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Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.
-Edward Abbey
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The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.
-Lord (John Emerich Edward Dalberg) Acton
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American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
-Henry Adams
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The happiness of society is the end of government.
-John Adams
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Society lives by faith, and develops by science.
-Henri Frederic Amiel
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The problem with society is that happiness and intelligence are rarely found in the same person. I guess that's why they say ignorance is bliss.
-Anonymous
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Nor was civil society founded merely to preserve the lives of its members; but that they might live well: for otherwise a state might be composed of slaves, or the animal creation... nor is it an alliance mutually to defend each other from injuries, or for a commercial intercourse. But whosoever endeavors to establish wholesome laws in a state, attends to the virtues and vices of each individual who composes it; from whence it is evident, that the first care of him who would found a city, truly deserving that name, and not nominally so, must be to have his citizens virtuous.
-Aristotle
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The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
-Isaac Asimov
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Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.
-Margaret Atwood
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The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
-Walter Bagehot
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If you're treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they're real for you whether they're real or not.
-James Baldwin
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Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.
-James Baldwin
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The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.
-Roland Barthes
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Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.
-Simone de Beauvoir
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Ours is the age of substitutes: instead of language, we have jargon: instead of principles, slogans: and, instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas.
-Eric Bently
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What is a wife and what is a harlot? What is a church and what is a theatre? are they two and not one? Can they exist separate? Are not religion and politics the same thing? Brotherhood is religion. O demonstrations of reason dividing families in cruelty and pride!
-William Blake
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Self-recognition is necessary to know one's road, but, knowing the road, the price of the mistakes and perils is worth paying. The following of that road will be all the discipline one needs. Discipline does not mean being molded by outside forces, but sticking to one's road against the forces that would deflect or bury the soul. People speak of finding one
-Randolph Silliman Bourne
Youth and Life
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Our true ancestry is the emergent creativity of the universe. Our forebears were the great inventors who 'learned' how to coalesce hydrogen and helium into stars, to form planets, to sustain life first from mineral nutrients in the sea and later to capture delicious photons, to exploit oxygen for energy rather than be exterminated by it, to diversify via sexual reproduction, to form social groups for greater security and protection of offspring. We are the beneficiaries (and, admittedly, also the victims) of this narrative of emergence. Our 'companions'
-John Brewer
The Great Story
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I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.
-Emily Bronte
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Society is indeed a contract. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
-Edmund Burke
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Society is now one polished horde, formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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It is a stern fact of history that no nation that rushed to the abyss ever turned back. Not ever, in the long history of the world. We are now on the edge of the abyss. Can we, for the first time in history, turn back? It is up to you.
-Taylor Caldwell
Honoria, 1957
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We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named fair competition and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Society is composed of two great classes, those that have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.
-Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort
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Society is divided into two classes, the shearers and the shorn.
-Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort
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Books about Society
