Quotes about society

When the common good of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals.

Since there is no such entity as ‘the public,’ since the public is merely a number of individuals, any claimed or implied conflict of ‘the public interest’ with private interests means that the interests of some men are to be sacrificed to the interests and wishes of others. Since the concept is so conveniently undefinable, its use rests only on any given gang's ability to proclaim that ‘The public, c’est moi’—and to maintain the claim at the point of a gun.

Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.

However hard they try, men cannot create a social organism, they can only create an organization. In the process of trying to create an organism they will merely create a totalitarian despotism.

"Stability," said the Controller, "stability. No civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability."

Every one belongs to every one else.

Wheels must turn steadily, but cannot turn untended, There must be men to tend them, men as steady as the wheels upon their axles, sane men, obedient men, stable in contentment.

"When the individual feels, the community reels," Lenina pronounced.

"Well, why shouldn't it reel a bit?"

"Bernard!"

This is the threat to our lives. We all face it. We all operate in our society in relation to a system. Now is the system going to eat you up and relieve you of your humanity or are you going to be able to use the system to human purposes? … If the person doesn't listen to the demands of his own spiritual and heart life and insists on a certain program, you're going to have a schizophrenic crack-up. The person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a programmatic life and it's not the one the body's interested in at all. And the world's full of people who have stopped listening to themselves.

Nothing would prove more disastrous to our ideas, we contended, than to neglect the effect of the internal upon the external, of the psychological motives and needs upon existing institutions. (p. 402)

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

Society is the most powerful conception in the world and society has no existence whatsoever.