In today’s society, it’s easy to get lost in the hustle and bustle of everyday life. We are constantly bombarded with messages from the media, our families, and our peers about what we should be doing and how we should be living our lives. It can be easy to forget what truly matters in life when we are so caught up in chasing after things that don’t matter.

That’s why it’s important to take a step back every once in awhile and reflect on what society means to us and how we want to live our lives.

Quotes About Society

1. You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty. – Mahatma Gandhi

2. An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life. – Robert A. Heinlein

3. It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. – Jiddu Krishnamurti

4. A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. – Dwight D. Eisenhower

5. There is more to life than increasing its speed. – Mahatma Gandhi

6. Think what a better world it would be if we all, the whole world, had cookies and milk about three o’clock every afternoon and then lay down on our blankets for a nap. – Barbara Jordan

7. Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness. – George Bernard Shaw

8. If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. – Henry David Thoreau

9. We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork. – Milton Friedman

10. What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on? – Henry David Thoreau

11. Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor. – Robert Frost

12. The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose. – James A. Baldwin

13. The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat. – Lily Tomlin

14. The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots. – Erich Fromm

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

16. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. – John W. Gardner

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

18. We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society. – Hillary Clinton

19. Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice. – George Orwell

20. Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers. – Mignon McLaughlin

21. In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning. – Carl Sandburg

22. The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age. – Orson Welles

23. Punishment is now unfashionable… because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility. – Thomas Szasz

24. Life was a lot simpler when what we honored was father and mother rather than all major credit cards. – Robert Orben

25. Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic. – Thomas Szasz

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

27. I am as frustrated with society as a pyromaniac in a petrified forest. – A. Whitney Brown

28. A pure democracy is a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person. – James Madison

29. Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top. – Timothy Leary

30. The human race’s prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenceless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenceless against ourselves. – Arnold J. Toynbee

31. The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum. – Adlai E. Stevenson

32. The wise person often shuns society for fear of being bored. – Jean de la Bruyere

33. You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars. – Charles Kuralt

34. One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we’ll need a new definition. – Alvin Toffler

35. I think this society suffers so much from too much freedom, too many rights that allow people to be irresponsible. – Boyd Rice

36. Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own. – Georg C. Lichtenberg

37. To give aid to every poor man is far beyond the reach and power of every man. Care of the poor is incumbent on society as a whole. – Baruch Spinoza

38. Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also. – Charles Horton Cooley

39. Good-looking individuals are treated better than homely ones in virtually every social situation, from dating to trial by jury. – Martha Beck

40. Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them. – Bill Vaughan

41. Man is the animal that intends to shoot himself out into interplanetary space, after having given up on the problem of an efficient way to get himself five miles to work and back each day. – Bill Vaughan

42. The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it. – Daniel Webster

43. How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young? – Paul Sweeney

44. It is not a fragrant world. – Raymond Chandler

45. Cockroaches and socialites are the only things that can stay up all night and eat anything. – Herb Caen

46. Normal social behavior requires that we be able to recognize identities in spite of change. Unless we can do so, there can be no human society as we know it. – Kenneth L. Pike

47. Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things. – Russell Baker

48. What can you say about a society that says that God is dead and Elvis is alive? – Irv Kupcinet

49. Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in. – Peter Medawar

50. The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role in society is to make money. – A. J. Liebling

51. Society is based on the assumption that everyone is alike and no one is alive. – Hugh Kingsmill

52. Exclusiveness in a garden is a mistake as great as it is in society. – Alfred Austin

53. Society is the union of men and not the men themselves. – Charles de Secondat

54. Women with money and women in power are two uncomfortable ideas in our society. – Candace Bushnell

55. It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence. – Jacques Barzun

56. You can’t make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you’re doing is recording it. – Art Buchwald

57. Marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening the good influence of society. – Jack Kingston

58. 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

59. People are going to behave however the social norms permit, and beyond that. – Max Cannon

60. Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has. – Randolph Bourne

61. Our society is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units. – Valerie Solanas

62. In our society leaving baby with Daddy is just one step above leaving the kids to be raised by wolves or apes. – Al Roker

63. It is good for society to have this introspection. – Jacques Verges

64. We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions. – Ronald Reagan

65. Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it. – John Lennon

66. Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

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

68. If God would have wanted us to live in a permissive society He would have given us Ten Suggestions and not Ten Commandments. – Zig Ziglar

69. One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society… shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

70. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

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

72. Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power. – P. J. O’Rourke

73. Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society. – Mark Twain

74. In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. – Hunter S. Thompson

75. The finest clothing made is a person’s own skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this. – Mark Twain

76. The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings. – John F. Kennedy

77. I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion. – Thomas Jefferson

78. Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. – Frederick Douglass

79. After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military. – William S. Burroughs

80. Truth is certainly a branch of morality and a very important one to society. – Thomas Jefferson

81. A liberal education is at the heart of a civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching. – A. Bartlett Giamatti

82. I claim that human mind or human society is not divided into watertight compartments called social, political and religious. All act and react upon one another. – Mahatma Gandhi

83. If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized. – Oscar Wilde

84. Society exists only as a mental concept in the real world there are only individuals. – Oscar Wilde

85. The great danger for family life, in the midst of any society whose idols are pleasure, comfort and independence, lies in the fact that people close their hearts and become selfish. – Pope John Paul II

86. Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion. – Oscar Wilde

87. My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all. – John Lennon

88. Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work. – Vince Lombardi

89. To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society. – Theodore Roosevelt

We hope you enjoyed this collection of quotes. Check out our picture quote of the day here.