Society Quotes – Thoughtful Reflections on Human Interaction

"What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority."

Walter Lippmann

"School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is."

Ivan Illich

"A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud."

George Orwell

"Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total… Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself."

Erich Fromm

"Social connections were also transformed beyond recognition. The invention of radio and television led to the rise of the mass media and a corresponding decline in direct human interactions with a merely social function. Evening meetings between neighbors, pub gatherings, harvest festivals, rituals, and celebrations—they were progressively replaced by consumption of what the media presented."

Mattias Desmet

"which is better - to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?"

Aldous Huxley

"A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both."

Milton Friedman

"Society is collapsing and people are starting to recognise that the reason they feel like they're mentally ill is that they're living in a system that's not designed to suit the human spirit."

Russell Brand

"If you want to change society then you must tell an alternative story."

Ivan Illich

"We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is taught in them."

Ivan Illich

"The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State."

Murray Rothbard

"A society whose principles are acquisition, profit, and property produces a social character oriented around having, and once the dominant pattern is established, nobody wants to be an outsider, or indeed an outcast; in order to avoid this risk everybody adapts to the majority, who have in common only their mutual antagonism."

Erich Fromm

"When society as a whole is in the grip of anxiety and the accompanying images of illness and death, those images in themselves become a causal factor."

Mattias Desmet

"The essential notion of a capitalist society ... is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force."

Milton Friedman

"Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?"

H. L. Mencken

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

Oscar Wilde

"We may not always recognize it, but government plays a bigger role in our lives than any other single person or institution. We spend nearly half of our lives working to pay for it. Children spend more time in government schools than they do with their parents. Birth, death, marriage, every area of our lives feels the influence of government."

Harry Browne

"The State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion."

Murray N. Rothbard