Matthew Arnold Quotes on Society
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The kings of modern thought are dumb.
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The free-thinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
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Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.
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English civilization - the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society-that is what interests me.
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That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.
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What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.
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The notion of the free play of the mind upon all subjects being a pleasure in itself, being an object of desire, being an essential provider of elements without which a nation's spirit, whatever compensations it may have for them, must, in the long run, die of inanition, hardly enters into an Englishman's thoughts.
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The great apostle of the Philistines, Lord Macaulay.
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Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.
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The men of culture are the true apostles of equality.
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Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves.