c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
When you devalue ethics and morals by proclaiming that our attitude toward them should be casual or lenient, you can't be surprised by a rising generation who then behaves disrespectfully, treating life, people, and choices as if they possess little value or worth.  For whether or not that was the intention, society has taught them to believe thusly.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
No one is thinking about you. They're thinking about themselves, just like you.
— Helen Fielding, Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination
Hope that justice will be done to those brave men who stood up for their convictions.
— Albert Einstein, On Peace
...wherever there is society, there is authority and the temptation to disobedience because our individual wills refuse to submit...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Be kind, for whenever kindness becomes part of something, it beautifies it. Whenever it is taken from something, it leaves it tarnished.
— Mohammad PBUH
When you took a man's job away from him, his ability to feed and clothe his family, that man was going to get angry.
— Darrin Grimwood, Destroy All Robots
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the world is made up of all kinds of people. Other people have their own value to live by, and the same holds true with me.
— Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
As it is not a settled question, you must clear your mind of the fancy withwhich we all begin as children, that the institutions under which we live,including our legal ways of distributing income and allowing people to own things, are natural, like the weather. They are not. Because they exist everywhere in our little world, we take it for granted that they have always existed and must always exist, and that they are self-acting. That is a dangerous mistake. They are in fact transient makeshifts; and many of them would not be obeyed, even by well-meaning people, if there were not a policeman within call and a prison within reach. They are being changed continually by Parliament, because we are never satisfied with them.... At the elections some candidates get votes by promising to make new laws or to get rid of old ones, and others by promising to keep things just as they are. This is impossible. Things will not stay as they are.Changes that nobody ever believed possible take place in a few generations. Children nowadays think that spending nine years in school, oldage and widows’ pensions, votes for women, and short-skirted ladies in Parliament or pleading in barristers’ wigs in the courts are part of the order of Nature, and always were and ever shall be; but their great-grandmothers would have set down anyone who told them that such things were coming as mad, and anyone who wanted them to come as wicked.
— George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
A man with a full stomach and the respect of his fellows had no business to scold about anything that he might think to be wrong in the ways of the universe, or even with the ways of society. Let the unfortunates rail; the others may play marbles.
— Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
The great hatred of capitalism in the hearts of the oppressed, ancient and modern, I think, stems not merely from the ensuing vast inequality in wealth, and the often unfair and arbitrary nature of who profits and who suffers, but from the silent acknowledgement that under a free market economy the many victims of the greed of the few are still better off than those under the utopian socialism of the well-intended. It is a hard thing for the poor to acknowledge benefits from their rich moral inferiors who never so intended it. (p.272)
— Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power
Disorder in society is the result of disorder in the family.
— St. Angela Merici
The system we have built refuses to recognize people. Only credit cards are recognized. Drivers' licenses are recognized. But not people. People haven't any use for faces anymore, it seems. They are busy looking at your credit card, your driver's licence, your social security number. If a driver's licence is more reliable than the face I wear, then why do I have a face?
— Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty
You may not be able to change the world for the better, but the world is able to change you for the worst, don't give them the rock you stand on.
— Anthony Liccione
Are the worst enemies of society those who attack it or those who do not even give themselves the trouble of defending it?
— Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Socialism
Not everyone will like what you have to say. Not everyone will like what you do. Social networking is a garbage pile waiting for rats to feed. Pointless nothings of your everyday lives. Still the fumes rise.
— Jerica Barsht
What the times demand, and in an unprecedented fashion, is that one be--not seem--outrageous, independent, anarchical. That one be thoroughly disciplined--as a means of being spontaneous. That one resist at whatever cost the fearful pressures placed on one to lie about one’s own experience. For in the same way that the writer scarcely ever had a more uneasy time, he has never been needed more.
— James     Baldwin
From warm meals, to daily exercise, to healthcare; one can't help but wonder how our society would be different if tended to the elderly as we do to our imprisoned.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
I want to live in a society where people are intoxicated with the joy of making things
— William Coperwaite
If a man can say ‘My life is more important than my country,’ that man has succeeded in freeing himself from the chains of society!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Don't think I know you," Harold said, grinning, as they shook. He had a firm grip. Larry's hand was pumped up and down exactly three times and let go. It reminded Larry of the time he had shaken hands with George Bush back when the old bushwhacker had been running for President. It had been at a political rally, which he had attended on the advice of his mother, given many years ago. If you can't afford a movie, go to the zoo. If you can't afford the zoo, go see a politician.
— Stephen King, The Stand
We’ve lived so long based on the seasons, or the phases of the moon,” I said. “Women are particularly vulnerable to it, if you want to get sexist. In the past few centuries we’ve gotten away from it and we are turning into beings that live around the clock on artificial cycles. I think it’s making our society a bit psychotic.
— Darren McKeeman, City of Apocrypha
The only soap of a dirty society is the clean men
—  only the clean can wash the grimy!
Great changes in our society are always inspired and set in motion by one person. Be that person today.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
In a formal socialization, no one individual can stand without the other to rely on, regardless of the situation.
— TOOTS888
A new question for the psychotherapist to ask is whether a theory can go beyond mere effectiveness in achieving either a so-called cure or even personal growth into its implications for the nature of an evolving society.
— Erving Polster, Gestalt Therapy Integrated: Contours of Theory & Practice
Peace is not merely the absence of war but the presence of justice, of law, of order —in short, of government.
— Albert Einstein, On Peace
The rich don't have to kill to eat. They employ people, as they call it. The rich don't do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody's happy.
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
With genius, as with beauty -- all, well almost all, is forgiven.
— Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover: A Romance
Everyone wants a piece of you. The trick is what piece to give.
— Solange nicole
Many of the people who consented to talk about their private lives in front of millions of television viewers would say that they were sharing their stories as a way to give comfort [to] fellow sufferers, to raise public awareness, to give a voice to their pain. None of them would ever admit that it was all about ratings and voyeurism and lurid, grotesque curiosity.
— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
Raging crime, class warfare, invasive immigrants, light morals, public misbehavior. Always we convince ourselves that the parade of unwelcome and despised is a new phenomenon, which is why the phrase "the good old days" has passed from cliché to self-parody.
— Anna Quindlen, Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City
When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings
— Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings
In all the known history of Mankind, advances have been made primarily in physical technology; in the capacity of handling the inanimate world about Man. Control of self and society has been left to to chance or to the vague gropings of intuitive ethical systems based on inspiration and emotion. As a result no culture of greater stability than about fifty-five percent has ever existed, and these only as the result of great human misery.
— Isaac Asimov, Second Foundation
An army is a miniature of the society which produces it.
— C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
In a world of complete economic equality, you get and keep the affections you deserve. You can’t buy love with gifts or favors, you can’t hold love by raising an inadequate child, and you can’t be secure in love by serving as a good scrub woman or a good provider.
— B.F. Skinner
The individual seeks out the heat of the crowd, in this century, to protect himself against the cold emanating from the corpse of the world.
— Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Surely,' she said, much quieter, more reasonable, 'surely you've been with other women?'His glance at her was dry. 'What do you think?'She looked away at random. 'I think that it appears we have a double standard, here. Men can have sex, women can't. Who, then, do the men have sex with?
— Amanda Carpenter, Rose-Coloured Love
At first, I was shocked that Diane could even suggest this family reunion [on television], and then I realized this is just the way of the world, or at least the way of fin de siecle America. Not only would the next revolution be televised, but so would every other little stupid thing. It was already happening: Television reunions between adopted children and their birth parents...
— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
I don’t think they can deal with someone being complex and contradictory; it’s not acceptable, you have to be a cartoon, a stereotype.
— Shirley Manson
Literature should be a kind of revolutionary manifesto against established morality and established society.
— Guo Moruo
The foundations of some formerly strong lands became so riddled with termites of diminished purpose, so decayed with the decadence of smug moderation, and so emaciated with the vacillating aims of appears, that even when they saw the enemy coming and did resist, they were easily toppled when the Imperial Order finally pushed.
— Terry Goodkind, Soul of the Fire
Join us. Play the game. It will bring you an untold number of rewards and you will finally have some direction and purpose in your lives. Take control of yourselves and those around you. Bend them to your will and all worldly pleasures will be yours...
— Martin  Hopkins, Cracks in the Pavement
What fueled this hatred? Society.
— Shannon A. Thompson, November Snow
I'm a little worried... Brave New World seems a bit more real everyday. . .
— Solange nicole
Genius feels like an over extended Helium balloon about to burst, and everyone criticizes you for not having a conventional way of coping with it.
— Solange nicole
Nothing is ‘wrong’ with me, Dan. What’s wrong with you? she said in the same eerily quiet voice, dark eyes fixated on Dan, as she breathed heavily.
— Martin  Hopkins, Cracks in the Pavement
The slick concrete reflected the facades of the work weary - grey, cracked and old,but more importantly, trodden upon.
— Martin  Hopkins, Cracks in the Pavement
I refuse to hold the coats of this generation.
— Rebecca McKinsey
Along with individual responsibility goes some societal responsibility to enable young people and their parents to do what they need to do. Otherwise, what is a society?
— Robert B. Reich
I'll just quote myself for now; actually, I'll quote what a good friend of mine, David Jenkins responded to a post I made when I was feeling 'pissy.'"Deep thoughts (come) from a deep well. Society is useful because when we see ourselves reflected through others we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves." ~ David Jenkins, 2013
— David Jenkins
The basic thing nobody asks is why do people take drugs of any sort? Why do we have these accessories to normal living to live? I mean, is there something wrong with society that's making us so pressurized, that we cannot live without guarding ourselves against it?
— John Lennon
When YOU stop believing one person in the world cannot make a difference
—  differences in the world will be made.
It's ridiculous, how people judge talent. Or, rather, don't judge. They just default to what everyone else thinks.
— Siobhan Vivian, Same Difference
So far nothing in your life has interfered with your reasoning process.
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
You can't build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.
— Norman Borlaug
Any decent society has to be built on trust and love and the intelligent use of information and feelings. Education involves being able to practice those things as you struggle to build a decent society that can be nonviolent.
— Myles Horton, The Long Haul: An Autobiography
What infinite heart's-easeMust kings neglect, that private men enjoy!And what have kings, that privates have not too,Save ceremony, save general ceremony?And what art thou, thou idle ceremony?What kind of god art thou, that suffer'st moreOf mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?What are thy rents? what are thy comings in?O ceremony, show me but thy worth!What is thy soul of adoration?Art thou aught else but place, degree and form,Creating awe and fear in other men?Wherein thou art less happy being fear'dThan they in fearing.What drink'st thou oft, instead of homage sweet,But poison'd flattery? O, be sick, great greatness,And bid thy ceremony give thee cure!Think'st thou the fiery fever will go outWith titles blown from adulation?Will it give place to flexure and low bending?Canst thou, when thou command'st the beggar's knee,Command the health of it? No, thou proud dream,That play'st so subtly with a king's repose;I am a king that find thee, and I know'Tis not the balm, the sceptre and the ball,The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,The intertissued robe of gold and pearl,The farced title running 'fore the king,The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pompThat beats upon the high shore of this world,No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,Not all these, laid in bed majestical,Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave,Who with a body fill'd and vacant mindGets him to rest, cramm'd with distressful bread;Never sees horrid night, the child of hell,But, like a lackey, from the rise to setSweats in the eye of Phoebus and all nightSleeps in Elysium; next day after dawn,Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse,And follows so the ever-running year,With profitable labour, to his grave:And, but for ceremony, such a wretch,Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep,Had the fore-hand and vantage of a king.The slave, a member of the country's peace,Enjoys it; but in gross brain little wotsWhat watch the king keeps to maintain the peace,Whose hours the peasant best advantages.
— William Shakespeare, Henry V
Reaching and reached. Cassia
— Ally Condie, Reached
Here then is an infallible criterion, by which the nation may judge of the intentions of those who govern it ... if they corrupt the morals of the people, spread a taste for luxury, effeminacy, a rage for licentious pleasures, - if they stimulate the higher orders to a ruinous pomp and extravagance, - beware, citizens! beware of those corruptors! they only aim at purchasing slaves in order to exercise over them an arbitrary sway.
— Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations
This much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions
...only in relatively recent times have people decided that "because I want to" is sufficient reason for annoying others.
— Bill McKibben, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks
It was before him again in its completeness -- the choice in which she was content to rest: in the stupid costliness of the food and the showy dulness of the talk, in the freedom of speech which never arrived at wit and the freedom to act which never made for romance. The strident setting of the restaurant, in which their table seemed set apart in a special glare of publicity, and the presence at it of little Dabham of the "Riviera Notes," emphasized the ideals of a world where conspicuousness passed for distinction, and the society column had become the roll of fame.
— Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
-The very absence of the freedom to criticise against your own or any other government is all the more a reason to loudly shout-out for democracy! If that is wrong, Drew boldly went on, -then I would rather be wrong then to be numbered among the majority of the so-called righteous people whose only mandate seems to be controlling people. If a government is against its people expressing themselves, then that government is obviously hiding something criminal from its people and the world, and it is therefore afraid of being exposed and losing whatever power it has.
— Andrew James Pritchard, Circle In the Sand
Practical jokes are a demonstration that the distinction between seriousness and play is not a law of nature but a social convention which can be broken, and that a man does not always require a serious motive for deceiving another.Two men, dressed as city employees, block off a busy street and start digging it up. The traffic cop, motorists and pedestrians assume that this familiar scene has a practical explanation – a water main or an electric cable is being repaired – and make no attempt to use the street. In fact, however, the two diggers are private citizens in disguise who have no business there.All practical jokes are anti-social acts, but this does not necessarily mean that all practical jokes are immoral. A moral practical joke exposes some flaw of society which is hindrance to a real community or brotherhood. That it should be possible for two private individuals to dig up a street without being stopped is a just criticism of the impersonal life of a large city where most people are strangers to each other, not brothers; in a village where all inhabitants know each other personally, the deception would be impossible.
— W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand
The expenses of government, having for their object the interests of all, should be borne by every one, and the more a man enjoys the advantages of society, the more he ought to hold himself honoured in contributing to these expenses.
— Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot
The thing I got to thinking about,' he said, 'is--what are the conditions that lead to larger portions of society being generous, humble, and selfless? While we have the conditions for economic opportunity here--and that is a blessing--do we have the conditions to learn how to self-regulate our own passions for the good of the whole?
— Warren St. John, Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town
Social psychologist argued that even severe mental illness was the result of society labeling unusual behavior rather than of biochemical processes.
— Thomas J. Scheff
Her black is beautiful, his society is ugly.
— Habeeb Akande
Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more. Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers. Taxes pay for doctors and nursing homes and medicine. During an emergency, like an earthquake or a hurricane, taxes pay for rescue workers, shelters, and services. For people whose lives are devastated by other kinds of disaster, like the disaster of poverty, taxes pay, even, for food.
— Jill Lepore
This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods
Society does not judge those it admires, they are deified. Yet it so eagerly burn those it fails to understand
— Ole H.
Worrying about scarcity is our culture's version of post-traumatic stress. It happens when we've been through too much, and rather than coming together to heal (which requires vulnerability) we're angry and scared and at each other's throats.
— Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
Honestly, if you don't fit in then you're probably doing the right thing.
— Lights Poxlietner
Visibility is a trap.
— Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Our society is so fragmented, our family lives so sundered by physical and emotional distance, our friendships so sporadic, our intimacies so 'in-between' things and often so utilitarian, that there are few places where we can feel truly safe.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World
They Want You To Be A Docile Apathetic Consumer
— Bill Hicks
does a sick society get so used to its illness that it can't remember being well? what if the memory is too dangerous for the people who like things the way they are?
— Neal Shusterman
That's the myth of it, the required lie that allows us to render our judgments. Parasites, criminals, dope fiends, dope peddlers, whores--when we can ride past them at Fayette and Monroe, car doors locked, our field of vision cautiously restricted to the road ahead, then the long journey into darkness is underway. Pale-skinned hillbillies and hard-faced yos, toothless white trash and gold-front gangsters--when we can glide on and feel only fear, we're well on the way. And if, after a time, we can glimpse the spectacle of the corner and manage nothing beyond loathing and contempt, then we've arrived at last at that naked place where a man finally sees the sense in stretching razor wire and building barracks and directing cattle cars into the compound.It's a reckoning of another kind, perhaps, and one that becomes a possibility only through the arrogance and certainty that so easily accompanies a well-planned and well-tended life. We know ourselves, we believe in ourselves; from what we value most, we grant ourselves the illusion that it's not chance in circumstance, that opportunity itself isn't the defining issue. We want the high ground; we want our own worth to be acknowledged. Morality, intelligence, values--we want those things measured and counted. We want it to be about Us.Yes, if we were down there, if we were the damned of the American cities, we would not fail. We would rise above the corner. And when we tell ourselves such things, we unthinkably assume that we would be consigned to places like Fayette Street fully equipped, with all the graces and disciplines, talents and training that we now posses. Our parents would still be our parents, our teachers still our teachers, our broker still our broker. Amid the stench of so much defeat and despair, we would kick fate in the teeth and claim our deserved victory. We would escape to live the life we were supposed to live, the life we are living now. We would be saved, and as it always is in matters of salvation, we know this as a matter of perfect, pristine faith.Why? The truth is plain:We were not born to be niggers.
— David Simon, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood
We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it.
— Émile Durkheim
What separates or unites people is not their language, their laws, their customs, their principles, but the way they hold their knife and fork.
— Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française
Because there’s nothing wrong with me,” Alec says. “You know what is? Our society is so screwed up from top to bottom, everything about it, that it’s become impossible to fix. It’s easier to change people and make them fit into something that’s broken. Know what I mean?
— Brian James, Life is But a Dream
Stupid patriarchal culture with stupid ideas of beauty—stupid me for going along with it.
— Marni Bates, Awkward
It is said that we do not make the guilty party suffer for the sake of suffering
—  it is nonetheless true that we find it right that he should suffer.
I will be a Friend to you, and you shall take care of my Linen
— Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded
Crime brings together honest men and concentrates them.
— Émile Durkheim
It is a policeman’s duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policeman’s duty becomes, not protection, but the plunder of property - then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Humans, I finally decided after a few more minutes of watching him, are paradoxically capable of both unattainable depths of kindness and unimaginable depths of cruelty, sometimes within the same body...
— Kiley MacLeod
Any society's upper-crust is riddled with immorality, how else d'you think they keep their power? Reputation is king of the public sphere, not private. It is dethroned by public acts.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays
From the newsstands a dozen models smiled up at her from a dozen magazine covers, smiled in thin-faced, high-cheekboned agreement to Kessa's new discovery. They knew the secret too. They knew thin was good, thin was strong; thin was safe.
— Steven Levenkron, The Best Little Girl in the World
I may be permitted, like the doctors, to cure a greater evil by a less, for I shall not fall seriously in love with the young widow, I think, nor she with me - that's certain - but if I find a little pleasure in her society I may surely be allowed to seek it; and if the star of her divinity be bright enough to dim the lustre of Eliza's, so much the better, but I scarcely can think it
— Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
You say that this society will come to an end, because societies always have done so. I wonder whether they have ended because they were not really societies at all.
— Idries Shah, Reflections
If we are teaching children how to lie,to steal, and to be aggressive, why do schools punish those who lie and steal? and why does the society punish the offender criminal?
— Ali Altantawi
Tolerance is the price we pay for living in a free, pluralistic society.
— Robert Casey
In theory at any rate each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy . It was understood that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were officers and NCOs, but there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; not titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society.
— George Orwell, Fighting in Spain
Historians are interested in ideas not only because they influence societies, but because they reveal the societies that give rise to them.
— Christopher Hill
There are certain questions that scientists may not ask, or, more accurately, for some questions, there are certain answers that scientists must a priori preclude from consideration.
— Satoshi Kanazawa, Social Class & Social Policy
Some of the epidemic may overwhelm society as a physical expression of energy hysteria.
— Lynne McTaggart, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies
—  it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
Society doesn't have values. People have values.
— Milton Friedman
Don't look for society to give you permission to be yourself.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Everyone you trust, everyone you think can count on, will eventually disappoint you. When left to their own devices, people lie and keep secrets and change and disappear…
— Lauren Oliver, Delirium
To me, the poor are like Bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a six-inch deep flower pot, you get a perfect replica of the tallest tree, but it is only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted; only the soil-base you provided was inadequate.Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong with their seeds. Only society never gave them a base to grow on.
— Muhammad Yunus, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism
A poet is a blind optimist.The world is against him formany reasons. But thepoet persists. He believesthat he is on the right track,no matter what any of his fellow men say. In hiseternal search for truth, thepoet is alone.He tries to be timeless in a society built on time.
— Jack Kerouac
When the Rule of Law disappears, we are ruled by the whims of men.
— Tiffany Madison
We expect more from technology and less from each other.
— Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
People who are different are beautiful. Those who follow society are boring.
— Gina Adel
Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity
— Aldous Huxley
It is an extremely unfortunate fact, that there are those who see the morale of respect as something that is beneficial to the other person on the receiving end, rather than something that is beneficial to the one who is capable of giving the respect! Because that's simply not how it works; the person who is capable of discerning respect and giving it to others, is the person who is better! There are people who believe that the virtue of respect and the ability to discern when to give respect and in which amounts to give it, belongs to the lower class! Oh I beg, I beg to differ! No. And no and no! If I am able to discern the amounts of respect to be given so that I may function as a beaming member of society, this virtue illuminates ME; this virtue does not illuminate those whom I give the respect to! Respect is known by the illuminated being!s
— C. JoyBell C.
Hell, there're already too many psychologists; too many everythings. Too many engineers, too many chemists, too many doctors, too many dentists, too many sociologists. There aren't enough people who can actually do anything, really know how to make this world work.When you thing about it; when you look at the way it really is; God, we've got - well, let's say, there's 100 percent. Half of these are under eighteen or over sixty-five; that is not working. This leaves the middle fifty percent. Half of these are women; most are so busy having babies or taking care of kids, they're totally occupied. Some of them work, too, so let's say we're down to 30 percent. Ten percent are doctors or lawyers or sociologists or psychologists or dentists or businessmen or artists or writers, or schoolteachers, or priests, ministers, rabbis; none of there are actually producing anything, they're only servicing people. So now we're down to 20 percent. At least 2 or 3 percent are living on trusts or clipping coupons or are just rich. That leaves 17 percent. Seven percent of these are unemployed, mostly on purpose! So in the end we've got 10 percent producing all the food, constructing the houses, building and repairing all the roads, developing electricity, working in the mines, building cars, collecting garbage; all the dirty work, all the real work.Everybody's just looking for some gimmick so they don't have to actually do anything. And the worst part is, the ones who do the work get paid the least.
— William Wharton
We don't think a sustainable society need be stagnant, boring, uniform, or rigid. It need not be, and probably could not be, centrally controlled or authoritarian. It could be a world that has the time, the resources, and the will to correct its mistakes, to innovate, to preserve the fertility of its planetary ecosystems. It could focus on mindfully increasing quality of life rather than on mindlessly expanding material consumption and the physical capital stock.
— Donella H. Meadows, The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update
Customs tell a man who he is, where he belongs, what he must do. Better illogical customs than none; men cannot live together without them. From an anthropologist's view, 'justice' is a search for workable customs.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Citizen of the Galaxy
we are waiting and waiting and doing nothing, until it is too late, and they commit crimes so serious that all society wants to do is punish instead of rehabilitate.
— Edward Humes, No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court
Stand here, he thought, and count the lighted windows of a city. You cannot do it. But behind each yellow rectangle that climbs, one over another, to the sky - under each bulb - down to there, see that spark over the river which is not a star? - there are people whom you will never see and who are your masters. At the supper tables, in the drawing rooms, in their beds and in their cellars, in their studies and in their bathrooms. Speeding in the subways under your feet. Crawling up in elevators through vertical cracks around you. Jolting past you in every bus. Your masters, Gail Wynand. There is a net - longer than the cables that coil through the walls of this city, larger than the mesh of pipes that carry water, gas and refuse - there is another hidden net around you; it is strapped to you, and the wires lead to every hand in the city. They jerked the wires and you moved. You were a ruler of men. You held a leash. A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends.
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
Oftentimes in a society when people of a certain type, whether individual or a group, are subconsciously portrayed by the media as abnormal, they also slowly, subconsciously become enemies of that society due to feelings of cultural guilt. Ultimately by this the inflated media is an enemy of its very own cause.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
I beg your pardon
—  one knows exactly what to think.
One of the chief paradoxes of our culture [is] that the welfare of its children, its _future_, is placed almost exclusively in the hands of people of low status, a class it holds in contempt.
— Joan Smith, Misogynies
You know Americans...Self-improvement. No matter who or what we are, we're always working on ways to become somebody else.
— Alan Brown
I'm sorry to disappoint you, but my experience belongs to me, not the collective bloody unconscious.
— Ian McEwan
One thing you'll learn when you're in the business of selling utter shite to the Great British Public is that there's really no bottom to where they'll go. Shit food, shit TV, shit bands, shit films, shit houses. There is absolutely no fucking bottom with this stuff. The shittier you can make it - a bad photocopy of a bad photocopy of what was a shit idea in the first place - the more they'll eat it up with a big fucking spoon, from dawn till dusk, from now until the end of time. It's too good.
— John Niven, Kill Your Friends
Ever since her being turned into a Churchill, she has out-Churchill'd them all in high and mighty claims.
— Jane Austen, Emma
And if you learn only one thing from the ensuing maybe let it be this: the police were not merely interested observers who occasionally witnessed criminality and were then basically compelled to make an arrest, rather the police had the special ability to in effect create Crime by making an arrest almost whenever they wishes, so widespread was wrongdoing. Consequently, the decision on who would become a body was often affected by overlooked factors like the candidate's degree of humility, the neighborhood it lived in, and most often the relevant officers' need for overtime.
— Sergio de la Pava, A Naked Singularity
My correspondence has certainly the charm of variety, and the humbler are usually the more interesting. This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure Of The Noble Bachelor
We should look closely on what is happening at the moment, guys with little moustaches can pop up everywhere now given this instable economic situation. A look into history shows us what that could mean.
— Steve Keen
Beware the ridiculous. It will one day rule you.
— Steven Dietz, God's Country
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.
— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
According to Madam Pomfrey, thoughts could leave deeper scars than almost anything else.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Introverts, in contrast, may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions.
— Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.
— C.G. Jung
As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.
— C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism: The Essays
There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-- you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.
— Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
All I know is this: nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.
— Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Sometimes, if you want to change a man's mind, you have to change the mind of the man next to him first.
— Megan Whalen Turner, The King of Attolia
If you discovered something that made you tighten inside, you had better try to learn more about it.
— Nicholas Sparks, Message in a Bottle
Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.
— C.G. Jung
I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been midly manic. When I am my present "normal" self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In short, for myself, I am a hard act to follow.
— Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?
— Sigmund Freud
Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune. 
— C.G. Jung
When a man is penalized for honesty he learns to lie.
— Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile
A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
It is always assumed by the empty-headed, who chatter about themselves for want of something better, that people who do not discuss their affairs openly must have something to hide.
— Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot
An intelligent person can rationalize anything, a wise person doesn't try.
— Jen Knox, The Glass City
When good people consider you the bad guy, you develop a heart to help the bad ones. You actually understand them.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
We're always contradicting ourselves.We want people to tell us apart.......yet we don't want them to be able to.We want people to get to know us......but we also want them to keep their distance.We've always longed for someone to accept us...But we never believed there'd be anyone who would accept our twisted ways.That's why we'll stay locked up tight......in our own little private world......and throw away the key, so that no one can ever hurt us.
— Bisco Hatori, Ouran High School Host Club, Vol. 9
If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.
— Erich Fromm
Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.
— William Gibson, Zero History
A person can't change all at once.
— Stephen King, The Stand
No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?
— Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.
— Saul Bellow, Herzog
Through others we become ourselves.
— Lev S. Vygotsky
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
— Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda
Man is many things, but he is not rational.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it.
— Richard Adams, Watership Down
Not knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never feel certain of not losing himself again.
— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Sensation tell us a thing is.Thinking tell us what it is this thing is.Feeling tells us what this thing is to us.
— C.G. Jung
It's not that there is no small talk...It's that it comes not at the beginning of conversations but at the end...Sensitive people...'enjoy small talk only after they've gone deep' says Strickland. 'When sensitive people are in environments that nurture their authenticity, they laugh and chitchat just as much as anyone else.
— Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
People who need to bully you are the easiest to push around.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagines past
— Alan Moore, Watchmen
One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.
— Alan W. Watts, Psychotherapy East and West
It was his subconscious which told him this---that infuriating part of a person's brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
We forget very easily what gives us pain.
— Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear
What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Rather than arriving five hours late and flustered, it would be better all around if he were to arrive five hours and a few extra minutes late, but triumphantly in command.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.
— John Berger
We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.
— Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd
It's in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes living in a carefully edited, overproduced and photoshopped world very dangerous.
— Brené Brown