Quotes About Society

The individual has totally different interests from the society, because the society has no soul. The society is soulless. And if you become too much a part of the society, it will reduce your soul also to a non-entity. Beware, before you have lost your whole opportunity. Don't be a slave. Follow society to the point you feel is needed, but always remain master of your own destiny.

Since the social victim has been oppressed by society, he comes to feel that his individual life will be improved more by changes in society than by his own initiative. Without realizing it, he makes society rather than himself the agent of change. The power he finds in his victimization may lead him to collective action against society, but it also encourages passivity within the sphere of his personal life.

Advertising and the free society are closely connected. Advertising helps to make a free society remain so by increasing competition, and by helping to maintain the freedom of the mass media themselves. The free society is one where advertising and advertising agencies are likely to be in considerable demand, though it is true that even in a totally centralist society there would still be a need for organisations and people to have access to mass communication media.

There is a very broad theory that society gets the right to hang, as the individual gets the right to defend himself. Suppose she does; there are certain principles which limit this right. Society has got the murderer within four walls; he never can do any more harm. Has society any need to take that man's life to protect itself? If any society has only the right that the individual has, she has no right to inflict the penalty of death, because she can effectually restrain the individual from ever again committing his offence.

The more you become a part of society, the less and less you are an individual, the less and less you are spontaneous - because the very membership in the society will not allow you to be spontaneous. You will have to follow the rules of the game. If you enter a society, you accept to follow those rules that the society is playing, or has decided to play.

I think what is being pointed out by African-Americans is that from slavery forward they have been living in a supposed democracy which treats them as less than other citizens, less than whites in the society. And I think that pointing out that there are structures of discrimination in the society, deeply rooted racist structures, that segregate housing, that send black children to ill-equipped schools, that discriminate in the workplace - these are truths about our society that must be faced.

Meditation is not to get out of society, to escape from society, but to prepare for a reentery into society.

There is the specter of "realism" that is still haunting Chinese contemporary art - that art is only an instrument, an instrument to reflect society, that it must be useful for society. Also, I have noticed many Western media outlets are very insistent on understanding contemporary art in China through this kind of realist approach. Sometimes I even sense that they are intent on, as we say in China, "picking bones of politics out of an egg of art." Or perhaps they see art as merely an instrument to reflect society.

Socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.

The strength of an individual is not in his extreme freedom and libertine lifestyle, but in the stalwartness of his character and his moral vigor. The society is made of individuals. What is true for an individual is also true for the society. A society that is not founded on moral values is doomed to fall.

Let us look at wealth and poverty. The affluent society and the deprived society inter-are. The wealth of one society is made of the poverty of the other. "This is like this, because that is like that." Wealth is made of non-wealth elements, and poverty is made by non-poverty elements. [...] so we must be careful not to imprison ourselves in concepts. The truth is that everything contains everything else. We cannot just be, we can only inter-be. We are responsible fo everything that happens around us.

Will dissent be permitted? The answer to that question will determine whether the society is a free society or a fear society.

A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance, this new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia but to keep the very structure of society intact.

You cannot reform your society or institution without opening your mind. So the core issue is how to open the mind, the whole society, and this means everybody in society including everyone. I am not talking about the state or average or common people. I am talking about everybody; because when you close your mind as an official you cannot upgrade and vice versa.

Liberty is the first condition of growth. Your ancestors gave every liberty to the soul, and religion grew. They put the body under every bondage, and society did not grow. The opposite is the case in the West - every liberty to society, none to religion. Now are falling off the shackles from the feet of Eastern society as from those of Western religion.

At the end of the day, if millions of people come together and say, we are not going to be a xenophobic society, we are not going to be throwing millions of Latinos out of this country, we are not going to be a racist society, we're not going to be a sexist society, we will prevail.

The most serious problems of freedom of expression in our society today exist on our campuses. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce correct opinion rather than to search for wisdom and to liberate the mind....Attitudes on campuses often presage tendencies in the larger society. If that is so with respect to freedom of expression, the erosion of principle we have seen throughout our society in recent years may be only the beginning.

To revolt within society in order to make it a little better, to bring about certain reforms, is like the revolt of prisoners to improve their life within the prison walls; and such revolt is no revolt at all, it is just mutiny. Do you see the difference? Revolt within society is like the mutiny of prisoners who want better food, better treatment within the prison; but revolt born of understanding is an individual breaking away from society, and that is creative revolution.

Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute.

The decisive moment in the defeat of upper class, capital-S, Society may have come when, in newspapers all over the nation, what used to be call the Society page was replaced by the Style section.

The novel as a form is usually seen to be moral if its readers consider freedom, individuality, democracy, privacy, social connection, tolerance and hope to be morally good, but it is not considered moral if the highest values of a society are adherence to rules and traditional mores, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships, and absolute ideas of right and wrong. Any society based on the latter will find novels inherently immoral and subversive.

The endeavor of being a foreign correspondent means that you will never be their equal. And that has its pros and cons. Were you to be an insider in a particular society, then you would be one of them, and the way you would write about that society would be very different. When you're brought up in a certain way, you have certain blind spots to the things going on in your culture. There is an illumination the outsider brings to a place or a situation that cannot be duplicated.

We no longer live in a post-Christian society, we live in an anti-Christian society, one in which the Christian faith is dismissed or ridiculed and Christians are considered suspect and their motives and behavior berated.

The more the society becomes a technological society, the less it has to hold itself together.

Meditation means: put the mind aside and watch. The first step - LOVE YOURSELF - will help you tremendously. By loving yourself you will have destroyed much that society has implanted within you. You will have become freer from the society and its conditioning.

This is one of the ways fiction is more liberating than nonfiction - I don't have to be so concerned with fact. I had the paradigm of certain people in my head who became my characters, but I never considered these people to be from a "certain sector of society," unless we agree that we're all from certain sectors of society.

Society needs people who...know how to be compassionate and honest...Societ y needs all kinds of skills that are not just cognitive; they're emotional, they're affectional. You can't run the society on data and computers alone.

A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling. When a society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. We need true satires and tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a clean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society.

Art can no longer be art today if it does not reach into the heart of our present culture and work transformatively within it that is, an art which cannot mould society — and through this naturally operate upon the core questions of our society — is not art.

Writers tend to think they occupy a much more relevant place in society than we actually do. But we really are closer to buffoons and jesters than we are to whistle-blowers or moral guides. Accepting our rather insignificant place in society can be depressing - but it's also freeing.

The private motives of scientists are not the trend of science. The trend of science is made by the needs of society: navigation before the eighteenth century, manufacture thereafter; and in our age I believe the liberation of personality. Whatever the part which scientists like to act, or for that matter which painters like to dress, science shares the aims of our society just as art does.

The negative side of football. The negative side of our society. People sometimes go to football and bring to it the negative aspects of our society.

I think that's what I really dig about science fiction these days - we've caught up to it in a way. It's no longer about people with huge brains. Now it's really much more, as Jim Cameron says, the nature of being human. What it is to be human in society. How to retain one's humanity in society.

The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society, which is nature's proper steward and society's only hope.

Even if one is interested only in one's own society, which is one's prerogative, one can understand that society much better by comparing it with others.

Society is a republic. When an individual endeavors to lift himself above his fellows, he is dragged down by the mass, either by means of ridicule or of calumny. No one shall be more virtuous or more intellectually gifted than others. Whoever, by the irresistable force of genius, rises above the common herd is certain to be ostracized by society, which will pursue him with such merciless derision and detraction that at last he will be compelled to retreat into the solitude of his thoughts.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

The ideal of a perfectly functioning democracy is one person, one vote; the ideal of a perfectly functioning market is one dollar, one vote.It's a hoary superstition that democratically elected governments invariably function as instruments of the collective will.A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste.

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet.

My overall approach toward art is to remain as open as possible in front of the world, to always be curious, not to be afraid to experiment, and have a sense of self-criticism and a general criticism toward the surrounding. Also, trying to make a difference between serious research and pure gag! And making as few compromises as possible toward doing things that might not be accepted by the majority of society, even if this dominant society is the one which is ruling the art world. To keep this fundamental idea, even if it's a bit trivial: to have the desire to transform the world.

People say mental hospitals are for the patients, in fact they are to protect society from them. They are justified in doing that. Society has to do what is best for itself.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life. Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death.

This supposed idyllic society we have is the most confused, warped, addicted society in the history of the world. We are addicted to power, we're addicted to our own image of ourselves, to violence, divorce, abortion, and sex.

The church, inserted and active in human society and in history, does not exist in order to exercise political power or to govern the society.

The penetration of society by the Internet and the penetration of the Internet by society is the best thing that has ever happened to global human civilisation.

Friedrich Engels once said: "Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism." What does "regression into barbarism" mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization.

The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role in society is to make money.