Selected society quotes

1. Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free. True peace with oneself and with the world around us can only be achieved through the development of mental peace.

2. No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

3. What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

4. Let's stop somebody from doing something! Everybody does too much.

5. A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually.

6. The Jews are the living embodiment of the minority, the constant reminder of what duties societies owe their minorities, whoever they might be.

7. The monster London laugh at me.

8. What shall we think of a well-adjusted slave?

9. But now, instead of discussion and argument, brute force rises up to the rescue of discomfited error, and crushes truth and right into the dust. 'Might makes right,' and hoary folly totters on in her mad career escorted by armies and navies.

10. I begin with the young. We older ones are used up but my magnificent youngsters! Are there finer ones anywhere in the world? Look at all these men and boys! What material! With you and I, we can make a new world.

11. Politics is history in the making.

12. What luck for rulers that men do not think.

13. In a mad world, only the mad are sane.

14. Truth is a new word in Europe (and elsewhere).

15. I am surprised to see that today everything that does not amount to surrender pure and simple to generalized capitalism, let us call it thus, is considered to be archaic or old-fashioned, as though in a way there existed no other definition of what it means to be modern than, quite simply, to be at all times caught in the dominant forms of the moment.

16. Let us say in passing that since (philosophical) remedies are often worse than the malady, our age, in order to be cured of the Plato sickness, has swallowed such doses of a relativist, vaguely skeptical, lightly spiritualist and insipidly moralist medicine, that it is in the process of gently dying, in the small bed of its supposed democratic comfort.

17. You can't have it both ways. Either our rights come from God, as our Declaration of Independence says, or they come from human choice. If they come from human choice, then our whole way of life is meaningless, it has no foundation.

18. Black Americans make up 10 or 11% of the population, but they account now for something of 40 to 45% of all the abortions. This is a privileged position that I'm not sure anyone in their right mind would aspire to.

19. Every leader, and every regime, and every movement, and every organization that steps across the line to terrorism must be banished from the discourse of civilized human life.

20. At the root of the assault on our liberties is, in fact, an assault on our character--an assault that assumes that we are not good enough to be free, and that aims to make sure that we are no longer strong enough, courageous enough, disciplined enough to be a free people.

21. Most of the people who get sent to die in wars are young men who've got a lot of energy and would probably rather, in a better world, be putting that energy into copulation rather than going over there and blowing some other young man's guts out.

22. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.

23. Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

24. An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion, soon degenerates. For force always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels. For this reason I have always been passionately opposed to systems such as we see in Italy and Russia to-day.

25. Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralisation of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?

26. It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

27. Laws alone can not secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population.

28. Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem - in my opinion - to characterize our age.

29. Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

30. The awareness that we are all human beings together has become lost in war and through politics.

31. Never for a moment do we lay aside our mistrust of the ideals established by society, and of the convictions which are kept by it in circulation. We always know that society is full of folly and will deceive us in the matter of humanity. ... humanity meaning consideration for the existence and the happiness of individual human beings.

32. Only when an ideal of peace is born in the minds of the peoples will the institutions set up to maintain this peace effectively fulfill the function expected of them.

33. Here again, there is no tabulation; for us it is left to sacrifice literary charm, and even some accuracy, in order to bring out the one great point. The cause of human sectarianism is not lack of sympathy in thought, but in speech; and this it is our not unambitious design to remedy.

34. Intolerance is evidence of impotence.

35. As soon as you put men together, they somehow sink, corporatively, below the level of the worst of the individuals composing it. Collect scholars on a club committee, or men of science on a jury; all their virtues vanish, and their vices pop out, reinforced by the self-confidence which the power of numbers is bound to bestow.

36. How right politicians are to look upon their constituents as cattle! Anyone who has any experience of dealing with any class as such knows the futility of appealing to intelligence, indeed to any other qualities than those of brutes.

37. Remember, America: organization will set you free.

38. We must build a trickle-up media that reflects the true character of this country and its people. A democratic media serving a democratic society.

39. During the 1960s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered.

40. Not even the apparently enlightened principle of the 'greatest good for the greatest number' can excuse indifference to individual suffering. There is no test for progress other than its impact on the individual.

41. Every man worships the dollar, and is down before his shrine from morning to night... Other men, the world over, worship regularly at the shrine with matins and vespers, nones and complines, and whatever other daily services may be known to the religious houses; but the New Yorker is always on his knees.

42. The only thing you find in the middle of the road are dead animals and dumb Americans.

43. Without comprehension, the immigrant would forever remain shut-a stranger in America. Until America can release the heart as well as train the hand of the immigrant, he would forever remain driven back upon himself, corroded by the very richness of the unused gifts within his soul.

44. The trouble with us is that the ghetto of the Middle Ages and the children of the twentieth century have to live under one roof.

45. Come away; poverty's catching.

46. Man is by nature a political animal.

47. He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

48. Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.

49. Law is order, and good law is good order.

50. The appropriate age for marriage is around eighteen for girls and thirty-seven for men.

51. When people are friends, they have no need of justice, but when they are just, they need friendship in addition.

52. Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government.

53. It is in justice that the ordering of society is centered.

54. Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.

55. The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.

56. The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.

57. Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

58. No graven images may be Worshipped, except the currency.

59. A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

60. If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.

61. Without alienation, there can be no politics.

62. An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.

63. After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.

64. I either want less corruption, or more chance to participate in it.

65. It's good to know that if I behave strangely enough, society will take full responsibility for me.

66. Is it you and I who are crazy, or is it everybody else?

67. It's well-known that men and women are different but it keeps being re-discovered with great excitement.

68. Why does it so often take a genius to see the obvious?

69. The reports on human progress are beginning to come in, and some are a little discouraging.

70. You can't stop progress, but you can help decide what is progress and what isn't.

71. At great expense, we have built a vast system of inter-connecting stupidities.

72. Speak nothing but the truth, and you'll soon be considered dangerous.

73. All people are different. That's why everybody should be treated the same.

74. Wealthy men can't live in an island that is encircled by poverty. We all breathe the same air. We must give a chance to everyone, at least a basic chance.

75. We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

76. Terms like that, 'Humane Society,' are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.

77. For any exam in history, here is the answer: all human history is the struggle between systems that attempt to shackle the human personality in the name of some intangible good on the one hand and systems that enable and expand the scope of human personality in the pursuit of extremely tangible aims. The American system is the most successful in the world because it harmonizes best with the aims and longings of human personality while allowing the best protection to other personalities.

78. I hope it won't come as a surprise to anyone that a big part of male homosexual behavior is interest in young boys.

79. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.

80. I've come to the realization that a lot of our problems are because of a dearth of spiritual values.

81. Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.

82. When women are encouraged to be competitive, too many of them become disagreeable.

83. Socialism, on the contrary, extends its function to the description of society as it should be, and the discovery of the means of making it what it should be.

84. You don't need to pray to God any more when there are storms in the sky, but you do have to be insured.

85. Society cannot share a common communication system so long as it is split into warring factions.

86. All the gang of those who rule us Hope our quarrels never stop Helping them to split and fool us So they can remain on top.

87. With drooping shoulders The majority sit hunched, their foreheads furrowed like Stony ground that has been repeatedly ploughed-up to no purpose.

88. Their peace and their war Are like wind and storm. War grows from their peace.

89. Why be a man when you can be a success?

90. I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue.

91. Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion?

92. The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

93. Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

94. Americans need rest, but do not know it. I believe this to be a large part of the explanation of the crime wave in the United States.

95. With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.

96. And all this madness, all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization and our hopes, has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination or heart, have chosen that it should occur rather than that any one of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country's pride.

97. I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.

98. The saviors of the world, society's last hope.

99. In this rat-race everybody's guilty till proved innocent!

100. I'd marry again if I found a man who had fifteen million dollars, would sign over half to me, and guarantee that he'd be dead within a year.