Society And Quotes

“A writer should not run around with a mirror for his countrymen; he should tell his society and his times things no one ever thought before.”

— StanisÅ‚aw Lem

“Even if the chance of impacting global change is slight and we don't know our chances of success, our ethical obligation is not simply to advance architecture, but to find ways to advance society and expand people's networks
one local intervention at a time.”

— Graham Owen

“Every idea that is a true idea has a form, and is capable of many forms. The variety of forms of which it is capable determines the value of the idea. So by way of ideas, and your mastery of them in relation to what you are doing, will come your value as an architect to your society and future. That's where you go to school. You can't get it in a university, you can't get it here, you can't get it anywhere except as you love it, love the feeling of it, desire and pursue it. And it doesn't come when you are very young, I think. I believe it comes faster with each experience, and the next is very simple, or more simple, until it becomes quite natural to you to become master of the idea you would express.
"Idea and Essence" September 7, 1958”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

“I would like to express how I regard salespeople in general. I consider they embody a unified and diverse aggregate of the most able individuals in society and its workplace. In any economy, they are among the most valuable to its continued existence. They alone move the economy of a nation.”

— Michael Delaware

“People say that modern life has grown so complicated, so busy, so crowded that we have to hurry even to survive. We need not accept that idea. It is quite possible to live in the midst of a highly developed technological society and keep an easy, relaxed pace while doing a lot of hard work. We have a choice.”

— Eknath Easwaran

“Where will it all end? In the destruction of all other command for the benefit of one alone - that of the state. In each man's absolute freedom from every family and social authority, a freedom the price of which is complete submission to the state. In the complete equality as between themselves of all citizens, paid for by their equal abasement before the power of their absolute master - the state. In the disappearance of every constraint which does not emanate from the state, and in the denial of every pre-eminence which is not approved by the state. In a word, it ends in the atomization of society, and in the rupture of every private tie linking man and man, whose only bond is now their common bondage to the state. The extremes of individualism and socialism meet: that was their predestined course.”

— Bertrand De Jouvenel

“The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it. We have talked enough; but we have not listened. And by not listening we have failed to concede the immense complexity of our society-and thus the great gaps between ourselves and those with whom we seek understanding.”

— William H. Whyte

“One person's prayer can create a close-nit family, a close-nit family can create a close-nit community. A close-nit community can create a close-nit society and a close-nit society can create a close-nit nation.”

— Euginia Herlihy

“Sometimes you need a reminder that negative comments about your body aren't even really about your body, they're about society and our society's wrongheaded and impossibly narrow definition of a "good" body. Your body didn't do anything wrong. What's fucked up about your body is not your body at all, but that your body has to live in a society that thinks it has a right to say fucked up things about your body.”

— Golda Poretsky

“When we replace a sense of service and gratitude with a sense of entitlement and expectation, we quickly see the demise of our relationships, society, and economy.”

— Steve Maraboli

“I come from that society and there is a common thread, specifically family values - the idea that you do anything for your family, and the unconditional love for one's children.”

— Ednita Nazario

“Humans have always used animals to depict ideas about themselves: ideas about their status, about their position in life and society and the world.”

— Alison Goldfrapp

“God makes it really clear that society and civilization is really held together by the glue of families ... When a man and a woman come together and say 'I do,' they are committing for a lifetime to love each other and to model what love is and what forgiveness is and what joy is to their kids.”

— Kirk Cameron

“There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”

— Karl Marx

“It is time for the world, the hemisphere and the region to make sure that relevant institutions of civil society and relevant laws are embedded in the mechanisms of governance.”

— Baldwin Spencer

“Entrepreneurship rests on a theory of economy and society. The theory sees change as normal and indeed as healthy. And it sees the major task in society - and especially in the economy - as doing something different rather than doing better what is already being done. That is basically what Say, two hundred years ago, meant when he coined the term entrepreneur. It was intended as a manifesto and as a declaration of dissent: the entrepreneur upsets and disorganizes. As Joseph Schumpeter formulated it, his task is creative destruction.”

— Peter F. Drucker

“Girls are the future mothers of our society, and it is important that we focus on their well-being.”

— Miriam Makeba

“At the heart of these challenges lies the question of how the institutions of the European Union make laws, the types of laws they pass and the effectiveness with which those laws are implemented on civil society and the economy.”

— John Hutton

“Mubarak's regime is dead and finished. People will not go back to this. This is a farce being propagated by the Muslim Brotherhood to say that this revolution was supported by the remnants of the Mubarak regime. They have gone against the whole Egyptian society, and this is why they were removed.”

— Naguib Sawiris

“In practice, socialism didn't work. But socialism could never have worked because it is based on false premises about human psychology and society, and gross ignorance of human economy.”

— David Horowitz

“By the end of the eighteenth century it had become clear that none of the estates or classes in the various countries was willing or able to become the new ruling class, that is to identify itself with the government as the nobility had done for centuries.8 The failure of the absolute monarchy to find a substitute within society led to the full development of the nation-state and its claim to be above all classes, completely independent of society and its particular interests, the true and only representative of the nation as a whole.”

— Hannah Arendt

“I was making films about American society, and it is true that I never felt at home there, except perhaps when my wife and I lived on a farm in the San Fernando Valley.”

— Douglas Sirk

“Unless we are willing to accept our artists as they are, the answer to the question, "Who speaks for America today?" will have to be: the advertising agencies. They are entirely capable of showing us our unparalleled prosperity and our almost classless society, and no one has ever accused them of not being affirmative. Where the artist is still trusted, he will not be looked to for assurance. Those who believe that art proceeds from a healthy, and not from a diseased, faculty of the mind will take what he shows them as a revelation, not of what we ought to be but of what we are at a given time and under given circumstances; that is , as a limited revelation but revelation nevertheless.”

— Flannery O'Connor

“What am I in the eyes of most people? A good-for-nothing, an eccentric and disagreeable man, somebody who has no position in society and never will have. Very well, even if that were true, I should want to show by my work what there is in the heart of such an eccentric man, of such a nobody.”

— Vincent Van Gogh

“I believe that the family unit has fundamentally been the most positive thing for society, and I don't believe that any minority has the right to create changes that impact on the majority.”

— Stephen Baldwin

“I am concerned about the whole man. I am concerned about what the people, using their government as an instrument and a tool, can do toward building the whole man, which will mean a better society and a better world.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

“If, therefore, those called to office and leadership roles in the church remain content merely to organize and manage the internal affairs of the church, they are leaving a vacuum exactly where there ought to be vibrant, pulsating life. Of course Christian leaders need to be trained and equipped for management, for running of the organization. The church will not thrive by performing in a bumbling, amateur fashion and hoping that piety and goodwill will make up for incompetence. But how much more should a Christian minister be a serious professional when it comes to grappling with scripture and discovering how it enables him or her, in preaching, teaching, prayer, and pastoral work, to engage with the huge issues that confront us as a society and as individuals. If we are professional about other things, we ought to be ashamed not to be properly equipped both to study the Bible ouselves and to bring its ever-fresh word to others.”

— N.T. Wright

“We believe that this initiative is a critical first step in our nation s effort to provide every student with a comprehensive, content rich and complete education. These standards have the potential to support teachers in achieving NEA s purpose of preparing students to thrive in a democratic society and a diverse, changing world as knowledgeable, creative and engaged citizens and lifelong learners.”

— Lily Eskelsen Garcia

“The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modern society, and one critic said, "To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls." Another one said, "To describe blow-jobs artistically.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

“What governs what we choose to notice? The first (which we shall have to qualify later) is whatever seems advantageous or disadvantageous for our survival, our social status, and the security of our egos. The second, again working simultaneously with the first, is the pattern and the logic of all the notation symbols which we have learned from others, from our society and our culture. It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us (whether verbal, mathematical, or musical) have no description. This is why we borrow words from foreign languages.”

— Alan W. Watts

“We are at the very point in time when a 400-year old age is dying and another is struggling to be born - a shifting of culture, science, society, and institutions enormously greater than the world has ever experienced. Ahead, the possibility of the regeneration of individuality, liberty, community and ethics such as the world has never know, and a harmony with nature, with one another, and with the divine intelligence such as the world has never dreamed.”

— Dee Hock

“I have therefore come to the opinion that the most reasonable recourse for the humanization of society and its institutions is to abandon them and begin again to build a society with a just, equitable and compassionate economy with justice, equality, and reverence for all life insured by the goals and forms of all its institutions.”

— Manitonquat

“Investigative reporting is the bone structure without which the journalistic body collapses. The Center for Public Integrity's constant and consistently enterprising investigative work is an invaluable contribution not only to journalism, but to society and to a healthy democracy”

— Alma Guillermoprieto

“There must be much more going on behind the scenes. The pivotal question is this: What is behind the deep-seated hatred that these atheists nurse against religion and against God? Let's face it, there is only one force that hates God's creation more than anything else - and that is Satan. Satan knows that God exists but wants no part of Him. It is Satan's ultimate goal to demolish all Christian elements in society and to damage the human image that was made in God's image. Could Satan be the real instigator of this aggressive form of atheism?”

— Gerard Verschuuren

“Big efforts should be made to integrate Israel's Arab citizens into the fabric of the Israeli society and the Israeli economy. That's really the key to any further progress to do with the Palestinians beyond Israel's borders.”

— Moshe Arens

“Kyoto is dead and has been dead, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't done some real damage and won't continue to do some real damage," "If global warming turns out to be a problem, which I doubt, it won't be solved by making ourselves poorer through energy rationing." "It will be solved through building resiliency and capability into society and through long-term technological innovation and transformation.”

— Myron Ebell

“By balancing the needs of families and employers, and by extending a safe haven to those fleeing persecution, our immigration policy serves its historic purpose. Freedom and opportunity is the cornerstone of American society, and immigrants continue to embody that freedom.”

— Spencer Abraham

“The difference between a stable society and an unstable one is that the restraints in an unstable one are external. In a stable society government ultimately becomes unnecessary; the restraints on people's actions are internal, they're self-disciplined ...”

— Carroll Quigley

“In the minds of many Western politicians, military interventions and air strikes appear to have become legitimate policy tools since the NATO attacks on Yugoslavia during the 1990s. That's how they intend to bring everyone into line who don't share the Western view of democratization of society and the liberalization of the economy. But there is no future for that kind of globalization.”

— Vladimir Yakunin

“It's absurd. We would all like to see Cuba move toward civil society and free markets and greater respect for human rights. But the U.S. policy is exactly the wrong way to go about it.”

— Wayne Smith

“We talk often about being in a media-saturated society, and we are surrounded by image streams. But it's nihilistic. There's a real randomness to all of it.”

— Cynthia Daignault

“The concept of guilt is found most powerfully developed even in the most primitive communal forms which we know: ... the man is guilty who violates one of the original laws which dominate the society and which are mostly derived from a divine founder; the boy who is accepted into the tribal community and learns its laws, which bind him thenceforth, learns to promise; this promise is often given under the sign of death, which is symbolically carried out on the boy, with a symbolical rebirth.”

— Martin Buber

“Whatever Scotland was, it was not a matriarchy; whereas the United States was a profoundly matriarchal society - and much more feminine than would be suggested by all that male bravado. That was a front, and a misleading one at that; underneath the male swagger lay a passive acceptance of female dominance - a fact not always appreciated by outsiders.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

“The existence of poverty is the proof of an unjust and ill-organised society, and our public charities are but the first tardy awakening in the conscience of a robber.”

— Sri Aurobindo

“Society and Government should together give priority to the poorest of poor and make efforts to provide affordable health services.”

— Narendra Modi

“Society, and the family as its psycho social agent, has to solve a difficult problem: How to break a person's will without his being aware of it? Yet by a complicated process of indoctrination, rewards, punishments, and fitting ideology, it solves this task by and large so well that most people believe they are following their own will and are unaware that their will itself is conditioned and manipulated.”

— Erich Fromm

“We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named fair competition and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.”

— Thomas Carlyle

“They may be all comprehended under three heads - 1st, Superstition; 2d, Power; 3d, the common interests of society, and the common rights of man.”

— Thomas Paine

“Literature remains an indispensable human activity, in which the reader and the writer are engaged of their own volition. Hence, literature has no duty to the masses or society, and ethical or moral pronouncements added by busybody critics are of no concern to the writer.”

— Gao Xingjian

“The family remains the basic unit of society and the first school in which children learn the human, spiritual and moral values which enable them to be a beacon of goodness, integrity and justice in our communities.”

— Pope Francis