Quotes about society

Conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation.

I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.

Knowledge is employed in the service of the necessity of life and primarily in the service of the instinct of personal preservation. The necessity and this instinct have created in man the organs of knowledge and given them such capacity as they possess. Man sees, hears, touches, tastes and smells that which it is necessary for him to see, hear, touch, taste and smell in order to preserve his life. The decay or loss of any of these senses increases the risks with which his life is environed, and if it increases them less in the state of society in which we are actually living, the reason is that some see, hear, touch, taste and smell for others. A blind man, by himself and without a guide, could not live long. Society is an additional sense; it is the true common sense.

Reason, that which we call reason, reflex and reflective knowledge, the distinguishing mark of man, is a social product.

Where there is equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would happen, strength would change into consciousness.

If human equality is to be forever averted — if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently — then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.''

Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.

And the people under the sky were also very much the same — everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same — people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.

The proles were immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure in the yard.

The future belonged to the proles. And... when their time came the world they constructed would not be just as alien to him, Winston Smith, as the world of the Party? Yes, because at the least it would be a world of sanity.

If there was hope, it lay in the proles!'''

In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.