Society Quotes – Thoughtful Reflections on Human Interaction

"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

"It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it."

George Orwell

"Society sees nothing because it is kept in a state of deep hypnosis. Never before have people been manipulated as much as they are now. A person is given no chance to pause and understand what is happening. Endless series, each dumber than the last, vulgar pop music, lustful or aggressive films that gently influence the subconscious, foster a spirit of selfishness and violence. An ordinary person quickly becomes a principle-less animal living an absolutely meaningless life."

Sergei Petrowitsch Kapiza

"If you look at the way society is structured , it is structured to keep people overwhelmingly in a state of fear and always trying to survive, in terms of physically, in terms of terror, in terms of financially, the credit crunch, rising food prices; all this is survive, survive, survive."

David Icke

"A society that is in its higher circles and middle levels widely believed to be a network of smart rackets does not produce men with an inner moral sense; a society that is merely expedient does not produce men of conscience. A society that narrows the meaning of 'success' to the big money and in its terms condemns failure as the chief vice, raising money to the plane of absolute value, will produce the sharp operator and the shady deal. Blessed are the cynical, for only they have what it takes to succeed."

Charles Wright Mills

"Society is joint action and cooperation in which each participant sees the other partner's success as a means for the attainment of his own."

Ludwig von Mises

"Families, authority, communities, and social ranks are the empirical-sociological concretization of the abstract philosophical-praxeological categories and concepts of property, production, exchange, and contract. Property and property relations do not exist apart from families and kinship relations."

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

"Never did I think that the university was properly ministerial to the society around it. Rather I thought and think that society is ministerial to the university, and I bless a society that tolerates and supports an eternal childhood for some, a childhood whose playfulness can in turn be a blessing to society."

Allan Bloom

"Society doesn't have values. People have values."

Milton Friedman

"If we look around, then, at the crucial problem areas of our society - the areas of crisis and failure - we find in each and every case a “red thread” marking and uniting them all: the thread of government. In every one of these cases, government either has totally run or heavily influenced the activity."

Murray Rothbard

"I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual."

Murray Rothbard

"Societies in which most people depend for most of their goods and services on the personal whim, kindness, or skill of another are called underdeveloped, while those in which living has been transformed into a process of ordering from an all-encompassing store catalogue are called advanced."

Ivan Illich

"There is nothing the state can do, and which society needs done, that cannot be done far better by the market."

Lew Rockwell

"The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. This is its task and its promise."

Charles Wright Mills

"It is the political task of the social scientist — as of any liberal educator — continually to translate personal troubles into public issues, and public issues into the terms of their human meaning for a variety of individuals. It is his task to display in his work — and, as an educator, in his life as well — this kind of sociological imagination. And it is his purpose to cultivate such habits of mind among the men and women who are publicly exposed to him. To secure these ends is to secure reason and individuality, and to make these the predominant values of a democratic society."

Charles Wright Mills

"Whatever sociology may be, it is the result of constantly asking the question, what is the meaning of this?"

Charles Wright Mills

"For we cannot adequately understand 'man' as an isolated biological creature, as a bundle of reflexes or a set of instincts, as an 'intelligible field' or a system in and of itself. Whatever else he may be, man is a social and an historical actor who must be understood, if at all, in close and intricate interplay with social and historical structures"

Charles Wright Mills

"By consequence I hold that no one ever did, or can do, anything for "society."... Comte invented the term altruism as an antonym for egoism, and it found its way at once into everyone's mouth, although it is utterly devoid of meaning, since it points to nothing that ever existed in mankind; This hybrid or rather this degenerate form of hedonism served powerfully to invest collectivism's principles with a specious moral sanction, and collectivists naturally made the most of it."

Albert Jay Nock