Society Quotes
Shakespeare, Emerson, Rousseau, Milton and John Stuart Mill lead the page. The sourced picks include Shaw’s remark in O’Flaherty V.C. (1919) that you will never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race, and a Martin Luther King sermon from 1967 on a man who talked as if he could build his barns alone.
Three entries have flags. “One man with courage makes a majority” is credited to Andrew Jackson, and the notes say it has never been found in his writings. Robert Kennedy and Ronald Reagan both repeated the attribution. “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” is credited to Dostoyevsky and flagged misattributed. The “I expect to pass through this world but once” passage, credited to Stephen Grellet, is disputed. The first known print is a June 1869 magazine, writing of an unnamed Quaker.
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.
The dependence of the individual upon society is a fact of nature which cannot be abolished.
The more a man's life is shaped by the collective norms, the greater is his individual immorality.
The wise man sometimes flees from society from fear of being bored.
The trappings of a monarchy would set up an ordinary commonwealth.
The only distinction that democracies reward is a high degree of conformity.
He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society.
Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.
At present there is no distinction among the upper ten thousand of the city.
People can’t understand the world as a gift unless someone shows them how it’s a gift.