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If everybody is rewarded just for being alive, you get the same sort of effect as you do when you reward every student just for being enrolled. You destroy not only education, you destroy society by giving A's to everyone. This is a philosophical consideration that bothers me very much as I sit in the United States Senate and see the great budget allocations going through.
-S. I. Hayakawa
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Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.
-Eric Hoffer
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Society is always trying in some way to grind us down to a single flat surface.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.
-Victor Hugo
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To associate with other like-minded people in small, purposeful groups is for the great majority of men and women a source of profound psychological satisfaction. Exclusiveness will add to the pleasure of being several, but at one; and secrecy will intensify it almost to ecstasy.
-Aldous Huxley
Beyond the Mexique Bay, Chichicastenango (1934)
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The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom -- these are the pillars of society.
-Henrik Ibsen
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Every institution not only carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution, but prepares the way for its most hated rival.
-W. R. [William Ralph] Inge
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Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.
-W. R. [William Ralph] Inge
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No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
-Eugene Ionesco
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The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents.... It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.... It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.
additional note: According to Hugh Sidey, in A Very Personal Presidency (1968), the slogan,
-Lyndon B. Johnson
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson: 1963-64, Speech, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, May 22, 1964
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There is no comparing the brutality and cynicism of today's pop culture with that of forty years ago: from High Noon to Robocop is a long descent.
-Charles Krauthammer
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What can you say about a society that says God is dead and Elvis is alive?
-Irv Kupcinet
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Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what's good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.
-Lewis H. Lapham
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Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a burden and a bore. It is so hard to see past him.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.
-Timothy Leary
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There is one fact that can be established. The only phenomenon which, always and in all parts of the world, seems to be linked with the appearance of writing
-Claude Levi-Strauss
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The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being -- which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs -- where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.
-Walter Lippmann
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Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.
-Karl Marx
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We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it means danger, revolution, anarchy.
-Henry Miller
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Power is not of a man. Wealth does not center in the person of the wealthy. Celebrity is not inherent in any personality. To be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions.
-C. Wright Mills
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Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!
-Marvin Minsky
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Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
-George Orwell
A Collection of Essays
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To train and educate the rising generation will at all times be the first object of society, to which every other will be subordinate.
-Robert Owen
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To me, we must learn to spell the word RESPECT. We must respect the rights and properties of our fellowman. And then learn to play the game of life, as well as the game of athletics, according to the rules of society. If you can take that and put it into practice in the community in which you live, then, to me you have won the greatest championship.
-Jesse Owens
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Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.
-Camille Anna Paglia
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Books about Society
