A civilized society that can no longer feel outrage, can no longer be civilized.
A free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
A system in which the two great commandments are to hate your neighbor and to love your neighbor's wife.
American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
Any relations in a social order will endure, if there is infused into them some of that spirit of human sympathy which qualifies life for immortality.
Compare society to a boat. Her progress through the water will not depend upon the exertion of her crew, but upon the exertion devoted to propelling her. This will be lessened by any expenditure of force in fighting among themselves, or in pulling in different directions.
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.
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.
Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.
It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggression.
Man's characteristic privilege is that the bond he accepts is not physical but moral; that is, social. He is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience superior to his own, the superiority of which he feels. Because the greater, better part of his existence transcends the body, he escapes the body's yoke, but is subject to that of society.
Never speak disrespectfully of Society. Only people who can't get into it do that.
No civilized society can thrive upon victims, whose humanity has been permanently mutilated.
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.
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.
One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.
Our society is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units.
Sobriety, severity, and self-respect are the foundations of all true sociality.
Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.
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!