Society Quotes – Thoughtful Reflections on Human Interaction

"The life-fate of the modern individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or which he enters by marriage, but increasingly upon the corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of his best years."

Charles Wright Mills

"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

"Government doesn't work. That's the first lesson we must learn if we want to improve society."

Harry Browne

"If you see that some aspect of your society is bad, and you want to improve it, there is only one way to do so: you have to improve people. And in order to improve people, you begin with only ONE thing: you can become better yourself."

Leo Tolstoi

"But it is not only the similarities of social origin, religious affiliation, nativity, and education that are important to the psychological and social affinities of the members of the power elite. Even if their recruitment and formal training were more heterogeneous than they are, these men would still be of quite homogeneous social type. For the most important set of facts about a circle of men is the criteria of admission, of praise, of honor, of promotion that prevails among them; if these are similar within a circle, then they will tend as personalities to become similar."

Charles Wright Mills

"If a society is to be free, its government has to be controlled."

Ayn Rand

"If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses. And what can this tell you about American culture? Well, look at the drugs we use. Except for pharmaceutical poison, there are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in."

Bill Hicks

"With the destruction of the family, the spiritual traditions of the family perish forever; when spiritual values are destroyed, then unrighteousness predominates the entire society."

Bhagavad-Gita

"Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which we live."

Hans-Georg Gadamer

"No group of sociologists can approximate the ad teams in the gathering and processing of exploitable social data. The ad teams have billions to spend annually on research and testing of reactions, and their products are magnificent accumulations of material about the shared experience and feelings of the entire community."

Marshall McLuhan

"As society rapidly changes, individuals will have to be able to function comfortably in a world that is always in flux. Knowledge will continue to increase at a dizzying rate. This means that a content-based curriculum, with a set body of information to be imparted to students, is entirely inappropriate as a means of preparing children for their adult roles."

John Taylor Gatto