82 Society Quotes

In the intricate tapestry of human existence, society holds a prominent place, weaving together diverse threads of culture, identity, and values. Quotes about society offer profound insights and reflections on our collective humanity, providing food for thought on how we live, interact, and grow together. Whether highlighting the beauty of community or critiquing the challenges we face, these carefully chosen words resonate deeply within us, encouraging contemplation and conversation. Join us as we explore a curated collection of the top 82 society quotes, each capturing a unique perspective on the complex and ever-evolving social landscape.

1. “California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.” - Don DeLillo

2. “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

3. “A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.” - Fidel Castro

4. “Anywhere you have extreme poverty and no national health insurance, no promise of health care regardless of social standing, that's where you see the sharp limitations of market-based health care. ” - Paul Farmer

5. “Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.” - Audre Lorde

6. “Wir existieren in einer Schizophrenen Form des sozialen Lebens. Fremde Mächte haben unser normales Leben okkupiert; und genau wie frembe Eroberer die Ureinwohner von Venedig in einen entlegenen Sumpf hinaustrieben, wo sie ihre Stadt auf Pfählen im Wasser bauen mußten, haben die Mächte die uns und unserer Kräfte ausbeuten, uns in eine unfruchtbare Einöde getrieben, die wir "Privatleben" nennen. (pp. 127-128)” - Lars Gustafsson

7. “What should have died along with communism is the belief that modern societies can be run on a single principle, whether that of planning under the general will or that of free-market allocations.” - Charles Taylor

8. “A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.” - Edith Wharton

9. “The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.” - Ayn Rand

10. “Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance.” - Hendrick Willem Van Loon

11. “He is among those beings of great scope who spread their leafy branches willingly over broad horizons. To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to know shame at the sight of poverty which is not of our making. It is to be proud of a victory won by our comrades. It is to feel, as we place our stone, that we are contributing to the building of the world.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

12. “The truth beyond the fetish's glimmering mirage is the relationship of laborer to product; it is the social account of how that object came to be. In this view every commodity, beneath the mantle of its pricetag, is a hieroglyph ripe for deciphering, a riddle whose solution lies in the story of the worker who made it and the conditions under which it was made.” - Leah Hager Cohen

13. “The anarch is (I am simplifying) on the side of gold: it fascinates him, like everything that eludes society. Gold has its own immeasurable might. It need only show itself, and society with its law and order is in jeopardy.The anarch is on the side of gold : this is not to be construed as a lust for gold. He recognizes gold as the central and immobile power. He loves it, not like Cortez, but like Montezuma, not like Pizarro but like Atahualpa ....” - Ernst Jünger

14. “Experience has taught me that those who give their time to the absorbing claims of what is called society, not having leisure to keep up a large acquaintance with the organs of opinion, remain much more ignorant of the general state either of the public mind, or of the active and instructed part of it, than a recluse who reads the newspapers need be. ” - John Stuart Mill

15. “Lily appeared, wearing her nightclothes, in the doorway. She gave an impatient sigh. 'This is certainly a very LONG private conversation,' she said. 'And there are certain people waiting for their comfort object.'Lily,' her mother said fondly, 'you're very close to being an Eight, and when you're an Eight, your comfort object will be taken away. It will be recycled to the younger children. You should be starting to go off to sleep without it.'But her father had already gone to the shelf and taken down the stuffed elephant which was kept there. Many of the comfort objects, like Lily's, were soft, stuffed, imaginary creatures. Jonas's had been called a bear.Here you are, Lily-billy,' he said. 'I'll come help you remove your hair ribbons.” - Lois Lowry

16. “If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals . . . We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it's too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us -- create who we are. It is we who created the system. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)” - Haruki Murakami

17. “Books turn people into isolated individuals, and once that's happened, the road only grows rockier. Books wire you to want to be Steve McQueen, but the world wants you to be [email protected].” - Douglas Coupland

18. “They can talk shit about each other behind the others' backs, but when it comes down to it, money is the one true race and everyone down here is the color of greenbacks and as tall as mountains.” - Richard Kadrey

19. “In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.” - William Kingdon Clifford

20. “We have too much technological progress, life is too hectic, and our society has only one goal: to invent still more technological marvels to make life even easier and better. The craving for every new scientific discovery breeds a hunger for greater comfort and the constant struggle to achieve it. All that kills the soul, kills compassion, understanding, nobility. It leaves no time for caring what happens to other people, least of all criminals. Even the officials in Venezuela's remote areas are better for they're also concerned with public peace. It gives them many headaches, but they seem to believe that bringing about a man's salvation is worth the effort. I find that magnificent.” - Henri Charrière

21. “In its various forms, so far as we know them, Love seems always to have a deep significance and a most practical importance to us little mortals. In one form, as the mere semi-conscious Sex-love, which runs through creation and is common to the lowest animals and plants, it appears as a kind of organic basis for the unity of all creatures; in another, as the love of the mother for her offspring—which may also be termed a passion—it seems to pledge itself to the care and guardianship of the future race; in another, as the marriage of man and woman, it becomes the very foundation of human society. And so we can hardly believe that in its homogenic form, with which we are here concerned, it has not also a deep significance, and social uses and functions which will become clearer to us, the more we study it.” - Edward Carpenter

22. “Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

23. “I believe there is a reason such as autism, severe manic-depression, and schizophrenia remain in our gene pool even though there is much suffering as a result.” - Temple Grandin

24. “To be wealthy and honored in an unjust society is a disgrace.” - Confucius

25. “And it's his illusions about whatconstitutes the real world which are inhibiting him...His reality, his reason, his society ... These are what must be destroyed” - Luke Rhineheart

26. “There is no end in India, Mr. Jiabao,as Mr. Ashok so correctly used to say. You'll have to keep paying and paying the fuckers. But I complain about the police the way the rich complain; not the way the poor complain. The difference is everything.” - Aravind Adiga

27. “They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.” - richard wright

28. “Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream.” - John Berger

29. “Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society must take the place of the victim, and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness.” - W.H. Auden

30. “It would seem from this fact, that man is naturally a wild animal, and that when taken from the woods, he is never happy in his natural state, 'till he returns to them again.” - Benjamin Rush

31. “Life is too short to waste any amount of time on wondering what other people think about you. In the first place, if they had better things going on in their lives, they wouldn't have the time to sit around and talk about you. What's important to me is not others' opinions of me, but what's important to me is my opinion of myself.” - C. JoyBell C.

32. “Each of us has interests which conflict the interests of everybody else... 'everybody else' we call 'society'. It's a powerful opponent and it always wins. Oh, here and there an individual prevails for a while and gets what he wants. Sometimes he storms the culture of a society and changes it to his own advantage. But society wins in the long run, for it has the advantage of numbers and of age.” - B.F. Skinner

33. “Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. It enslaves him almost before he has tasted freedom. The 'ologies' will tell you how its done Theology calls it building a conscience or developing a spirit of selflessness. Psychology calls it the growth of the superego.Considering how long society has been at it, you'd expect a better job. But the campaigns have been badly planned and the victory has never been secured.” - B.F. Skinner

34. “Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it. -Andrew Young, author, civil rights activist, US congressman, mayor, and UN ambassador (b. 1932)” - Andrew Young

35. “We are much too tolerant of the moral aberration of statesmen and bureaucrats.” - Kenzaburō Ōe

36. “Remember when only a few people had mobile phones. Generally regarded as an object of derision, you would occasionally see business types clutching those ridiculous grey bricks to their faces and mutter to yourself 'what a prick.' Nowadays, an eyebrow hardly even flutters when we see a ten-year-old child happily texting away. You probably wouldn't notice anyway; you'd be too busy downloading an app that could definitively pinpoint who it was that had just farted in your tube carriage.” - Simon Pegg

37. “Public opinion is the worst of all opinions.” - Chamfort

38. “Nie można zrozumieć ani życia jednostki, ani życia społeczeństwa, nie odnosząc jednego do drugiego.” - C. Wright Mills

39. “In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it... She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt.” - Nathaniel Hawthorne

40. “Mystery is a commodity for society that willing to buy it.” - Toba Beta

41. “Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families, miss; bless your heart, what you would think to be phenomenons, quite ... Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great families ... and you have no idea ... what games goes on!” - Charles Dickens

42. “To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.” - Naomi Wolf

43. “Since middle-class Western women can best be weakened psychologically now that we are stronger materially, the beauty myth, as it has resurfaced in the last generation, has had to draw on more technological sophistication and reactionary fervor than ever before. The modern arsenal of the myth is a dissemination of millions of images of the current ideal; although this barrage is generally seen as a collective sexual fantasy, there is in fact little that is sexual about it. It is summoned out of political fear on the part of male-dominated institutions threatened by women's freedom, and it exploits female guilt and apprehension about our own liberation -- latent fears that we might be going too far.” - Naomi Wolf

44. “The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.” - Naomi Wolf

45. “Criminal justice" is what happens after a complicated series of events has gone bad. It is the end result of failure--the failure of a group of people that sometimes includes, but is never limited to, the accused person.” - Paul Delano Butler

46. “To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men's sexual--and hence social--confidence while undermining that of women.” - Naomi Wolf

47. “To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.” - Henry Miller

48. “In spite of hopes to the contrary, pornography and mass culture are working to collapse sexuality with rape, reinforcing the patterns of male dominance and female submission so that many young people believe this is simply the way sex it. This means that many of the rapists of the future will believe they are behaving within socially accepted norms.” - Susan G. Cole

49. “Their [girls] sexual energy, their evaluation of adolescent boys and other girls goes thwarted, deflected back upon the girls, unspoken, and their searching hungry gazed returned to their own bodies. The questions, Whom do I desire? Why? What will I do about it? are turned around: Would I desire myself? Why?...Why not? What can I do about it?The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, become estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it. Sex is held hostage by beauty and its ransom terms are engraved in girls' minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful that those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting, and film.This outside-in perspective on their own sexuality leads to the confusion that is at the heart of the myth. Women come to confuse sexual looking with being looked at sexually ("Clairol...it's the look you want"); many confuse sexually feeling with being sexually felt ("Gillete razors...the way a woman wants to feel"); many confuse desiring with being desirable. "My first sexual memory," a woman tells me, "was when I first shaved my legs, and when I ran my hand down the smooth skin I felt how it would feel to someone else's hand." Women say that when they lost weight they "feel sexier" but the nerve endings in the clitoris and nipples don't multiply with weight loss. Women tell me they're jealous of the men who get so much pleasure out of the female body that they imagine being inside the male body that is inside their own so that they can vicariously experience desire. Could it be then that women's famous slowness of arousal to men's, complex fantasy life, the lack of pleasure many experience in intercourse, is related to this cultural negation of sexual imagery that affirms the female point of view, the culture prohibition against seeing men's bodies as instruments of pleasure? Could it be related to the taboo against representing intercourse as an opportunity for a straight woman actively to pursue, grasp, savor, and consume the male body for her satisfaction, as much as she is pursued, grasped, savored, and consumed for his?” - Naomi Wolf

50. “Healthy" and "diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control.” - Naomi Wolf

51. “She may resent Playboy because she resents feeling ugly in sex--or, if "beautiful," her body defined and diminished by pornography. It inhibits in her something she needs to live, and gives her the ultimate anaphrodisiac: the self-critical sexual gaze. Alice Walker's essay "Coming Apart" investigates the damage done: Comparing herself to her lover's pornography, her heroine "foolishly" decides that she is not beautiful.” - Naomi Wolf

52. “It's not me but the world that's deranged.” - Haruki Murakami

53. “Humikab ang dagat na parang leonmasarap sanang tumalon peroBAWAL MAGTAPON NG BASURAsabi ng alon.” - Jose F. Lacaba

54. “So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine destiny; so long as the three great problems of the century—the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light—are unsolved; so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world;—in other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use. HAUTEVILLE HOUSE, 1862. [Translation by Isabel F. Hapgood]” - Victor Hugo

55. “Another important consequence in the arrival of digital technology and its facilitation of feedback is that we can look at large systems and recognize them once more not only as part of ourselves, but also as components that can change... Now, though, we live in a world where text is fluid, where is responds to our instructions. Writing something down records it, but does not make it true or permanent. So why should we put up with a system we don't like simply because it's been written somewhere?” - Nick Harkaway

56. “Our crime against criminals lies in the fact that we treat them like rascals.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

57. “In the world I lived in, the world of human people, there were ties and debts and consequences and good deeds. That was what bound people to society; maybe that was what constituted society. And I tried to live in my little niche in it the best way I could.” - Charlaine Harris

58. “[about a hat] You can put it on and say, "Hey you, person without a hat! I've got something you don't! How did I get it? Probably by being worth more to society.” - Alice LeGrow

59. “The question of the stranger in a society which estranges everybody from it--while forcing everybody to assimilate their own alienation--takes cover under dubious and sinister masks.” - Norman Manea

60. “What about the contacts your mum had?” his dad asked.“I rang and spoke to four very polite computers who gave me all these options and then cut out on me. Then I tried the post office, because they were advertising, and I spoke to another computer. Very rude, that one. Don’t think it recognized ‘Are you shitting me?’ as an option.”“You know why that is?”“Why is that, Dominic?” Tom had asked drolly, because he knew he was going to be told why.“Because we don’t live in a society anymore, Tom. We live in an economy. We’re not citizens. We’re customers. That’s what this government’s done to us.” - Melina Marchetta

61. “si chacun de tes sujets ressemble à l'autre tu n'as point atteint l'unité, car mille colonnes identiques ne créent qu'un stupide effet de miroirs et non un temple. Et la perfection de ta démarche serait, de ces mille sujets, de les massacrer tous sauf un seul.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

62. “Ich wünsche mir, dass sich unsere Gesellschaft tolerant, wertbewusst und vor allen Dingen in Liebe zur Freiheit entwickelt und nicht vergisst, dass die Freiheit der Erwachsenen Verantwortung heißt.” - Joachim Gauck

63. “المجتمع الجاهل يغتفر للرجل إنحرافه، ويقتل المرأة على إنحرافها، مع أن الشريعة أوجبت على كلٍ منهما الإستقامة، وأنكرت من كلٍ منهما الإنحراف، وأوجبت لكلٍ منهما الستر حين الزلل، وحتّمت عقوبة كل منهما حين تثبت الجريمة، فمن أين جاءهم الفرق بين الرجل والمرأة في العقوبة والغفران؟” - مصطفى السباعي

64. “To me, the poor are like Bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a six-inch deep flower pot, you get a perfect replica of the tallest tree, but it is only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted; only the soil-base you provided was inadequate.Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong with their seeds. Only society never gave them a base to grow on.” - Muhammad Yunus

65. “America pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever the hell they want.” - Robin Sloan

66. “Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it's right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of its existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering - unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

67. “You know Americans...Self-improvement. No matter who or what we are, we're always working on ways to become somebody else.” - Alan Brown

68. “The slick concrete reflected the facades of the work weary - grey, cracked and old,but more importantly, trodden upon.” - Martin Hopkins

69. “es necesario tener claro que la literatura recoge del centro de la vida social e ideológica los contenidos más sensibles de las preocupaciones y los debates históricos, de ahí que resulte forzoso ubicarlos en el seno de la sociedad donde se gestan para empezar a entender el significado artístico que después adquieren.” - Martha Elena Munguia Zatarain

70. “A giant octopus living way down deep at the bottom of the ocean. It has this tremendously powerful life force, a bunch of long, undulating legs, and it's heading somewhere, moving through the darkness of the ocean… It takes on all kinds of different shapes—sometimes it's 'the nation,' and sometimes it's 'the law,' and sometimes it takes on shapes that are more difficult and dangerous than that. You can try cutting off its legs, but they just keep growing back. Nobody can kill it. It's too strong, and it lives too far down in the ocean. Nobody knows where its heart is. What I felt then was a deep terror. And a kind of hopelessness, a feeling that I could never run away from this thing, no matter how far I went. And this creature, this thing doesn't give a damn that I'm me or you're you. In its presence, all human beings lose their names and their faces. We all turn into signs, into numbers.” - Haruki Murakami

71. “Hell, there're already too many psychologists; too many everythings. Too many engineers, too many chemists, too many doctors, too many dentists, too many sociologists. There aren't enough people who can actually do anything, really know how to make this world work.When you thing about it; when you look at the way it really is; God, we've got - well, let's say, there's 100 percent. Half of these are under eighteen or over sixty-five; that is not working. This leaves the middle fifty percent. Half of these are women; most are so busy having babies or taking care of kids, they're totally occupied. Some of them work, too, so let's say we're down to 30 percent. Ten percent are doctors or lawyers or sociologists or psychologists or dentists or businessmen or artists or writers, or schoolteachers, or priests, ministers, rabbis; none of there are actually producing anything, they're only servicing people. So now we're down to 20 percent. At least 2 or 3 percent are living on trusts or clipping coupons or are just rich. That leaves 17 percent. Seven percent of these are unemployed, mostly on purpose! So in the end we've got 10 percent producing all the food, constructing the houses, building and repairing all the roads, developing electricity, working in the mines, building cars, collecting garbage; all the dirty work, all the real work.Everybody's just looking for some gimmick so they don't have to actually do anything. And the worst part is, the ones who do the work get paid the least.” - William Wharton

72. “Numa sociedade, se houver espaço, nunca há conflito” - Afonso Cruz

73. “This much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed.” - Kurt Vonnegut

74. “When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings” - Octavio Paz

75. “A poet is a blind optimist.The world is against him formany reasons. But thepoet persists. He believesthat he is on the right track,no matter what any of his fellow men say. In hiseternal search for truth, thepoet is alone.He tries to be timeless in a society built on time.” - Jack Kerouac

76. “Social psychologist argued that even severe mental illness was the result of society labeling unusual behavior rather than of biochemical processes.” - Thomas Scheff

77. “Be kind, for whenever kindness becomes part of something, it beautifies it. Whenever it is taken from something, it leaves it tarnished.” - Mohammad PBUH

78. “The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide‟s reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by thePage | 49 .state which paid the coroner? And then, since you had been declared temporarily mad, your reasons for killing yourself were also assumed to be mad. So I doubt anyone paid much attention to Adrian‟s argument, with its references to philosophers ancient and modern, about the superiority of the intervening act over the unworthy passivity of merely letting life happen to you.” - Julian Barnes

79. “So long as there is death there will be sorrow, and so long as there is sorrow it can be no part of the duty of human beings to increase its amount, in spite of the fact that a few rare spirits know how to transmute it.” - Bertrand Russell

80. “Almost always we are bored by people to whom we ourselves are boring.” - Francois de La Rochefoucauld

81. “Whom boasts about his happiness, cause doesn't got it!” - Miguel Ángel Sáez Gutiérrez

82. “Perhaps our judgement of the purple woman was unfair. No doubt her theories concerning the "approach of the Teatro" made us all uneasy. But was this reason enough to cast her out from that artistic underworld which was the only society available to her? Like many societies, of course, ours was founded on fearful superstition, and this is always reason enough for any kind of behavior. She had been permanently stigmatized by too closely associating herself with something unclean in its essence.” - Thomas Ligotti