Society Quotes

Men of genius are often dull and inert in society, as a blazing meteor when it descends to earth, is only a stone.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Doctors are not servants of their patients, they are traders like everyone else in a free society and they should bear that title proudly considering the crucial importance of the services they offer.

Ayn Rand

Individual commitment to a group effort - That is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.

Vince Lombardi

Man seeketh in society comfort, use and protection.

Sir Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 1605

Society is now one polished horde, - - - Formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.

Lord Byron, Don Juan

The church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.

Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 1963

Some people surrender their freedom willingly but others are forced to surrender it. Imprisonment begins with birth. Society, parents they refuse to allow you to keep the freedom you were born with. There are subtle ways to punish a person for daring to feel. You see that everyone around you has destroyed his true feeling nature. You imitate what you see.

Jim Morrison

The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, they finish by loading honors on your head.

Jean Cocteau, Journey to Freedom (1969)

It is the first step of wisdom to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the society in which they occur.

George Whitehead

Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers.

Erik Pepke

The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.

Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 1931

What torture, this life in society! Often someone is obliging enough to offer me a light, and in order to oblige him I have to fish a cigarette out of my pocket.

Karl Kraus

Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

George Orwell

To surpress minority thinking and minority expression would tend to freeze society and prevent progress... Now more than ever, we must keep in the forefront of our minds the fact that whenever we take away the liberties of those we hate, we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love.

Wendell Willkie

There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.

Robertson Davies

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to opress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Frederick Douglass, Speech, April 1886

Say nothing of my religion. It is known to God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life if it has been honest and dutiful to society the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one.

Thomas Jefferson

Acceptance of dissent is the fundamental requirement of a free society.

Richard Royste

Friendship is the highest degree of perfection in society.

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

My purpose in life does not include a hankering to charm society.

James Dean

I have no mercy or compassion for a society that crushes people, and then penalizes them for not being able to stand up under the weight.

Malcom X, My counselor, Mrs. Ross

We are all born charming, fresh and spontaneous and must be civilized before we are fit to participate in society.

Judith Martin, (Miss Manners)

To educate a man in mind, and not in morals, is to educate a menace to society.

Theodore Roosevelt

The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.

Georges Bernanos, "Why Freedom? " The Last Essays of Georges Bernanos, 1955

If I were to select a jack - Booted group of fascists who are perhaps as large a danger to American society as I could pick today, I would pick BATF.

John Dingell