# Quotes about society

- Quotes: 119
- Authors: 29
- Topic page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society

## Quotes

> Such is the constitution of civil society, that whilst a few persons are distinguished by riches, by honors, and by knowledge, the body of the people is condemned to obscurity, ignorance and poverty. The Christian religion, which addressed itself to the whole human race, must consequently collect a far greater number of proselytes from the lower than from the superior ranks of life. This innocent and natural circumstance has been improved into a very odious imputation, which seems to be less strenuously denied by the apologists, than it is urged by the adversaries, of the faith; that the new sect of Christians was almost entirely composed of the dregs of the populace, of peasants and mechanics, of boys and women, of beggars and slaves, the last of whom might sometimes introduce the missionaries into the rich and noble families to which they belonged. These obscure teachers (such was the charge of malice and infidelity) are as mute in public as they are loquacious and dogmatical in private. Whilst they cautiously avoid the dangerous encounter of philosophers, they mingle with the rude and illiterate crowd, and insinuate themselves into those minds, whom their age, their sex, or their education, has the best disposed to receive the impression of superstitious terrors.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [religion](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/religion.md)

> A people elated by pride, or soured by discontent, is seldom qualified to form a just estimate of their actual situation.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> It was easier to vanquish the Goths than to eradicate the public vices.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [morality](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/morality.md)

> France has always more or less influenced manners in England; and when your fountain is choked up and polluted, the stream will not run long, or not run clear, with us, or perhaps with any nation. This gives all Europe, in my opinion, but too close and connected a concern in what is done in France. Excuse me, therefore, if I have dwelt too long on the atrocious spectacle of the 6th of October, 1789, or have given too much scope to the reflections which have arisen in my mind on occasion of the most important of all revolutions, which may be dated from that day, I mean a revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions.

Reflections on the Revolution in France

Topics: [politics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/politics.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure — but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and the invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place. This law is not subject to the will of those, who by an obligation above them, and infinitely superior, are bound to submit their will to that law. The municipal corporations of that universal kingdom are not morally at liberty at their pleasure, and on their speculations of a contingent improvement, wholly to separate and tear asunder the bands of their subordinate community, and to dissolve it into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of elementary principles. It is the first and supreme necessity only, a necessity that is not chosen, but chooses, a necessity paramount to deliberation, that admits no discussion, and demands no evidence, which alone can justify a resort to anarchy. This necessity is no exception to the rule; because this necessity itself is a part too of that moral and physical disposition of things, to which man must be obedient by consent or force: but if that which is only submission to necessity should be made the object of choice, the law is broken, nature is disobeyed, and the rebellious are outlawed, cast forth, and exiled, from this world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence, into the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow.

Reflections on the Revolution in France

Topics: [politics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/politics.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolitic.

Reflections on the Revolution in France

Topics: [politics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/politics.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possession of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possessions (as most concerned in it,) are the natural securities for this transmission.

Reflections on the Revolution in France

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [family](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/family.md)

> Good order is the foundation of all good things.

Reflections on the Revolution in France

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.

Reflections on the Revolution in France · p. 344

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas.

[G. Chesterton](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton.md) · [Heretics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics/the-modern-world.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> The middle and lower orders of London can sincerely, though not perhaps safely, admire the health and grace of the English aristocracy. And this for the very simple reason that the aristocrats are, upon the whole, more healthy and graceful than the poor. But they cannot honestly admire the wit of the aristocrats. And this for the simple reason that the aristocrats are not more witty than the poor, but a very great deal less so. A man does not hear, as in the smart novels, these gems of verbal felicity dropped between diplomatists at dinner. Where he really does hear them is between two omnibus conductors in a block in Holborn.

[G. Chesterton](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton.md) · [Heretics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics/the-middle-and.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> It means that the living and invigorating ideal of England must be looked for in the masses; it must be looked for where Dickens found it—Dickens among whose glories it was to be a humorist, to be a sentimentalist, to be an optimist, to be a poor man, to be an Englishman, but the greatest of whose glories was that he saw all mankind in its amazing and tropical luxuriance, and did not even notice the aristocracy; Dickens, the greatest of whose glories was that he could not describe a gentleman.

[G. Chesterton](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton.md) · [Heretics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics/it-means-that.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Because we are not in a civilization which believes strongly in oracles or sacred places, we see the full frenzy of those who killed themselves to find the sepulchre of Christ. But being in a civilization which does believe in this dogma of fact for facts' sake, we do not see the full frenzy of those who kill themselves to find the North Pole. I am not speaking of a tenable ultimate utility which is true both of the Crusades and the polar explorations. I mean merely that we do see the superficial and aesthetic singularity, the startling quality, about the idea of men crossing a continent with armies to conquer the place where a man died. But we do not see the aesthetic singularity and startling quality of men dying in agonies to find a place where no man can live — a place only interesting because it is supposed to be the meeting-place of some lines that do not exist.

[G. Chesterton](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton.md) · [Heretics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics/because-we-are.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [faith](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/faith.md)

> We have public-house licensing laws, but not sumptuary laws. That is to say, we have laws against the festivity and hospitality of the poor, but no laws against the festivity and hospitality of the rich. We have laws against blasphemy—that is, against a kind of coarse and offensive speaking in which nobody but a rough and obscure man would be likely to indulge. But we have no laws against heresy—that is, against the intellectual poisoning of the whole people, in which only a prosperous and prominent man would be likely to be successful. The evil of aristocracy is not that it necessarily leads to the infliction of bad things or the suffering of sad ones; the evil of aristocracy is that it places everything in the hands of a class of people who can always inflict what they can never suffer.

[G. Chesterton](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton.md) · [Heretics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics/we-have-public-house.md)

Topics: [power](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/power.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [justice](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/justice.md)

> This habit of insisting on the wit of the wealthier classes is the last and most servile of all the servilities. It is, as I have said, immeasurably more contemptible than the snobbishness of the novelette which describes the nobleman as smiling like an Apollo or riding a mad elephant. These may be exaggerations of beauty and courage, but beauty and courage are the unconscious ideals of aristocrats, even of stupid aristocrats. The nobleman of the novelette may not be sketched with any very close or conscientious attention to the daily habits of noblemen. But he is something more important than a reality; he is a practical ideal. The gentleman of fiction may not copy the gentleman of real life; but the gentleman of real life is copying the gentleman of fiction. He may not be particularly good-looking, but he would rather be good-looking than anything else; he may not have ridden on a mad elephant, but he rides a pony as far as possible with an air as if he had. And, upon the whole, the upper class not only especially desire these qualities of beauty and courage, but in some degree, at any rate, especially possess them. Thus there is nothing really mean or sycophantic about the popular literature which makes all its marquises seven feet high. It is snobbish, but it is not servile. Its exaggeration is based on an exuberant and honest admiration; its honest admiration is based upon something which is in some degree, at any rate, really there. The English lower classes do not fear the English upper classes in the least; nobody could. They simply and freely and sentimentally worship them. The strength of the aristocracy is not in the aristocracy at all; it is in the slums. It is not in the House of Lords; it is not in the Civil Service; it is not in the Government offices; it is not even in the huge and disproportionate monopoly of the English land. It is in a certain spirit. It is in the fact that when a navvy wishes to praise a man, it comes readily to his tongue to say that he has behaved like a gentleman. From a democratic point of view he might as well say that he had behaved like a viscount. The oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.

[G. Chesterton](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton.md) · [Heretics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics/this-habit-of-insisting.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> The poor are merely sentimental, and very excusably sentimental, if they praise the gentleman for having a ready hand and ready money. But they are strictly slaves and sycophants if they praise him for having a ready tongue. For that they have far more themselves.

[G. Chesterton](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton.md) · [Heretics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics/the-poor-are.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich. The word "kleptomania" is a vulgar example of what I mean. It is on a par with that strange theory, always advanced when a wealthy or prominent person is in the dock, that exposure is more of a punishment for the rich than for the poor. Of course, the very reverse is the truth. Exposure is more of a punishment for the poor than for the rich. The richer a man is the easier it is for him to be a tramp. The richer a man is the easier it is for him to be popular and generally respected in the Cannibal Islands. But the poorer a man is the more likely it is that he will have to use his past life whenever he wants to get a bed for the night. Honour is a luxury for aristocrats, but it is a necessity for hall-porters.

[G. Chesterton](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton.md) · [Heretics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics/science-in-the.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [justice](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/justice.md)

> If we were to-morrow morning snowed up in the street in which we live, we should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than we have ever known. And it is the whole effort of the typically modern person to escape from the street in which he lives. First he invents modern hygiene and goes to Margate. Then he invents modern culture and goes to Florence. Then he invents modern imperialism and goes to Timbuctoo. He goes to the fantastic borders of the earth. He pretends to shoot tigers. He almost rides on a camel. And in all this he is still essentially fleeing from the street in which he was born; and of this flight he is always ready with his own explanation. He says he is fleeing from his street because it is dull; he is lying. He is really fleeing from his street because it is a great deal too exciting. It is exciting because it is exacting; it is exacting because it is alive. He can visit Venice because to him the Venetians are only Venetians; the people in his own street are men. He can stare at the Chinese because for him the Chinese are a passive thing to be stared at; if he stares at the old lady in the next garden, she becomes active. He is forced to flee, in short, from the too stimulating society of his equals—of free men, perverse, personal, deliberately different from himself. The street in Brixton is too glowing and overpowering.

[G. Chesterton](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton.md) · [Heretics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics/if-we-were.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [relationships](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/relationships.md)

> The weak point in the whole of Carlyle's case for aristocracy lies, indeed, in his most celebrated phrase. Carlyle said that men were mostly fools. Christianity, with a surer and more reverent realism, says that they are all fools. This doctrine is sometimes called the doctrine of original sin. It may also be described as the doctrine of the equality of men. But the essential point of it is merely this, that whatever primary and far-reaching moral dangers affect any man, affect all men. All men can be criminals, if tempted; all men can be heroes, if inspired. And this doctrine does away altogether with Carlyle's pathetic belief (or any one else's pathetic belief) in "the wise few." There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.

[G. Chesterton](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton.md) · [Heretics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics/the-weak-point.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Every man speaks of public opinion, and means by public opinion, public opinion minus his opinion.

[G. Chesterton](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton.md) · [Heretics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics/every-man-speaks.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge.

[G. Chesterton](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton.md) · [Heretics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics/the-man-who.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [relationships](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/relationships.md)

> In the fifteenth century men cross-examined and tormented a man because he preached some immoral attitude; in the nineteenth century we feted and flattered Oscar Wilde because he preached such an attitude, and then broke his heart in penal servitude because he carried it out. It may be a question which of the two methods was the more cruel; there can be no kind of question which was the more ludicrous. The age of the Inquisition has not at least the disgrace of having produced a society which made an idol of the very same man for preaching the very same things which it made him a convict for practising.

[G. Chesterton](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton.md) · [Heretics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/heretics/in-the-fifteenth.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [hypocrisy](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/hypocrisy.md)

> Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?

[G. Chesterton](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton.md) · [The Napoleon of Notting Hill](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/the-napoleon-of-notting-hill.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/the-napoleon-of-notting-hill/many-clever-men.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [history](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/history.md)

> The practical reformer has continually to demand that changes be made in things which are supported by powerful and widely-spread feelings, or to question the apparent necessity and indefeasibleness of established facts; and it is often an indispensable part of his argument to show, how these powerful feelings had their origin, and how those facts came to seem necessary and indefeasible. There is therefore a natural hostility between him and a philosophy which discourages the explanation of feelings and moral facts by circumstances and association, and prefers to treat them as ultimate elements of human nature; a philosophy which is addicted to holding up favorite doctrines as intuitive truths, and deems intuition to be the voice of Nature and of God, speaking with an authority higher than that of our reason. In particular, I have long felt that the prevailing tendency to regard all the marked distinctions of human character as innate, and in the main indelible, and to ignore the irresistible proofs that by far the greater part of those differences, whether between individuals, races, or sexes, are such as not only might but naturally would be produced by differences in circumstances, is one of the chief hindrances to the rational treatment of great social questions, and one of the greatest stumbling blocks to human improvement.

Autobiography · p. 273

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [character](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/character.md), [change](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/change.md)

> These considerations did not make us overlook the folly of premature attempts to dispense with the inducements of private interest in social affairs, while no substitute for them has been or can be provided: but we regarded all existing institutions and social arrangements as being (in a phrase I once heard from Austin) "merely provisional," and we welcomed with the greatest pleasure and interest all socialistic experiments by select individuals (such as the Co-operative Societies), which, whether they succeeded or failed, could not but operate as a most useful education of those who took part in them, by cultivating their capacity of acting upon motives pointing directly to the general good, or making them aware of the defects which render them and others incapable of doing so.

Autobiography · p. 233

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> [E]xperience has taught me that those who give their time to the absorbing claims of what is called society, not having leisure to keep up a large acquaintance with the organs of opinion, remain much more ignorant of the general state either of the public mind, or of the active and instructed part of it, than a recluse who reads the newspapers need be.

Autobiography · p. 262

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> I did not know the way in which, among the ordinary English, the absence of interest in things of an unselfish kind, except occasionally in a special thing here and there, and the habit of not speaking to others, nor much even to themselves, about the things in which they do feel interest, causes both their feelings and their intellectual faculties to remain undeveloped, or to develope themselves only in some single and very limited direction; reducing them, considered as spiritual beings, to a kind of negative existence.

Autobiography · p. 59

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> But Bentham's subject was Legislation, of which Jurisprudence is only the formal part: and at every page he seemed to open a clearer and broader conception of what human opinions and institutions ought to be, how they might be made what they ought to be, and how far removed from it they now are. When I laid down the last volume of the Traité, I had become a different being. The "principle of utility" understood as Bentham understood it, and applied in the manner in which he applied it through these three volumes, fell exactly into its place as the keystone which held together the detached and fragmentary component parts of my knowledge and beliefs. It gave unity to my conceptions of things. I now had opinions; a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a religion; the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principal outward purpose of a life. And I had a grand conception laid before me of changes to be effected in the condition of mankind through that doctrine. The Traité de Législation wound up with what was to me a most impressive picture of human life as it would be made by such opinions and such laws as were recommended in the treatise.

Autobiography · p. 66

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> I thought the predominance of the aristocratic classes, the noble and the rich, in the English Constitution, an evil worth any struggle to get rid of; not on account of taxes, or any such comparatively small inconvenience, but as the great demoralizing agency in the country. Demoralizing, first, because it made the conduct of the government an example of gross public immorality, through the predominance of private over public interests in the State, and the abuse of the powers of legislation for the advantage of classes. Secondly, and in a still greater degree, because the respect of the multitude always attaching itself principally to that which, in the existing state of society, is the chief passport to power; and under English institutions, riches, hereditary or acquired, being the almost exclusive source of political importance; riches, and the signs of riches, were almost the only things really respected, and the life of the people was mainly devoted to the pursuit of them. I thought, that while the higher and richer classes held the power of government, the instruction and improvement of the mass of the people were contrary to the self-interest of those classes, because tending to render the people more powerful for throwing off the yoke: but if the democracy obtained a large, and perhaps the principal, share in the governing power, it would become the interest of the opulent classes to promote their education, in order to ward off really mischievous errors, and especially those which would lead to unjust violations of property. On these grounds I was not only as ardent as ever for democratic institutions, but earnestly hoped that Owenite, St. Simonian, and all other anti-property doctrines might spread widely among the poorer classes; not that I thought those doctrines true, or desired that they should be acted on, but in order that the higher classes might be made to see that they had more to fear from the poor when uneducated, than when educated.

Autobiography · p. 171

Topics: [politics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/politics.md), [power](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/power.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> M. Comte soon left the St. Simonians, and I lost sight of him and his writings for a number of years. But the St. Simonians I continued to cultivate. I was kept au courant of their progress by one of their most enthusiastic disciples, M. ... I was introduced to their chiefs, Bazard and Enfantin, in 1830; and as long as their public teachings and proselytism continued, I read nearly everything they wrote. Their criticisms on the common doctrines of Liberalism seemed to me full of important truth; and it was partly by their writings that my eyes were opened to the very limited and temporary value of the old political economy, which assumes private property and inheritance as indefeasible facts, and freedom of production and exchange as the dernier mot of social improvement. The scheme gradually unfolded by the St. Simonians, under which the labour and capital of society would be managed for the general account of the community every individual being required to take a share of labour either as thinker, teacher, artist, or producer, all being classed according to their capacity, and remunerated according to their works, appeared to me a far superior description of Socialism to Owen's.

Autobiography · p. 166

Topics: [politics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/politics.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

On Liberty

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [freedom](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/freedom.md)

> New technologies create new customs, new laws, new ethics, new crimes.

[Larry Niven](https://www.leafyquotes.com/larry-niven.md) · [Flatlander](https://www.leafyquotes.com/larry-niven/flatlander.md) · p. 28 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/larry-niven/flatlander/new-technologies-create.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [change](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/change.md)

> Putting a monkey wrench in machinery is often the only way to force somebody to repair, replace, or redesign the machinery. Especially legal or social machinery.

[Larry Niven](https://www.leafyquotes.com/larry-niven.md) · [The World Of Ptavvs](https://www.leafyquotes.com/larry-niven/the-world-of-ptavvs.md) · p. 97 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/larry-niven/the-world-of-ptavvs/putting-a-monkey.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [change](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/change.md)

> The Shades, in brief, were an abode of discredited gods and unlicensed thieves, ladies of the night and peddlers in exotic goods, alchemists of the mind and strolling mummers; in short, all the grease on civilization's axle.

[Terry Pratchett](https://www.leafyquotes.com/terry-pratchett.md) · [Equal Rites](https://www.leafyquotes.com/terry-pratchett/equal-rites.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/terry-pratchett/equal-rites/the-shades-in-brief.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> A hint was to Esk what a mosquito bite was to the average rhino because she was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.

[Terry Pratchett](https://www.leafyquotes.com/terry-pratchett.md) · [Equal Rites](https://www.leafyquotes.com/terry-pratchett/equal-rites.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/terry-pratchett/equal-rites/a-hint-was.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> They called themselves the Munrungs. It meant The People, or The True Human Beings.
>
> It's what most people call themselves, to begin with. And then one day the tribe meets some other People or, if it's not been a good day, The Enemy. If only they'd think up a name like Some More True Human Beings, it'd save a lot of trouble later on.

[Terry Pratchett](https://www.leafyquotes.com/terry-pratchett.md) · [The Carpet People](https://www.leafyquotes.com/terry-pratchett/the-carpet-people.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/terry-pratchett/the-carpet-people/they-called-themselves.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [identity](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/identity.md)

> Nor did I learn about sex from any reasoned source of instruction. I learned about it from the distorted and imperfect knowledge of other boys. This is the usual fate enforced upon youngsters by a society that is too prim and too hypocritical to have sex taught like any other branch of knowledge.
>
> Considering how important sex is, how great a source of joy, how enormous a source of misery and disease, how is permeates the workings of courtship and marriage, isn’t it strange that we go to great lengths to teach our children to play football and make no effort whatever to teach them to play sex?

[Isaac Asimov](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov.md) · [I, Asimov](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/i-asimov.md) · p. 93 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/i-asimov/nor-did-i-learn.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [hypocrisy](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/hypocrisy.md)

> There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don’t come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity.

[Isaac Asimov](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov.md) · [I, Asimov](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/i-asimov.md) · p. 421 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/i-asimov/there-are-no-nations.md)

Topics: [politics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/politics.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> I refuse to consider myself to be anything more sharply defined than “human being,” and I feel that aside from overpopulation the most intractable problem we face in trying to avoid the destruction of civilization and humanity is the diabolical habit of people dividing themselves into tiny groups, with each group extolling itself and denouncing its neighbors.

[Isaac Asimov](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov.md) · [I, Asimov](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/i-asimov.md) · p. 325 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/i-asimov/i-refuse-to-consider.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [identity](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/identity.md)

> The greatest single problem facing humanity today is the multiplicity of people. No environmental problem can possibly be solved till the population is stabilized and brought under control. Under these circumstances, it would seem that any young couple who were indifferent to children and showed no disposition to add to Earth’s burden ought to be encouraged and made much of.
>
> The truth, however, is quite the contrary. The world would not let us be childless. People who met us invariably asked if we had children, and when we said we didn’t, they would look at us with disapproval or with sorrow.

[Isaac Asimov](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov.md) · [I, Asimov](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/i-asimov.md) · p. 174 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/i-asimov/the-greatest-single.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [children](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/children.md)

> When I was young, all youngsters wore caps.… Now they are gone, all gone. The story I’ve heard was that caps were always worn by the bad guys in the early gangster movies, and the American public, never notable for thinking for themselves, therefore rejected them.

[Isaac Asimov](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov.md) · [I, Asimov](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/i-asimov.md) · p. 35 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/i-asimov/when-i-was.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> “It is a mistake,” he said, “to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort. We know that well enough from our experience in the environmental crisis of the twentieth century.”

[Isaac Asimov](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov.md) · [The Gods Themselves](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/the-gods-themselves.md) · p. 56 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/the-gods-themselves/it-is-a-mistake.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> At the slightest stress, human beings seemed to divide themselves into antagonistic groups.

[Isaac Asimov](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov.md) · [Prelude to Foundation](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/prelude-to-foundation.md) · p. 378 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/prelude-to-foundation/at-the-slightest.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> “But it’s been quiet under Cleon. And we’ve had fifty years of peace.”
>
> “Yes, but soldiers who are well-paid would resent having that pay reduced just because there is peace. Admirals resist mothballing ships and having themselves reduced in rank simply because there is less for them to do. So the credits still go—unproductively—to the armed forces and vital areas of the social good are allowed to deteriorate. That’s what I call decay. Don’t you?”

[Isaac Asimov](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov.md) · [Prelude to Foundation](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/prelude-to-foundation.md) · p. 71 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/prelude-to-foundation/but-its-been.md)

Topics: [politics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/politics.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> No matter how the conomy and sociology of the neighbouring sectors of the Galaxy changes, there was always an elite; and it is always the characteristic of an elite that it possesses leisure as the great reward of its elite-hood.

[Isaac Asimov](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov.md) · [Second Foundation](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/second-foundation.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/second-foundation/no-matter-how.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> An unpleasant nest of nasty, materialistic and aggressive people, careless of the rights of others, imperfectly democratic at home though quick to see the minor slaveries of others, and greedy without end.

[Isaac Asimov](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov.md) · [The Currents of Space](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/the-currents-of-space.md) · p. 62 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/the-currents-of-space/an-unpleasant-nest.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> There was no denying that he would always be conscious of the fact that an Earthman was an Earthman. He couldn’t help that. That was the result of a childhood immersed in an atmosphere of bigotry so complete that it was almost invisible, so entire that you accepted its axioms as second nature. Then you left it and saw it for what it was when you looked back.

[Isaac Asimov](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov.md) · [Pebble in the Sky](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/pebble-in-the-sky.md) · p. 58 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/pebble-in-the-sky/there-was-no-denying.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> It was the addition of status that brought the little things: a more comfortable seat here, a better cut of meat there, a shorter wait in line at the other place. To the philosophical mind, these items might seem scarcely worth any great trouble to acquire.
>
> Yet no one, however philosophical, could give up those privileges, once acquired, without a pang. That was the point.

[Isaac Asimov](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov.md) · [The Caves of Steel](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/the-caves-of-steel.md) · p. 85 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/the-caves-of-steel/it-was-the.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> “Logically, developing children are carefully screened for physical and mental defects before being allowed to mature.”
>
> Baley interrupted. “You mean you kill them if they don’t—”
>
> “If they don’t measure up. Quite painlessly, I assure you. The notion shocks you, just as the Earthman’s uncontrolled breeding shocks us.”

[Isaac Asimov](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov.md) · [The Caves of Steel](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/the-caves-of-steel.md) · p. 91 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/the-caves-of-steel/logically-developing-children.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [morality](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/morality.md), [children](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/children.md)

> Remember, you once said, Lije, that people sometimes mistake their own shortcomings for those of society and want to fix the Cities because they don’t know how to fix themselves.

[Isaac Asimov](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov.md) · [The Caves of Steel](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/the-caves-of-steel.md) · p. 148 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/the-caves-of-steel/remember-you-once.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Civilizations have always been pyramidal in structure. As one climbs toward the apex of the social edifice, there is increased leisure and increasing opportunity to pursue happiness. As one climbs, one finds also fewer and fewer people to enjoy this more and more. Invariably, there is a preponderance of the dispossessed. And remember this, no matter how well off the bottom layers of the pyramid might be on an absolute scale, they are always dispossessed in comparison with the apex.
>
> So there is always social friction in ordinary human societies. The action of social revolution and the reaction of guarding against such revolution or combating it once it has begun are the causes of a great deal of the human misery with which history is permeated.

[Isaac Asimov](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov.md) · [The Naked Sun](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/the-naked-sun.md) · p. 312 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/the-naked-sun/civilizations-have-always.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Yes - crime. Always some... Society's irreducible noise level. What to do? Your solution - prisons. State-sponsored perversion factories - costing ten times average family income to hold one inmate! Utterly crazy... Obviously something very wrong with people who shouted loudest for more prisons - They should be psychoanalysed! But let's be fair - really no alternative before electronic monitoring and control perfected - you should see the joyful crowds smashing the prison walls then - nothing like it since Berlin fifty years earlier! p. 39

[Arthur C. Clarke](https://www.leafyquotes.com/arthur-c-clarke.md) · [3001 The Final Odyssey](https://www.leafyquotes.com/arthur-c-clarke/3001-the-final-odyssey.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/arthur-c-clarke/3001-the-final-odyssey/yes-crime-always.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [crime](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/crime.md)

> There are no buildings that have been built by chance, remote from the human society where they have grown and its needs, hopes and understandings, even as there are no arbitrary lines and motiveless forms in the work of the masons. The life and existence of every great, beautiful and useful building, as well as its relation to the place where it has been built, often bears within itself complex and mysterious drama and history.

[Ivo Andric](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ivo-andric.md) · [The Bridge on the Drina](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ivo-andric/the-bridge-on-the-drina.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ivo-andric/the-bridge-on-the-drina/there-are-no-buildings.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Kanye West told a prime-time T.V. audience, "George Bush doesn't care about black people." Jesse Jackson later compared the New Orleans Convention Center to the "hull of a slave ship". A member of the Congressional Black Caucus claimed that if the storm victims had been "white, middle-class Americans" they would have received more help. Five years later, I can barely write those words without feeling disgusted. I am deeply insulted by the suggestion that we allowed American citizens to suffer because they were black. As I told the press at the time, "The storm didn't discriminate, and neither will we. When those coast guard choppers, many of whom were first on the scene, were pulling people off roofs, they didn't check the color of a person's skin." The more I thought about it, the angrier I felt. I was raised to believe that racism was one of the greatest evils in society. I admired dad's courage when he defied near-universal opposition from his constituents to vote for the Open Housing Bill of 1968. I was proud to have earned more black votes than any Republican governor in Texas history. I had appointed African Americans to top government positions, including the first black woman national security adviser and the first two black secretaries of state. It broke my heart to see minority children shuffled through the school system, so I had based my signature domestic policy initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act, on ending the soft bigotry of low expectations. I had launched a $15 billion program to combat HIV/AIDS in Africa. As part of the response to Katrina, my administration worked with Congress to provided historically black colleges and universities in the Gulf Coast with more than $400 million in loans to restore their campuses and renew their recruiting efforts.

[George W. Bush](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-w-bush.md) · [Decision Points](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-w-bush/decision-points.md) · p. 325 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-w-bush/decision-points/kanye-west-told.md)

Topics: [politics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/politics.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> The people were divided into the persecuted and those who persecuted them. That wild beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free. The signal was given, the barriers were down. As has so often happened in the history of man, permission was tacitly granted for acts of violence and plunder, even for murder, if they were carried out in the name of higher interests, according to established rules, and against a limited number of men of a particular type and belief. A man who saw clearly and with open eyes and was then living could see how this miracle took place and how the whole of a society could, in a single day, be transformed. In a few minutes the business quarter, based on centuries of tradition, was wiped out. It is true that there had always been concealed enmities and jealousies and religious intolerance, coarseness and cruelty, but there had also been courage and fellowship and a feeling for measure and order, which restrained all these instincts within the limits of the supportable and, in the end, calmed them down and submitted them to the general interest of life in common. Men who had been leaders in the commercial quarter for forty years vanished overnight as if they had all died suddenly, together with the habits, customs and institutions which they represented.

[Ivo Andric](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ivo-andric.md) · [The Bridge on the Drina](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ivo-andric/the-bridge-on-the-drina.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ivo-andric/the-bridge-on-the-drina/the-people-were.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [human nature](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/human-nature.md), [evil](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/evil.md)

> There ain't no such thing as civilization.

The Colossus of Maroussi · p. 144

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Somebody said that Bertolt Brecht [German socialist writer of political theater] wanted everybody to think alike. I want everybody to think alike. But Brecht wanted to do it through Communism, in a way. Russia is doing it under government. It's happening here [in America] all by itself without being under a strict government; so if it's working without trying, why can't it work without being Communist? Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we're getting more and more that way.

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol · p. 26

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> I love every "lib" movement there is, because after the "lib" the things that were always a mystique become understandable and boring, and then nobody has to feel left out if they're not part of what is happening. For instance, single people looking for husbands and wives used to feel left out because the image marriage had in the old days was so wonderful. w:Jane Wyatt and Robert Young. w:Nick and Nora Charles, Ethel and Fred Mertz, Dagwood and Blondie.

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> They, poor devils, were just machine-fodder, they were penned like cattle in housing-estates, the big Companies were gradually dominating their whole lives, regulating slavery, threatening to enlist all the nation’s workers, millions of hands to increase the wealth of a thousand idlers.

Germinal

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [work](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/work.md)

> There's only one thing that warms my heart, and that is the thought that we are going to sweep away these bourgeois.

Germinal

Topics: [politics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/politics.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> But now, deep in the earth, the miner was waking from his slumber and germinating in the soil like a real seed; and one fine day people would see what was growing in the middle of these fields: yes, men, a whole army of men, would spring up from the earth, and justice would be restored.

Germinal

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [justice](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/justice.md)

> They spoke one after the other in a despairing voice, giving expression to their complaints. The workers could not hold out; the Revolution had only aggravated their wretchedness; only the bourgeois had grown fat since '89, so greedily that they had not even left the bottom of the plates to lick. Who could say that the workers had had their reasonable share in the extraordinary increase of wealth and comfort during the last hundred years? They had made fun of them by declaring them free. Yes, free to starve, a freedom of which they fully availed themselves. It put no bread into your cupboard to go and vote for fine fellows who went away and enjoyed themselves, thinking no more of the wretched voters than of their old boots. No! one way or another it would have to come to an end, either quietly by laws, by an understanding in good fellowship, or like savages by burning everything and devouring one another. Even if they never saw it, their children would certainly see it, for the century could not come to an end without another revolution, that of the workers this time, a general hustling which would cleanse society from top to bottom, and rebuild it with more cleanliness and justice.

Germinal

Topics: [politics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/politics.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [justice](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/justice.md)

> This sounded the death knell of small family businesses, soon to be followed by the disappearance of the individual entrepreneur, gobbled up one by one by the increasingly hungry ogre of capitalism, and drowned by the rising tide of large companies.

Germinal

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> They were brutes, no doubt, but brutes who could not read, and who were dying of hunger.

Germinal

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Oh, those bourgeois scum! One day they’d stuff 'em with champagne and truffles till their guts burst!

Germinal

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [hatred](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/hatred.md)

> It was the red vision of the revolution, which would one day inevitably carry them all away, on some bloody evening at the end of the century. Yes, some evening the people, unbridled at last, would thus gallop along the roads, making the blood of the middle class flow, parading severed heads and sprinkling gold from disembowelled coffers. The women would yell, the men would have those wolf-like jaws open to bite. Yes, the same rags, the same thunder of great sabots, the same terrible troop, with dirty skins and tainted breath, sweeping away the old world beneath an overflowing flood of barbarians.

Germinal

Topics: [politics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/politics.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Foucarmont had twice fought duels, and he was in consequence most politely treated, and admitted into every circle.

Nana

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> The fact that what are commonly spoken of as rights are often really privileges is demonstrated in the case of the Jews. They resent bitterly their exclusion from certain hotels, resorts and other places of gathering, and make determined efforts to horn in. But the moment any considerable number of them horns in, the attractions of the place diminish, and the more pushful Jews turn to one where they are still nicht gewuenscht.

[H.L. Mencken](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hl-mencken.md) · [Minority Report](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hl-mencken/minority-report.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hl-mencken/minority-report/the-fact-that.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.

[H.L. Mencken](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hl-mencken.md) · [Minority Report](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hl-mencken/minority-report.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hl-mencken/minority-report/the-more-noisy.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Q: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here?
>
> A: Why do men go to zoos?

[H.L. Mencken](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hl-mencken.md) · [A Mencken Chrestomathy](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hl-mencken/a-mencken-chrestomathy.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hl-mencken/a-mencken-chrestomathy/q-if-you.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> My guess is that well over eighty per cent of the human race goes through life without ever having a single original thought. That is to say, they never think anything that has not been thought before, and by thousands.
>
> A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable. The pressure of ideas would simply drive it frantic. The normal human society is very little troubled by them. Whenever a new one appears the average man displays signs of dismay and resentment. The only way he can take in such a new idea is by translating it crudely into terms of more familiar ideas. That translation is one of the chief functions of politicians, not to mention journalists. They devote themselves largely to debasing the ideas launched by their betters. This debasement is intellectually reprehensible, but probably necessary to carry on the business of the world.

[H.L. Mencken](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hl-mencken.md) · [Minority Report](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hl-mencken/minority-report.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hl-mencken/minority-report/my-guess-is-that.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [thinking](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/thinking.md)

> Equality before the law is probably forever inattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

[H.L. Mencken](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hl-mencken.md) · [Minority Report](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hl-mencken/minority-report.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/hl-mencken/minority-report/equality-before-the.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [justice](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/justice.md)

> Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.

Holidays in Hell

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> The real slums are another matter. The bad parts of Tondo are as bad as any place I've seen, ancient, filthy houses swarmed with the poor and stinking of sewage and trash. But there are worse parts— squatter areas where people live under cardboard, in shipping crates, behind tacked-up newspapers. Dad would march you straight to the basement with a hairbrush in his hand if he caught you keeping your hamster cage like this.

Republican Party Reptile

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Something is happening to America, not something dangerous but something all too safe. I see it in my lifelong friends. I am a child of the "baby boom," a generation not known for its sane or cautious approach to things. Yet suddenly my peers are giving up drinking, giving up smoking, cutting down on coffee, sugar, and salt. They will not eat red meat and go now to restaurants whose menus have caused me to stand on a chair yelling, "Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, dinner is served!" This from the generation of LSD, Weather Underground, and Altamont Rock Festival! And all in the name of safety! Our nation has withstood many divisions—North and South, black and white, labor and management—but I do not know if the country can survive division into smoking and non-smoking sections.

Republican Party Reptile

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies. I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from the works of Plato and Socrates, the behaviour of the three Thomases, Aquinas, More and Jefferson — the austere analyses of Immanuel Kant and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

[James A. Michener](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-a-michener.md) · [The World Is My Home](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-a-michener/the-world-is-my-home.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/james-a-michener/the-world-is-my-home/i-am-a-humanist.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [morality](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/morality.md)

> In every province, the chief occupations, in order of importance, are lovemaking, malicious gossip, and talking nonsense.

[Voltaire](https://www.leafyquotes.com/voltaire.md) · [Candide](https://www.leafyquotes.com/voltaire/candide.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/voltaire/candide/in-every-province.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> He who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist.

Civil Disobedience

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> I had grown tired of standing in the lean and lonely front line facing the greatest enemy that ever confronted man — public opinion.

The Story Of My Life · p. 232

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interests the common interest of all the members of society, that is, sality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.

[Karl Marx](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx.md) · [The German Ideology](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx/the-german-ideology.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx/the-german-ideology/for-each-new.md)

Topics: [politics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/politics.md), [power](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/power.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals. Its organisation is, therefore, essentially economic, the material production of the conditions of this unity; it turns existing conditions into conditions of unity. The reality, which communism is creating, is precisely the true basis for rendering it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals, insofar as reality is only a product of the preceding intercourse of individuals themselves.

[Karl Marx](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx.md) · [The German Ideology](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx/the-german-ideology.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx/the-german-ideology/communism-differs-from.md)

Topics: [politics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/politics.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production. The social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they appear in their own or other people's imagination, but as they really are; i.e. as they are effective, produce materially, and are active under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.
>
> The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of the politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics of a people. Men are the producers of their conception, ideas, etc. — real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

[Karl Marx](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx.md) · [The German Ideology](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx/the-german-ideology.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx/the-german-ideology/the-fact-is-therefore.md)

Topics: [politics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/politics.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

[Karl Marx](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx.md) · [The German Ideology](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx/the-german-ideology.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx/the-german-ideology/communism-is-for.md)

Topics: [politics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/politics.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> In civil law the existing property relationships are declared to be the result of the general will. The jus utendi et abutendi itself asserts on the one hand the fact that private property has become entirely independent of the community, and on the other the illusion that private property itself is based solely on the private will, the arbitrary disposal.

[Karl Marx](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx.md) · [The German Ideology](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx/the-german-ideology.md) · p. 188 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx/the-german-ideology/in-civil-law.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic and must remain so if he does not wish to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

[Karl Marx](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx.md) · [The German Ideology](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx/the-german-ideology.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx/the-german-ideology/for-as-soon.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [freedom](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/freedom.md), [work](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/work.md)

> Bourgeois society continuously brings forth the Jew from its own entrails.

[Karl Marx](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx.md) · [On the Jewish Question](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx/on-the-jewish-question.md) · p. 72 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx/on-the-jewish-question/bourgeois-society-continuously.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the State has become a separate entity, beside and outside civil society; but is it nothing more than the form of organization which the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests.

[Karl Marx](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx.md) · [The German Ideology](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx/the-german-ideology.md) · p. 187 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/karl-marx/the-german-ideology/through-the-emancipation.md)

Topics: [politics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/politics.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is—a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any man at the head of it is beneath pitifulness.

[Mark Twain](https://www.leafyquotes.com/mark-twain.md) · [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn](https://www.leafyquotes.com/mark-twain/adventures-of-huckleberry-finn.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/mark-twain/adventures-of-huckleberry-finn/the-pitifulest-thing.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [courage](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/courage.md)

> H'aint we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?

[Mark Twain](https://www.leafyquotes.com/mark-twain.md) · [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn](https://www.leafyquotes.com/mark-twain/adventures-of-huckleberry-finn.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/mark-twain/adventures-of-huckleberry-finn/haint-we-got.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [stupidity](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/stupidity.md)

> No California gentleman or lady ever abuses or oppresses a Chinaman, under any circumstances, an explanation that seems to be much needed in the east. Only the scum of the population do it; they and their children. They, and, naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians, likewise, for these are the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum, there as well as elsewhere in America.

[Mark Twain](https://www.leafyquotes.com/mark-twain.md) · [Roughing It](https://www.leafyquotes.com/mark-twain/roughing-it.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/mark-twain/roughing-it/no-california-gentleman.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> As a Citizen . . . Make calls, write letters, attend town halls. . . . [M]ake clear that this is an issue that will help determine how you vote. . . . Look locally as well as nationally. . . . Run for office.

[Bill Gates](https://www.leafyquotes.com/bill-gates.md) · [How to Avoid a Climate Disaster](https://www.leafyquotes.com/bill-gates/how-to-avoid-a-climate-disaster.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/bill-gates/how-to-avoid-a-climate-disaster/as-a-citizen.md)

Topics: [politics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/politics.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> One of the wonderful things about the information highway is that virtual equity is far easier to achieve than real-world equity...We are all created equal in the virtual world and we can use this equality to help address some of the sociological problems that society has yet to solve in the physical world,"

[Bill Gates](https://www.leafyquotes.com/bill-gates.md) · [The Road Ahead](https://www.leafyquotes.com/bill-gates/the-road-ahead.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/bill-gates/the-road-ahead/one-of-the.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [justice](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/justice.md)

> So there's no question about it: by the mid-fifties, America was definitely in a Golden Era, an era of excitement and opportunity for all citizens, regardless of race or creed or color, unless the person happened to be black. Then there was a problem.

[Dave Barry](https://www.leafyquotes.com/dave-barry.md) · [Dave Barry Slept Here](https://www.leafyquotes.com/dave-barry/dave-barry-slept-here.md) · p. 137 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/dave-barry/dave-barry-slept-here/so-theres-no-question.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [hypocrisy](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/hypocrisy.md)

> Thus was born the civil rights movement, an epic struggle that has required much sacrifice and pain, but which has enabled the United States to progress, in just three decades, from being a nation where blacks were forced to ride in the back of the bus, to being a nation where, due to federal cutbacks, there is no bus.

[Dave Barry](https://www.leafyquotes.com/dave-barry.md) · [Dave Barry Slept Here](https://www.leafyquotes.com/dave-barry/dave-barry-slept-here.md) · p. 138 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/dave-barry/dave-barry-slept-here/thus-was-born.md)

Topics: [politics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/politics.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> No, subtlety and protocol are not the strong suit of Americans, which is one reason why the Japanese tend to view us as large, loud water buffalo, lumbering around without a clue, tromping and pooping all over their carefully arranged, exquisitely tended garden of a society. I certainly felt like a water buffalo when I got off the plane at Narita Airport, mumbling my one word of Japanese, taking my long vowels seriously, and weighing approximately four hundred pounds more than when I got on.

[Dave Barry](https://www.leafyquotes.com/dave-barry.md) · [Dave Barry Does Japan](https://www.leafyquotes.com/dave-barry/dave-barry-does-japan.md) · p. 39 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/dave-barry/dave-barry-does-japan/no-subtlety-and.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> The mysterious thing about all this is that Japan- ask anybody who has been there- has superb service. And not just in nice hotels. Everywhere. You walk into any store, any restaurant, no matter how low-rent it looks, and I bet you that somebody will immediately call out to you in a cheerful manner. This happened to us all over. I never understood what the people were saying, of course. They could have been saying: "Hah! Americans! We will eventually purchase your entire nation and use the Lincoln Memorial for tofu storage!" But they always sounded friendly and welcoming. And they were always eager to wait on us. I couldn't help but think of the many times I've been in American stores, especially large ones, attempting to give somebody some money in exchange for merchandise- which I always thought was the whole point of stores- but was unable to do so because the store employees were too busy with other, high-priority activities, such as talking or staring into space. More than once, in America's stores, I have felt like an intruder for trying to give money to clerks. "Oh great" is their unspoken but extremely clear attitude. "Here we had everything going nice and smooth, and along comes this doofus who wants- of all things!- to make a purchase. In a store, for God's sake."

[Dave Barry](https://www.leafyquotes.com/dave-barry.md) · [Dave Barry Does Japan](https://www.leafyquotes.com/dave-barry/dave-barry-does-japan.md) · p. 47 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/dave-barry/dave-barry-does-japan/the-mysterious-thing.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> For man seeketh in society comfort, use, and protection: and they be three wisdoms of divers natures, which do often sever: wisdom of the behaviour, wisdom of business, and wisdom of state.

[Francis Bacon](https://www.leafyquotes.com/francis-bacon.md) · [The Advancement of Learning](https://www.leafyquotes.com/francis-bacon/the-advancement-of-learning.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/francis-bacon/the-advancement-of-learning/for-man-seeketh.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [wisdom](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/wisdom.md)

> It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.

[George Bernard Shaw](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw.md) · [Pygmalion](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw/pygmalion.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw/pygmalion/it-is-impossible.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> I ask you, what am I? I'm one of the undeserving poor: thats what I am. Think of what that means to a man.

[George Bernard Shaw](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw.md) · [Pygmalion](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw/pygmalion.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw/pygmalion/i-ask-you.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Independence? That's middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

[George Bernard Shaw](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw.md) · [Pygmalion](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw/pygmalion.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw/pygmalion/independence-thats-middle-class.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [relationships](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/relationships.md)

> Undershaft: You have made for yourself something that you call a morality or a religion or what not. It doesn't fit the facts. Well, scrap it. Scrap it and get one that does fit. That is what is wrong with the world at present. It scraps its obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it wont scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions. Whats the result? In machinery it does very well; but in morals and religion and politics it is working at a loss that brings it nearer bankruptcy every year.

[George Bernard Shaw](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw.md) · [Major Barbara](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw/major-barbara.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw/major-barbara/undershaft-you-have.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [change](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/change.md)

> The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier: the manners and habits of a duke would cost a city clerk his situation.

[George Bernard Shaw](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw.md) · [Major Barbara](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw/major-barbara.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw/major-barbara/the-faults-of-the.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [hypocrisy](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/hypocrisy.md)

> Cusins: Call you poverty a crime?
>
> Undershaft: The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill fed, ill clothed people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty.

[George Bernard Shaw](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw.md) · [Major Barbara](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw/major-barbara.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw/major-barbara/cusins-call-you.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [crime](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/crime.md)

> Society, with all its prisons and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and starvations, is powerless in the face of the Anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in the battle with it. Our natural safety from the cheap and devastating explosives which every Russian student can make ... lies in the fact that brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until their consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is, then, simply not to outrage their consciences.

[George Bernard Shaw](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw.md) · [Major Barbara](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw/major-barbara.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw/major-barbara/society-with-all.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Theodotus: Caesar: you are a stranger here, and not conversant with our laws. The kings and queens of Egypt may not marry except with their own royal blood. Ptolemy and Cleopatra are born king and consort just as they are born brother and sister.
>
> Britannus (shocked): Caesar: this is not proper.
>
> Theodotus (outraged): How!
>
> Caesar (recovering his self-possession): Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

[George Bernard Shaw](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw.md) · [Caesar and Cleopatra](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw/caesar-and-cleopatra.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-bernard-shaw/caesar-and-cleopatra/theodotus-caesar-you.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> "Detestation of the high is the involuntary homage of the low."

[Charles Dickens](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens.md) · [A Tale of Two Cities](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens/a-tale-of-two-cities.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens/a-tale-of-two-cities/detestation-of-the.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> A large cask of wine had been dropped and broken, in the street. The accident had happened in getting it out of a cart; the cask had tumbled out with a run, the hoops had burst, and it lay on the stones just outside the door of the wine-shop, shattered like a walnut-shell.All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women's heads, which were squeezed dry into infants' mouths; others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments with eager relish. There was no drainage to carry off the wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up along with it, that there might have been a scavenger in the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in such a miraculous presence.A shrill sound of laughter and of amused voices—voices of men, women, and children—resounded in the street while this wine game lasted. There was little roughness in the sport, and much playfulness. There was a special companionship in it, an observable inclination on the part of every one to join some other one, which led, especially among the luckier or lighter-hearted, to frolicsome embraces, drinking of healths, shaking of hands, and even joining of hands and dancing, a dozen together. When the wine was gone, and the places where it had been most abundant were raked into a gridiron-pattern by fingers, these demonstrations ceased, as suddenly as they had broken out. The man who had left his saw sticking in the firewood he was cutting, set it in motion again; the women who had left on a door-step the little pot of hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften the pain in her own starved fingers and toes, or in those of her child, returned to it; men with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous faces, who had emerged into the winter light from cellars, moved away, to descend again; and a gloom gathered on the scene that appeared more natural to it than sunshine.

[Charles Dickens](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens.md) · [A Tale of Two Cities](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens/a-tale-of-two-cities.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens/a-tale-of-two-cities/a-large-cask.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [suffering](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/suffering.md)

> The sea of black and threatening waters, and of destructive upheaving of wave against wave, whose depths were yet unfathomed and whose forces were yet unknown. The remorseless sea of turbulently swaying shapes, voices of vengeance, and faces hardened in the furnaces of suffering until the touch of pity could make no mark on them.

[Charles Dickens](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens.md) · [A Tale of Two Cities](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens/a-tale-of-two-cities.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens/a-tale-of-two-cities/the-sea-of-black.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [suffering](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/suffering.md)

> Expressive signs of what made them poor, were not wanting; the tax for the state, the tax for the church, the tax for the lord, tax local and tax general, were to be paid here and to be paid there, according to solemn inscription in the little village, until the wonder was, that there was any village left unswallowed.

[Charles Dickens](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens.md) · [A Tale of Two Cities](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens/a-tale-of-two-cities.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens/a-tale-of-two-cities/expressive-signs-of-what.md)

Topics: [power](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/power.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.

[Charles Dickens](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens.md) · [A Tale of Two Cities](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens/a-tale-of-two-cities.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens/a-tale-of-two-cities/crush-humanity-out.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [history](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/history.md)

> Samples of a people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground old people young, shivered at every corner, passed in and out at every doorway, looked from every window, fluttered in every vestige of a garment that the wind shook. The mill which had worked them down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sigh, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and stared up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker's shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomics in every farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil.

[Charles Dickens](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens.md) · [A Tale of Two Cities](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens/a-tale-of-two-cities.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens/a-tale-of-two-cities/samples-of-a-people.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [suffering](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/suffering.md)

> "'We were so robbed by that man who stands there, as all we common dogs are by those superior Beings — taxed by him without mercy, obliged to work for him without pay, obliged to grind our corn at his mill, obliged to feed scores of his tame birds on our wretched crops, and forbidden for our lives to keep a single tame bird of our own, pillaged and plundered to that degree that when we chanced to have a bit of meat, we ate it in fear, with the doors barred and the shutters closed, that his people should not see it and take it from us — I say, we were so robbed, and hunted, and were made so poor, that our father told us it was a dreadful thing to bring a child into the world, and that what we should most pray for, was, that our women might be barren and our miserable race die out!'"

[Charles Dickens](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens.md) · [A Tale of Two Cities](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens/a-tale-of-two-cities.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens/a-tale-of-two-cities/we-were-so-robbed.md)

Topics: [power](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/power.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [justice](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/justice.md)

> It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

[Charles Dickens](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens.md) · [A Tale of Two Cities](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens/a-tale-of-two-cities.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-dickens/a-tale-of-two-cities/it-was-the.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [history](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/history.md)

> Remember, comrades, your resolution must never falter. No argument must lead you astray. Never listen when they tell you that Man and the animals have a common interest, that the prosperity of the one is the prosperity of the others. It is all lies. Man serves the interests of no creature except himself. And among us animals let there be perfect unity, perfect comradeship in the struggle. All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.

[George Orwell](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-orwell.md) · [Animal Farm](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-orwell/animal-farm.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-orwell/animal-farm/remember-comrades-your.md)

Topics: [politics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/politics.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Nobody stole, nobody grumbled over his rations, the quarreling and biting and jealousy which had been normal features of life in the old days had almost disappeared.

[George Orwell](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-orwell.md) · [Animal Farm](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-orwell/animal-farm.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-orwell/animal-farm/nobody-stole-nobody.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Why then do we continue in this miserable condition? Because nearly the whole of the produce of our labour is stolen from us by human beings. There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word--Man. Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished for ever.

[George Orwell](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-orwell.md) · [Animal Farm](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-orwell/animal-farm.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-orwell/animal-farm/why-then-do-we-continue.md)

Topics: [politics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/politics.md), [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)

> Some years ago Professor Bixler reminded us of the danger of overstressing the well-adjusted life. Everybody passionately seeks to be well-adjusted. We must, of course, be well-adjusted to avoid neurotic schizophrenic personalities, but there are some things in our world to which men of goodwill must be maladjusted. I confess that I never intend to become adjusted to the evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination, to the moral degeneracy of religious bigotry and the corroding effects of narrow sectarianism, to economic conditions that deprive men of work and food, and the to the insanities of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.

[Martin Luther King, Jr.](https://www.leafyquotes.com/martin-luther-king-jr.md) · [Strength to Love](https://www.leafyquotes.com/martin-luther-king-jr/strength-to-love.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/martin-luther-king-jr/strength-to-love/some-years-ago.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md), [justice](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/justice.md)

> Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

[Martin Luther King, Jr.](https://www.leafyquotes.com/martin-luther-king-jr.md) · [Strength to Love](https://www.leafyquotes.com/martin-luther-king-jr/strength-to-love.md) — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/martin-luther-king-jr/strength-to-love/human-salvation-lies.md)

Topics: [society](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/society.md)