56+ Best Society Quotes: Exclusive Selection

Profoundly inspirational society quotes will brighten up your day and make you feel ready to take on anything.

Famous Society Quotes

Society must be better than the individual. Governor Mike Morris, ‘The Ides Of March’, 2011

Beautiful? said Miss Bartlett, puzzled at the word. Are not beauty and delicacy the same?

Society is like a large piece of frozen water; and skating well is the great art of social life. Letitia E. Landon

If slavery had been abolished I too could have married the man of my choice; I could have had a home shielded by the laws.

Man was formed for society and is neither capable of living alone, nor has the courage to do it. William Blackstone

One had followed the rules, and one had not. But the problem with rules was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time they were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure what side of the line you stood on.

Society is our extended mind and body. Alan Watts

They thought he had spoiled his children, by teaching them to feel that they were human beings. This was blasphemous doctrine for a slave to teach

We must reform society before we can reform ourselves. George Bernard Shaw

I never spoke more plainly in my life. Try believing the evidence instead of insisting that the cameras must be at fault because what they saw was not what you expected.

Music moves society more than most people realize. In my opinion, it’s a soft manipulator of influence and change. Kim Harrison

Our jobs here, as stupid and menial as they may be, allow us to pretend that we are, if even for just a few minutes a day, just like other people

The key to organizing an alternative society is to organize people around what they can do, and more importantly, what they want to do. Abbie Hoffman

A prude thinks that his own rules of propriety are natural laws.

Some people strengthen the society just by being the kind of people they are. John W. Gardner

Society programs us, through the subliminal messages of popular culture, to believe that we’re not truly desirable as women unless we adhere to the current standards of physical beauty.

No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded. Margaret Mead

The Underlanders hadn’t been rude when they’d wanted him to bathe. They had been trying to keep him alive!

We owe our children  the most vulnerable citizens in any society a life free from violence and fear. Nelson Mandela

The thing to do was to act just like others acted, live like they lived, and while they were not looking, do what you wanted. 

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both. C. Wright Mills

As for a divorced daughter  according to Baby Kochamma, she had no position anywhere at all. And as for a divorced daughter from a love marriage, well, words could not describe Baby Kochamma’s outrage. As for a divorced daughter from an intercommunity love marriage  Baby Kochamma chose to remain quiveringly silent on the subject.

Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. Jose Saramago

All my life’s been full of hard troubles. If I wasn’t hungry, I was sick. And if I wasn’t sick, I was in trouble. I ain’t never bothered nobody. I just worked hard every day for as long as I can remember And now I’m in this. They are looking for me and when they catch me they’ll kill me. 

Progressive societies outgrow institutions as children outgrow clothes. Henry George

But it wasn’t just them. It was the others too. They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, and jelly jelly.

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children. Nelson Mandela

You can’t exist in this world with such strong likes and dislikes.

If your joy is derived from what society thinks of you, you’re always going to be disappointed. Madonna

In our school there were different groups you would run with, depending on your station in life. There were the town kids, whose daddies owned the hardware store or what have you they were your cheerleaders and your football players. Then there were hoodlums, the motorcycle types that cut down trees on Halloween. And then there were the rest of us, the poor kids and the farm kids. Greasers, we were called, or Nutters. The main rule was that there was absolutely no mixing.

In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create. Raoul Vaneigem

With the passage of time, I became increasingly aware of how all of the adults around me were living with constant fear and apprehension. I was feeling more and more vulnerable as I watched them continually struggle to solve the mystery of what white folks expected of them. They behaved as though it were an awful sin to overlook even one of those unspoken rules and step out of ‘their place,’ to cross some invisible line. And yet lots of discussions in my household were about how to cross that line, when to cross that line, and who could cross that line without getting hurt.

The nature of a society is largely determined by the direction in which talent and ambition flow by the tilt of the social landscape. Eric Hoffer

Black folks aren’t born expecting segregation, prepared from day one to follow its confining rules. Nobody presents you with a handbook when you’re teething and says, ‘Here’s how you must behave as a second class citizen.’ Instead, the humiliating expectations and traditions of segregation creep over you, slowly stealing a teaspoonful of your self esteem each day.

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. Adam Smith

So much went through my head. How families are families, no matter the caste. How mothers all have their own worries to bear.

A society regulated by a public sense of justice is inherently stable. John Rawls

Our caste was just three away from the bottom. We were artists. And artists and classical musicians were only three steps up from dirt. Literally.

Under any system of society  the family holds the future in its bosom. Charles Franklin Thwing

Societal conditioning discourages telling the truth to those perceived to be in higher positions.

No one would talk much in society if they knew how often they misunderstood others. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Women are always to seem to be this and that.

We must work together to ensure the equitable distribution of wealth, opportunity and power in our society. Nelson Mandela

As I afterwards learned, the poor scrivener, when told that he must be conducted to the Tombs, offered not the slightest obstacle, but, in his pale, unmoving way, silently acquiesced.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. John F. Kennedy

Make no mistake about it: What we do here is highly illegal, but that does not mean we don’t follow the rule of law. My law.

All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded the individual. Albert Einstein

You’ll learn, as you get older, that rules are made to be broken. Be bold enough to live life on your terms, and never, ever apologize for it.

A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society. Emil Cioran

We are now far away from the country of tortures, dotted with wheels, gibbets, gallows, pillories; we are far, too, from that dream of the reformers, less than fifty years before.

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand. Karl Marx

Set the force that drove the criminal to the crime against itself.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. Isaac Asimov

Always give without remembering and always receive without forgetting Brian Tracy