Society Quotes – Thoughtful Reflections on Human Interaction

"You can never really understand an individual unless you also understand the society, historical time period in which they live, personal troubles, and social issues."

Charles Wright Mills

"A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort ... is not strictly speaking a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang violence."

Ayn Rand

"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."

Isaac Asimov

"Beneath the broad tides of human history there flow the stealthy undercurrents of the secret societies, which frequently determine in the depth the changes that take place upon the surface."

Arthur Edward Waite

"You can protect a society, you can protect an economy, and you can even protect personal relationships to death."

Prof. Ferdinand Kirchhof

"Our society is run by mad men, for crazy targets. I think we are driven by mad men, to a mad end, And I think I am imprisoned as a madman because I say that. That is what's insane about it."

John Lennon

"Being a socialist means subordinating the self to the collective, sacrificing one's personality for the greater good. Socialism, in its deepest sense, is service. It is renunciation for the individual and demand for the whole."

Joseph Goebbels

"Never before in the course of the world’s history had such a Society [i.e., the Jesuit Order] appeared. The old Roman Senate itself did not lay schemes for world domination with greater certainty of success."

Friedrich von Hardenberg

"No society ever thrived because it had a large and growing class of parasites living off those who produce."

Thomas Sowell

"For the decline of capitalism to continue, that is to say, no revolutionary alternative is required, and certainly no masterplan of a better society displacing capitalism. Contemporary capitalism is vanishing on its own, collapsing from internal contradictions, and not least as a result of having vanquished its enemies - who, as noted, have often rescued capitalism from itself by forcing it to assume a new form. What comes after capitalism in its final crisis, now underway, is, I suggest, not socialism or some other defined social order, but a lasting interregnum - no new world system equilibrium a la Wallerstein, but a prolonged period of social entropy or disorder (and precisely for this reason a period of uncertainty and indeterminacy). It is an interesting problem for sociological theory whether and how a society can turn for a significant length of time into less than a society, a post-social society as it were, or a society lite, until it may or may not recover and again to become a society in the full meaning of the term."

Wolfgang Streeck

"Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."

Arthur Miller

"The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation"

Terence McKenna

"Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both."

Charles Wright Mills

"A free society is a society in which all traditions have equal rights and equal access to the centers of power. A tradition receives these rights not because the importance the cash value, as it were) it has for outsiders but because it gives meaning to the lives of those who participate in it."

Paul Feyerabend

"We don't live in a capitalist totality. Capitalism couldn't survive as a totality anyway. We live in this complex system and we already live communism and anarchism in a million forms everyday."

David Graeber

"Anarchism and anthropology go well together because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible because so many exist."

David Graeber

"It may well be that a societys greatest madness seems normal to itself."

Allan Bloom

"Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others."

Alan Kay