Society Quotes – Thoughtful Reflections on Human Interaction

"Society is best served when the means of production are in the possession of those who know how to use them best."

Ludwig von Mises

"What we experience in various and specific milieux, I have noted, is often caused by structural changes. Accordingly, to understand the changes of many personal milieux we are required to look beyond them. And the number and variety of such structural changes increase as the institutions within which we live become more embracing and more intricately connected with one another. To be aware of the idea of social structure and to use it with sensibility is to be capable of tracing such linkages among a great variety of milieux. To be able to do that is to possess the sociological imagination"

Charles Wright Mills

"School is the first impression children get of organized society. Like most first impressions it is the lasting one. Life is dull and stupid, only Coke provides relief. And other products, too, of course."

John Taylor Gatto

"A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ... A great society is simply a big and complicated urban society."

Walter Lippmann

"The only reason there is a crisis about Social Security in the US and pensions in Europe and Japan is that you cannot maintain a "Ponzi" scheme indefinitely. We have collected from today's young to pay today's old and counted on tomorrow's young to keep doing so. That was a fine scheme as long as the number of young people was rising faster than old people. When that ratio comes to an end, such a system also has to end."

Milton Friedman

"The assumption that we can keep societies open and free to everybody is going to have to stop. We are going to have to recognize that some people simply are not qualified and do not want to belong a civil order. Until we begin to make discrimination along those lines, then I think we are going to be extremely vulnerable."

James M. Buchanan

"History is the shank of the social sciences."

Charles Wright Mills

"The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state."

Thomas Sowell

"We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society."

Edward Bernays

"Traditional society was more like a set of concentric circles of meaningful structures, while modern man must learn how to find meaning in many structures to which he is only marginally related. In the village, language and architecture and religion and work and family customs were consistent with one another, mutually explanatory and reinforcing. To grow into one implied a growth into others."

Ivan Illich

"IBM Plus Reality Plus Humanism = Sociology."

Charles Wright Mills

"The only thing that the psychically-human being can do to improve society is to present society with one improved unit."

Albert Jay Nock

"Only when the true ends of society have nothing to do with the sublime does "culture" become necessary as a veneer to cover over the void. Culture can at best appreciate the monuments of earlier faith; it cannot produce them."

Allan Bloom

"These sociologists who talk to facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle."

Allan Bloom

"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."

Ayn Rand

"Society wants people to travel on fixed tracks. That way, you know where they’ll end up in an hour. This is more predictable than if they were to walk. It’s a disaster if they veer off onto a path into the woods halfway through the journey: Where will that get us? What about our efficiency? What about our dominance in the global market?"

Hans-Peter Dürr

"Truth was never the highest priority of human society. It was the highest priority of some individuals, but never of society as a whole — because society as a whole does not function on the basis of truth. If you take two of the most powerful institutions of humankind — science and the scientific community, and religion and churches — neither of them has truth as their chief value. For individuals, yes. But as institutions, no. The chief value of science is power. The chief value of religion is order — organization. Religion is all about maintaining order in society, and science is mainly about gaining power."

Yuval Noah Harari

"Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society."

Edward Bernays