c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
We teach our boys to firebomb villages, but we won't let them write fuck on the side of their planes because it's obscene.
— Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now
A man without a wife and babies is a menace to civilization... One bachelor is an irritation. Ten thousand bachelors are a war.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender in Exile
If you ask me, my ideal would be the society based on liberty, equality and fraternity. An ideal society should be mobile and full of channels of conveying a change taking place in one part to other parts.
— B.R. Ambedkar, Writings And Speeches: A Ready Reference Manual
To me, the best zombie movies aren’t the splatter fests of gore and violence with goofy characters and tongue in cheek antics. Good zombie movies show us how messed up we are, they make us question our station in society… and our society’s station in the world. They show us gore and violence and all that cool stuff too… but there’s always an undercurrent of social commentary and thoughtfulness.
— Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead, Vol. 01: Days Gone Bye
If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals . . . We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it's too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us -- create who we are. It is we who created the system. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)
— Haruki Murakami
The secret message communicated to most young people today by the society around them is that they are not needed, that the society will run itself quite nicely until they - at some distant point in the future - will take over the reigns. Yet the fact is that the society is not running itself nicely... because the rest of us need all the energy, brains, imagination and talent that young people can bring to bear down on our difficulties. For society to attempt to solve its desperate problems without the full participation of even very young people is imbecile.
— Alvin Toffler
It must be recognized that in any culture the source of law is the god of that society.
— Rousas John Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law, Volume 1 of 3
Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is.
— Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States
Soon after I began working for the Professor, I realized that he talked about numbers whenever he was unsure of what to say or do. Numbers were also his way of reaching out to the world. They were safe, a source of comfort.
— Yōko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor
I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess that we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.
— John D. MacDonald, The Deep Blue Good-By
She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with. She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance, but I cannot pity her: she is white. She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it. She persisted, and her subsequent reaction is something that all of us have known at one time or another. She did something every child has done-she tried to put the evidence of her offense away from her. But in this case she was no child hiding stolen contraband: she struck out at her victim-of necessity she must put him away from her-he must be removed from her presence, from this world. She must destroy the evidence of her offense.
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
You'll get everything society can give a man. You'll keep all the money. You'll take any fame or honor anyone might want to grant. You'll accept such gratitude as the tenants might feel. And I - I'll take what nobody can give a man, except himself. I will have built Cortlandt. - Howard Roark
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
It [is] that courage that Africa most desperately needs.
— Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
How long will it be necessary to pay City men so entirely out of proportion to what other servants of society commonly receive for performing social services not less useful or difficult?
— John Maynard Keynes
Logic is something the mind has created to conceal its timidity, a hocus-pocus designed to give formal validity to conclusions we are willing to accept if everybody else in our set will too.
— Carl Lotus Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers
We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds. -Laura Ingalls Wilder, author (1867-1957)
— Laura Ingalls Wilder
Expect poison from the standing water.
— William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
We have too much technological progress, life is too hectic, and our society has only one goal: to invent still more technological marvels to make life even easier and better. The craving for every new scientific discovery breeds a hunger for greater comfort and the constant struggle to achieve it. All that kills the soul, kills compassion, understanding, nobility. It leaves no time for caring what happens to other people, least of all criminals. Even the officials in Venezuela's remote areas are better for they're also concerned with public peace. It gives them many headaches, but they seem to believe that bringing about a man's salvation is worth the effort. I find that magnificent.
— Henri Charrière, Papillon
The ones who hate me the most are the ones who don't scare me.
— Rebecca McKinsey
The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.
— John Fowles, The Collector
In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.
— William Kingdon Clifford, The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays
I hate the endless admonishments of a nanny state that lives in fear of its lawyers. While colonies of dim-witted traffic wardens swarm about looking for minor parking infringements, nobody seems to notice that our very social fabric is falling apart.
— Christopher Fowler, The Victoria Vanishes
. . . then life began, and since then we remember each dumpster, abandoned house, and foot-chase by retail security. At night, after running around, plotting and scheming, our checklist items all crossed out, we paused to think — 'What to do tomorrow?' and the answer was always, 'As we please . . .
— CrimethInc., Evasion
Those who most obstinately oppose the most widely-held opinions more often do so because of pride than lack of intelligence. They find the best places in the right set already taken, and they do not want back seats.
— François de La Rochefoucauld
If we only have great companies, we will merely have a prosperous society, not a great one. Economic growth and power are the means, not the definition, of a great nation.
— James C. Collins, GOOD TO GRT  SOCIAL SECTOR PB
You're only young once. That is all society can stand.
— Jane Seabrook, Furry Logic Parenthood
The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.
— Marcel Proust
Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them?
— Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays
Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.
— J.B. Priestley
A writer should not run around with a mirror for his countrymen
—  he should tell his society and his times things no one ever thought before.
He is among those beings of great scope who spread their leafy branches willingly over broad horizons. To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to know shame at the sight of poverty which is not of our making. It is to be proud of a victory won by our comrades. It is to feel, as we place our stone, that we are contributing to the building of the world.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars
Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
The English judged a person so that they'd be justified in casting her out. The Amish judged a person so that they'd be justified in welcoming her back. Where I'm from, if someone is accused of sinning, it's not so that others can place blame. It's so that the person can make amends and move on.
— Jodi Picoult, Plain Truth
The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
Someone ... tell us what's important, because we no longer know.
— Richard Ford, A Multitude of Sins
Society can only hurt if you care for its opinion
— Jude Morgan, Indiscretion
Artists don't create society, they reflect it
— Ben Elton, Popcorn
THE CORRECTION, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.
— Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
In our society of fixed texts and printed words, it is the function of the poet to see the life value of the facts round about, and to deify them, as it were, to provide images that relate the everyday to the eternal.
— Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation
The elephants are dancing on the graves of squeeling mice.
— Cream
Society shall never make progress unless it changes its basic objective of making things easier;instead our main objective should be to make men stronger!I say "men" as women have always had and shall continue to have all the strength needed!!-Ashoka Jahnavi Prasad(Woods oration-2008)
— Ashoka Jahnavi Prasad
While there is a lower class I am in it. While there is a criminal element I am of it. While there is a soul in prison I am not free.
— Eugene V. Debs
Never trust someone that claims they care nothing of what society thinks of them. Instead of conquering obstacles, they simply pretend they don't exist.
— Tiffany Madison
Show me a filthy public restroom and I’ll show you a society where discipline and order have broken down.
— Lourd Ernest H. de Veyra, The Best of This Is A Crazy Planets
If little else, the brain is an educational toy.The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometime they'd rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don't play some people's game, they say that you have "lost your marbles," not recognizing that, while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain.
— Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine destiny; so long as the three great problems of the century—the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light—are unsolved; so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world;—in other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use. HAUTEVILLE HOUSE, 1862. [Translation by Isabel F. Hapgood]
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. It enslaves him almost before he has tasted freedom. The 'ologies' will tell you how its done Theology calls it building a conscience or developing a spirit of selflessness. Psychology calls it the growth of the superego.Considering how long society has been at it, you'd expect a better job. But the campaigns have been badly planned and the victory has never been secured.
— B.F. Skinner, Walden Two
Society sucks. It should not matter what others think, if we are fine with it. Still we both have to concern ourselves with what others might see and think.
— Jayson James, Tormented Discovery
A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.
— Edith Wharton
In our country for all her greatness there is one thing she cannot do and that is translate a person wholly out of one class into another. Perfect translation from one language into another is impossible. Class is the British language.
— William Golding, Rites of Passage
The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power--and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition.But that's not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.
— Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.
— William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience
We don't need to have the answers. We'll never have them. They'll come and go and change. And all we can do is figure out the best way to behave when life comes at us. Even if society says it isn't right. Right is so subjective, after all.
— Na, I'll Be Seeing You
It is sobering to reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.
— Charles A. Beard
Sometimes you need a reminder that negative comments about your body aren’t even really about your body, they’re about society and our society’s wrongheaded and impossibly narrow definition of a “good” body. Your body didn’t do anything wrong. What’s fucked up about your body is not your body at all, but that your body has to live in a society that thinks it has a right to say fucked up things about your body.
— Golda Poretsky
Experience 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. 
— John Stuart Mill, The Autobiography
Everyone rushes wherever his instincts impel him, the populace swarms like insects over a corpse, poets pass by without having the time to sculpt their thoughts, hardly have they scribbled their ideas down on sheets of paper than the sheets are blown away; everything glitters and everything resounds in this masquerade, beneath its ephemeral royalties and its cardboard scepters, gold flows, wine cascades, cold debauchery lifts her skirts and jigs around…horror! horror! and then there hangs over it all a veil that each one grabs part of to hide himself the best he can. Derision! Horror – horror!
— Gustave Flaubert, Memoirs of a Madman
Unless society came out past Flat Rock Crossroads, kept on past Booker T. High School, hung two rights, a left, turned in on Milk Farm Road and found Roland plowing a tobacco field, jerked him off the tractor, warped him and set him back up there without anybody riding by and noticing, blame can't be laid on society.
— Kaye Gibbons, A Virtuous Woman
and there was a beautiful view but nobody could see cause everybody on the island was saying look at me
— Laurie  Anderson
If wrappings of cloth can impart respectability, the most respectable persons are the Egyptian mummies, all wrapped in layers and layers of gauze
— Kamala Suraiyya Das, Wages of Love
We’ve become a nation of defaulters: we buy on credit, and when the bill comes in, we’re so deeply outraged that we refuse even to look at it.
— Tana French, The Likeness
There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good.
— Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny
There is something about veganism that is not easy, but the difficulty is not inherent in veganism, but in our culture.
— Will Tuttle, The World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony
The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.
— Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety
Successfully functioning in a society with diverse values, traditions and lifestyles requires us to have a relationship to our own reactions rather than be captive of them. To resist our tendencies to make right or true, that which is nearly familiar, and wrong or false, that which is only strange.
— Robert Kegan
They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience
...isn't it possible that advertising as a whole is a fantastic fraud, presenting an image of America taken seriously by no one, least of all the advertising men who create it? 
— David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character
Look out!! Ha! Now you've done it! Now you've broken a lamp, and you've got no one to blame it on but yourself!""Maybe I could blame it on society!
— Charles M. Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, Vol. 5: 1959-1960
There are two Venices I know about and one of them is a hotel in Vegas. The other is an L.A. beach where pretty girls walk their dogs while wearing as little as possible and mutant slabs of tanned, posthuman beef sip iced steroid lattes and pump iron until their pecs are the size of Volkswagens.
— Richard Kadrey, Kill the Dead
It is wrong to say that schoolmasters lack heart and are dried-up, soulless pedants! No, by no means. When a child's talent which he has sought to kindle suddenly bursts forth, when the boy puts aside his wooden sword, slingshot, bow-and-arrow and other childish games, when he begins to forge ahead, when the seriousness of the work begins to transform the rough-neck into a delicate, serious and an almost ascetic creature, when his face takes on an intelligent, deeper and more purposeful expression - then a teacher's heart laughs with happiness and pride. It is his duty and responsibility to control the raw energies and desires of his charges and replace them with calmer, more moderate ideals. What would many happy citizens and trustworthy officials have become but unruly, stormy innovators and dreamers of useless dreams, if not for the effort of their schools? In young beings there is something wild, ungovernable, uncultured which first has to be tamed. It is like a dangerous flame that has to be controlled or it will destroy. Natural man is unpredictable, opaque, dangerous, like a torrent cascading out of uncharted mountains. At the start, his soul is a jungle without paths or order. And, like a jungle, it must first be cleared and its growth thwarted. Thus it is the school's task to subdue and control man with force and make him a useful member of society, to kindle those qualities in him whose development will bring him to triumphant completion.
— Hermann Hesse, Beneath the Wheel
One might say that there is an "ethics barrier " a speed above which ethics can no longer exit. After that point the only remaining goal is to survive the immediate moment.
— Pekka Himanen, The Hacker Ethic: A Radical Approach to the Philosophy of Business
Strike a glass and it will not endure an instant. Simply do not strike it and it will endure a thousand years.
— G.K. Chesterton
Tragedy of the Commons: while each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome.
— Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
No society can work unless its members feel responsibilities as well as rights.
— Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science
The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion.
— Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
Or was he merely a mollycoddled favorite, enjoying capriciously prejudiced love? Schenback was inclined to believe the latter. Inborn in nearly every artist’s nature is a voluptuous, treacherous tendency to accept the injustice if it creates beauty and to grant sympathy and homage to aristocratic preferences.
— Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales
In our day and age, global society has been saturated with the wrong teaching of false positivity. The denial of darkness never equates the abundance of light. And the denial of your actual character never equates to the reality of your best character. People today are afraid to work on themselves and on their actual realities, they believe that outward appearances are enough. Outward appearances have become everything in our current day and age. People don't see what they are actually like, nor who they actually are, in reality. They live in a phantasmic version of reality. It has to stop. In the phantasmic version of reality, there is no chance to experience true love, true goodness, and true metamorphosis. The caterpillar does not become a butterfly by telling everybody it has wings. It actually buries itself in darkness and grows those wings.
— C. JoyBell C.
I used to believe in 'em [lines]. I don't anymore. They in our heads. People like Miss Hilly is always trying to make us believe they there. But they ain't." - Aibileen
— Kathryn Stockett
[Prison] relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.
— Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?
Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
— John Berger
I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.I would have done anything to feel real again.
— Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
When someone else's safety and acceptance in society is on the line, your personal discomfort comes in a very distant second.
— Courtney Milan
Each human being is unique, each with their own qualities, instincts, forms of pleasure, and desire for adventure. However, society always imposes on us a collective ways of behaving, and people never stop to wonder why they should behave like that. They just accept it, the way typists accepted the fact that the QWERTY keyboard was the best possible one. Have you ever met anyone is your entire life who asked why the hands of a clock should go in one particular direction and not the other?
— Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
Everything that makes the world like it is now will be gone. We'll have new rules and new ways of living. Maybe there'll be a law not to live in houses, so then no one can hide from anyone else, you see.
— Shirley Jackson, The Lottery and Other Stories
She was beginning to stir questions in me that I'd spent all my life refusing to ask, since the day I had looked down from the window at the broken body of the schoolboy on the flagstones a long way below, while a master hurried from the cloisters with his black gown flapping in the winter wind, to see what had happened: the day when I was suddenly old enough to understand that I had a choice. I could either do what that other boy had done, or I could spend the rest of my life outside society, where it was safe
— Adam Hall, Quiller
It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so.
— Felix Okoye
Odo had not tried to renew the basic relationships of music, when she renewed the relationships of men. She had always respected the necessary. The Settlers of Anarres had left the laws of man behind them, but had brought the laws of harmony along.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
But of all the instances of error arising from this physical fancy, the worst is that we have before us: the habit of exhaustively describing a social sickness, and then propounding a social drug.
— G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World
How nice-to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
It is always possible that society you live in might go backwards, towards the land of ignorance and darkness! While this tragedy and stupidity happening, you must move forward! You must walk forward, towards the light and wisdom, to the land of reason!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.
— Martha Gellhorn
The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.
— Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Most people are too silly to be truly interested in any thing. They herd together like cattle, and do not know what is good for them.
— Frank R. Stockton
Who did the council fight?""It split in two and fought itself.""That's suicide!""No, ordinary behaviour. The efficient half eats the less efficient half and grows stronger. War is just a violent way of doing what half the people do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation.""I refuse to believe men kill each other just to make their enemies rich.""How can men recognize their real enemies when their family, schools and work teach them to struggle with each other and to believe law and decency come from the teachers?""My son won't be taught that," said Lanark firmly."You have a son?""Not yet.
— Alasdair Gray, Lanark
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society must take the place of the victim, and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness.
— W.H. Auden
If Congress refuse to listen to and grant what women ask, there is but one course left then to pursue. What is there left for women to do but to become the mothers of the future government?
— Victoria Claflin Woodhull
To ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.
— Naomi Wolf
Many are the scholars who make it their professional occupation to occupy themselves in this towering edifice of culture, exploring its nook and crannies, developing their responses, making their contributions here and there, and helping to hand it on to succeeding generations. For some the temptation proves irresistible to go yet farther and make this the concern of their lives, letting society go its own sorry way while they lock themselves away in this abiding, socially transcendent cultural stronghold, acquiescing in society while pursuing Bildung. As Rotterdam burns, they study Sanskrit verb forms.
— Nicholas Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace: The Kuyper Lectures for 1981 Delivered at the Free University of Amsterdam
The anarch is (I am simplifying) on the side of gold: it fascinates him, like everything that eludes society. Gold has its own immeasurable might. It need only show itself, and society with its law and order is in jeopardy.The anarch is on the side of gold : this is not to be construed as a lust for gold. He recognizes gold as the central and immobile power. He loves it, not like Cortez, but like Montezuma, not like Pizarro but like Atahualpa ....
— Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil
There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe.
— Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
She's on the stairs, ma'am, getting her breath,' said the young servant, who had not been long up from the country, where my mother had the excellent habit of getting all her servants. Often she had seen them born. That's the only way to get really good ones. And they're the rarest of luxuries.
— Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove
This mannerism of what he'd seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice people—because, surely, Wally was nice—would say a host of critical things about someone to whom they would then be perfectly pleasant. At. St. Cloud's, criticism was plainer—and harder, if not impossible, to conceal.
— John Irving, The Cider House Rules
He had a reputation in society as a man with a lively wit, whose gaiety was pleasant and formidable – which all gaiety must be in a society which would despise you if, while amusing it, you did not make it tremble a little. ("A Woman's Vengeance")
— Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques
Jesus revealed a face of God that bothered society profoundly! (Carlos Mesters, p. 122)
— Mev Puleo, The Struggle Is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation
Mystery is a commodity for society that willing to buy it.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
The child tends to be stripped of all social influences but those of the market place, all sense of place, function and class is weakened, the characteristics of region and clan, neighborhood or kindred are attenuated. The individual is denuded of everything but appetities, desires and tastes, wrenched from any context of human obligation or commitment. It is a process of mutilation; and once this has been achieved, we are offered the consolation of reconstituting the abbreviated humanity out of the things and the goods around us, and the fantasies and vapors which they emit. A culture becomes the main determinant upon morality, beliefs and purposes, usurping more and more territory that formerly belonged to parents, teachers, community, priests and politics alike.
— Jeremy Seabrook, What Went Wrong?
I can imagine no greater catastrophe than if I were mistaken, and the theory were correct that what I consider secondary instincts or drives are actually primary instincts! Because in that case the emotional plague would rest upon the support of a natural law while its archenemies, truth and sociality, would be relying upon unfounded ethics. Until now both lies and truth have taken recourse to ethics. But only lies have profited because they were able to appear under the guise of truth. Under these circumstances, egoism, theft, petty selfishness, slander, etc., would be the natural rule. (26.july.1943)
— Wilhelm Reich, American Odyssey: Letters & Journals, 1940-1947
This is a diseased world in which it is impossible for anyone to be fully human. One way or another, everyone who lives in the modern world is sick or maladjusted.
— David T. Dellinger, Revolutionary Nonviolence: Essays
Ideas about a person's place in society, his role, lifestyle, and ego qualities will lose their hold as the cohesive forces in society disintegrate. Subculture values will proliferate to such a bewildering extent that a whole new class of professionals will arise to control them. Such a Transmutation Technology will deal in fashions, in ways of being. Lifestyle consultants will become the new priests of our civilizations. They will be the new magicians.
— Peter J. Carroll, Liber Null and Psychonaut: An Introduction to Chaos Magic
[N]ew technology enables new kinds of group-forming.
— Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.
— Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
That which is good for the society is not necessarily good for the individual. That which is good for the individual is good for the society.
— Richard Diaz
Society is not just the product of its individual members
—  it is also the product of its constituent groups.
A civilized society is formed when every individual in that society are bound to obey the rules and regulation which is for the benefit of their own society. 
— Santosh Kalwar
We often take for granted the notion that some people are insiders, while others are outsiders. But such a notion is a social contrivance, that, like virtually every public construct, is a legacy of a primordial and tribal mentality.
— Jamake Highwater, The Mythology of Transgression: Homosexuality as Metaphor
To her amazement, she realized that the way of life of these people was nothing more than an indeterminate fiction, casually knotted together at particular points that were used again and again. With four or five remarks, and a couple of facial expressions, she had mastered it with no problem at all.
— Gerhard Amanshauser
In a profession, members are only partly guided by service to the public.
— Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
[B]ecause the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organized way. New social tools are altering this equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action.
— Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust
—  nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts.
And a human being whose life is nurtured in an advantage which has accrued from the disadvantage of other human beings, and who prefers that this should remain as it is, is a human being by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer, and the scavengers of the deep sea.
— James Agee, Cotton Tenants: Three Families
In a world where critical thinking skills are almost wholly absent, repetition effectively leapfrogs the cognitive portion of the brain. It helps something get processed as truth. We used to call it unsubstantiated buy-in. Belief without evidence. It only works in a society where thinking for one's self is discouraged. That's how we lost our country.
— Laura Bynum, Veracity
What about the contacts your mum had?” his dad asked.“I rang and spoke to four very polite computers who gave me all these options and then cut out on me. Then I tried the post office, because they were advertising, and I spoke to another computer. Very rude, that one. Don’t think it recognized ‘Are you shitting me?’ as an option.”“You know why that is?”“Why is that, Dominic?” Tom had asked drolly, because he knew he was going to be told why.“Because we don’t live in a society anymore, Tom. We live in an economy. We’re not citizens. We’re customers. That’s what this government’s done to us.
— Melina Marchetta, The Piper's Son
You have a spark of anarchy in your spirit and that's not to be tolerated. Nothing wild or honest is tolerated her! It has to be extinguished...
— Tennessee Williams
Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.
— Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
Our standards of morality are begotten of the past needs of society, but is society to remain always the same?
— Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea
I always think the opening moments of a party are the hardest, before everyone has had enough to drink.
— Stephanie Clifford, Everybody Rise
I find it a challenge to cooperate in a society where it's considered moral to critique a résumé yet immoral to critique morality.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Most of us waste this extraordinary thing called life. We have lived forty or sixty years, have gone to the office, engaged ourselves in social activity, escaping in various forms, and at the end of it, we have nothing but an empty, dull, stupid life, a wasted life.Now, please has created this pattern of social life. We take pleasure in ambition, in competition, in acquiring knowledge or power, or position, prestige, status. And that pursuit of pleasure as ambition, competition, greed, envy, status, domination, power is respectable. It is made respectable by a society which has only one concept: that you shall lead a moral life, which is a respectable life. You can be ambitious, you can be greedy, you can be violent, you can be competitive, you can be a ruthless human being, but society accepts it, because at the end of your ambition, you are either so called successful man with plenty of money, or a failure and therefore a frustrated human being. So social morality is immorality.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it. -Andrew Young, author, civil rights activist, US congressman, mayor, and UN ambassador (b. 1932)
— Andrew Young
In short, the right given to one man to inflict corporal punishment on another is one of the ulcers of society, one of the most powerful destructive agents of every germ and every budding attempt at civilization, the fundamental cause of its certain and irretrievable destruction.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead
Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families, miss; bless your heart, what you would think to be phenomenons, quite ... Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great families ... and you have no idea ... what games goes on!
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
The measure of a society is its compassion.
— Kristin Hannah, Summer Island
This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don't owe each other anything. On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly pay. We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities. But it's a false dichotomy. States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would rec­ognize today.
— David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
The male orientation of classical Athens was inseparable from its genius. Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny.
— Camille Paglia
Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everybody in good society holds exactly the same opinions.
— Oscar Wilde, The Remarkable Rocket
His act was rather that of a harmless lunatic than an enemy. We were not so new to the country as not to know that the solitary life of many a plainsman had a tendency to develop eccentricities of conduct and character not always easily distinguishable from mental aberration. A man is like a tree: in a forest of his fellows he will grow as straight as his generic and individual nature permits; alone, in the open, he yields to the deforming stresses and tortions that environ him.
— Ambrose Bierce, Ghost Stories
So, wonder! I also wonder about you," said Cadfael mildly. "Do you know any human creatures who are not strangers, one to another?
— Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many
Human security depends on a system where each rational individual calculates that it is more profitable not to rebel.
— Mark Gough
As history has repeatedly suggested, nothing is more effective for demolishing traditional legal protections than the combined claims that a crime is uniquely dangerous, and that those behind it have exceptional powers of resistance. [On witchburning in France during the 16th Century.]
— Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer
The commonwealth is sick of their own choice
— Their over-greedy love has surfeited.An habitation giddy and unsureHath he that buildeth on the vulgar heart.
Some are taxed on their success, true. Some are taxed on their survival, also true.
— Benjamin Kane Ethridge
Hidden Highlands was maybe a little richer but not that different from many of the other small, wealthy and scared enclaves nestled in the hills and valleys around Los Angeles. Walls and gates, guardhouses and private security forces were the secret ingredients of the so-called melting pot of southern California.
— Michael Connelly, Trunk Music
...there is nothing so dangerous in its consequences as injustice to individuals- whether it arise from prejudice of color or from any other source
—  that a wrong done to one man is a wrong to society and to the world.
A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repressive and murderous society.
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.
— John Maynard Keynes
Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
— John Berger
You don't expect me," he said, "to revolutionize society on this lawn?"Syme looked straight into his eyes and smiled sweetly."No, I don't," he said; "but I suppose that if you were serious about your anarchism, that is exactly what you would do.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
The nearer persons come to each other, the greater is the room and the more are the occasions for courtesy; but just in proportion to their approach the gentleness of most men diminishes.
— George MacDonald
But alas, my dear child, we are the slaves of custom, the dupes of prejudice, and dare not stem the torrent of the opposing world, even though our judgments condemn our compliance! However, since the die is cast, we must endeavor to make the best of it.
— Fanny Burney, Evelina
The people of Hiroshima went to work at once to restore human society in the aftermath of the great atomic flood. They were concerned to salvage their own lives, but in the process they also salvaged the souls of the people who have brought the atomic bomb.
— Kenzaburō Ōe, Hiroshima Notes
Eric, you need to look at the whole picture," the PM said. "You look at the jobless as a huge pile of scrap and you're looking for what can be recycled. That's good. That's your job. But what you don't realise is that this pile of scrap itself serves a purpose. I need my zeros, Eric. They put fear in people; fear of crime and terrorism. They are a stark reminder to the stakeholders that what they despise today, they may end up joining tomorrow. It keeps them obedient. Remember that!
— Mark Cantrell, Citizen Zero
The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
— John Berger
Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
— John Berger
it's hard to talk sensibly with giants - their massive heads tend to get lost in the clouds
— Rick Poynor, Obey the Giant: Life in the Image World
The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognizes neither pity nor pitilessness.
— John Berger
Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why /but the editorialists forget it /terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.
— John Berger
There is not a man of common sense who would not chuse to be agreeable in company; and yet, strange as it may seem, very few are
— The Town and Country Magazine. vol. 11, 1779
There is nothing to be gained by multiplying social distinctions indefinitely.
— Evelyn Waugh
Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream.
— John Berger
our triumphant age of plenty is riddled with darker feelings of doubt, cynicism, distrust, boredom and a strange kind of emptiness
— Samuel Johnson
we've reached utopia and it sucks
— Richard Tomkins