrence

In spite of all our speeding it’s still the style to be late.
Kin Hubbard

Noise, crowding, pollution, and the sheer rush of our complex, modern society are rapidly becoming as oppressive to many individuals as the worst kind of political dictatorship.
Thomas F. Eagleton

The public is hedged about by so many goddam bookkeepers that no time is left in which to produce. More time is spent in carrying out garbage than in carrying in food.
Martin H. Fischer

Beggars should be abolished. It annoys one to give to them, and it annoys one not to give to them.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

We have smothered ourselves, buried ourselves, in the vast heap of information which all of us have and none of us has.
Gamaliel Bradford

The secret to living contently and sanely in this modern world is to… find the beautiful in the ugly – but don’t get confused which is which.
Leslie Grimutter

I believe… that security declines as security machinery expands.
E.B. White

If some people got their rights they would complain of being deprived of their wrongs.
Oliver Herford

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

Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.
Mignon McLaughlin

Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers.
Erik Pepke

There are more doctors in a single North Shore medical building than in one entire West Side ghetto. Jack Starr

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.
Arnold Toynbee

Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of ‘progress,’ but only by viewing history as a neurosis.
Norman O

You make me sick! You are offered meat and you choose a banana-split-with-nuts.
Martin H. Fischer

We’re the middle children of history…. no purpose or place. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s-license age than at voting age.
Marshall McLuhan

You can say this for ready-mixes – the next generation isn’t going to have any trouble making pies exactly like mother used to make.
Earl Wilson

You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.
Charles Kuralt

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on the human face – forever.
George Orwell

No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.
Dave Barry

A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.
Harold Hardy Godfrey

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Martin Luther King, Jr

My meaningless office job: they pay me for my body and mind, but my heart gets no paycheck and my soul pays the taxes.
Carrie Latet

Everything is for the eye these days – TV, Life, Look, the movies. Nothing is just for the mind. The next generation will have eyeballs as big as cantaloupes and no brain at all.
Fred Allen

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.
Thomas Szasz

The trouble with the laws these days is that criminals know their rights better than their wrongs.

Somebody recently figured out that we have 35 million laws to enforce the ten commandments.

In the lifetime of one person, we went from figuring out where we came from to figuring out how to get rid of ourselves.
Jack Horner

Living in this modern toxic world, we are all slowly being poisoned to death.
Carrie Latet

Death is losing its terror. It is the emergency exit for a world that is becoming more frightening death ever was.
Julian Green

A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion.
H.L. Mencken

Somehow among all our use of antibiotic medicine and antibacterial soap our souls are becoming sanitized as well – don’t let it happen to you!
Brock Fiant

Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all.
Norbert Wiener

Science is now the craft of the manipulation, substitution and deflection of the forces of nature. What I see coming is a gigantic slaughterhouse, an Auschwitz, in which valuable enzymes, hormones, and so on will be extracted instead of gold teeth.
Erwin Chargaff

I always turn to the sports section first. The sports section records people’s accomplishments; the front page nothing but man’s failures.
Earl Warren

When Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he said, “It would be nice.”

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

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

Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an afterlife.
Arianna Stassinopoulos

Social reform aims to improve the condition of the poor by worsening the condition of the rich.
Martin H. Fischer

Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.
Norbert Wiener

Jefferson thought schools would produce free men: we prove him right by putting dropouts in jail.
Benjamin R. Barber

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
Mohandas Gandhi

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. ~Bill Vaughan

The world is changing so fast I’ve got societal vertigo.

If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all.
Pearl S. Buck

This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.
Matthew Arnold

In this prostituting society, we all have to hustle, and I’d rather suck cock than kiss ass!
Margo St. James, attributed

Think what a better world it would be if we all, the whole world, had cookies and milk about three o’clock every afternoon and then lay down on our blankets for a nap.
Barbara Jordan

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
Milton Friedman

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

There is more to life than increasing its speed.
Mohandas K. Gandhi

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.
John W. Gardner

Leave a Reply