Society Quotes – Thoughtful Reflections on Human Interaction

"You can never really understand an individual unless you also understand the society, historical time period in which they live, personal troubles, and social issues."

Charles Wright Mills

"A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort ... is not strictly speaking a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang violence."

Ayn Rand

"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."

Isaac Asimov

"Beneath the broad tides of human history there flow the stealthy undercurrents of the secret societies, which frequently determine in the depth the changes that take place upon the surface."

Arthur Edward Waite

"You can protect a society, you can protect an economy, and you can even protect personal relationships to death."

Prof. Ferdinand Kirchhof

"Our society is run by mad men, for crazy targets. I think we are driven by mad men, to a mad end, And I think I am imprisoned as a madman because I say that. That is what's insane about it."

John Lennon

"Being a socialist means subordinating the self to the collective, sacrificing one's personality for the greater good. Socialism, in its deepest sense, is service. It is renunciation for the individual and demand for the whole."

Joseph Goebbels

"Never before in the course of the world’s history had such a Society [i.e., the Jesuit Order] appeared. The old Roman Senate itself did not lay schemes for world domination with greater certainty of success."

Friedrich von Hardenberg

"No society ever thrived because it had a large and growing class of parasites living off those who produce."

Thomas Sowell

"The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation"

Terence McKenna

"Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both."

Charles Wright Mills

"A free society is a society in which all traditions have equal rights and equal access to the centers of power. A tradition receives these rights not because the importance the cash value, as it were) it has for outsiders but because it gives meaning to the lives of those who participate in it."

Paul Feyerabend

"It may well be that a societys greatest madness seems normal to itself."

Allan Bloom

"Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others."

Alan Kay

"Far from being magisterial in its objectivity, science was conditioned by history, society, and the prejudices of scientists."

Thomas Kuhn

"In any given society the authority of man over man runs in inverse proportion to the intellectual development of that society."

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"Socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good."

Ayn Rand

"Many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of 'unadjusted' individuals, and not of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself."

Erich Fromm