Quotes on society
The human race has had long experience and a fine tradition in surviving adversity. But we now face a task for which we have little experience, the task of surviving prosperity.
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Alan Gregg Quotes
It would be a service to mankind if the pill were available in slot machines and the cigarette were placed on prescription.
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Malcolm Potts Quotes
Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of 'progress,' but only by viewing history as a neurosis.
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Norman O. Brown Quotes
The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we're passing one another without a look of recognition.
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Henry Miller Quotes
This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.
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Matthew Arnold Quotes
We create an environment where it is alright to hate, to steal, to cheat, and to lie if we dress it up with symbols of respectability, dignity and love.
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Whitney Moore Quotes
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.
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Daniel Webster Quotes
You can say this for ready-mixes - the next generation isn't going to have any trouble making pies exactly like mother used to make.
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Earl Wilson Quotes
The year is 2006. The world has changed in about 364 significant ways since you started reading this sentence.
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Ed Northstrum Quotes
Oh, for the good old days when people would stop Christmas shopping when they ran out of money.
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Author Unknown Quotes
One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame, we have killed off so much real shame as well.
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Louis Kronenberger Quotes
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on the human face - forever.
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George Orwell Quotes
We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
Once the Xerox copier was invented, private diplomacy died. There's no such thing as secrecy. It's just a question of whether it's leaked or revealed openly.
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Andrew Young Quotes
History assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.
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Will Durant Quotes
If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.
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Author Unknown Quotes
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
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Mohandas K. Gandhi Quotes
The secret to living contently and sanely in this modern world is to find the beautiful in the ugly - but don't get confused which is which.
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Leslie Grimutter Quotes
Noise, crowding, pollution, and the sheer rush of our complex, modern society are rapidly becoming as oppressive to many individuals as the worst kind of political dictatorship.
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Thomas F. Eagleton Quotes
There's a standard formula for success in the entertainment medium, and that is: "Beat it to death if it succeeds."
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Ernie Kovacs Quotes
If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all.
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Pearl S. Buck Quotes
Choice has always been a privilege of those who could afford to pay for it.
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Ellen Frankfort Quotes
In spite of all our speeding it's still the style to be late.
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Frank McKinney Hubbard Quotes
I am not quite sure what the advantage is in having a few more dollars to spend if the air is too dirty to breathe, the water too polluted to drink, the commuters are losing out in the struggle to get in and out of the city, the streets are filthy, and the schools so bad that the young perhaps wisely stay away, and the hoodlums roll citizens for some of the dollars they saved in the tax cut.
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John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes
Somebody recently figured out that we have 35 million laws to enforce the ten commandments.
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Bert Masterson and Earl Wilson Quotes
Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.
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Mary Ellen Kelly Quotes
I believe that security declines as security machinery expands.
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E. B. White Quotes
The three horrors of modern life - talk without meaning, desire without love, work without satisfaction.
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Mignon McLaughlin Quotes
When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?
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Chuck Palahniuk Quotes
If some people got their rights they would complain of being deprived of their wrongs.
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Oliver Herford Quotes
Our society's values are being corrupted by advertising's insistence on the equation: Youth equals popularity, popularity equals success, success equals happiness.
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John Fisher Quotes
The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age.
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Russell Baker Quotes
It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake.
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Norman Douglas Quotes
Depressed? Of course we're all depressed. We've been so quickly, violently, and irreconcilably plucked from nature, from physical labor, from kinship and village mentality, from every natural and primordial anti-depressant. The further society "progresses," the grander the scale of imbalance. Just as fluoride is put in water to prevent dental caries, we'll soon find government mandating Prozac in our water to prevent mental caries.
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M. Robin D'Antan Quotes
You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.
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Octave Mirbeau Quotes
I've been reading a lot lately about Indian captives. One woman who had been captured by the Indians and made a squaw was resentful when she was rescued because she'd found that there was a lot more work to do as the wife of a white man.
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Stephen Vincent Benét Quotes
Mammalia, n. pl. A family of vertebrate animals whose females in a state of nature suckle their young, but when civilized and enlightened put them out to nurse, or use the bottle.
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Ambrose Bierce Quotes
Society is composed of two great classes - those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.
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Nicholas de Chamfort Quotes
What's wrong with this world is, it's not finished yet. It is not competed to the point where man can put his final signature to the job and say, "It is finished. We made it and it works."
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William Faulkner Quotes
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.
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Barbara Jordan Quotes
The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
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Martin Luther King Quotes
The things that are wrong with the country today are the sum total of all the things that are wrong with us as individuals.
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Charles W. Tobey Quotes
Everything is for the eye these days - TV, Life, Look, the movies. Nothing is just for the mind. The next generation will have eyeballs as big as cantaloupes and no brain at all.
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Fred Allen Quotes
Beggars should be abolished. It annoys one to give to them, and it annoys one not to give to them.
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Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes
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.
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George Bernard Shaw Quotes
It's a sad and stupid thing to have to proclaim yourself a revolutionary just to be a decent man.
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David Harris Quotes
No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.
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Dave Barry Quotes
It'll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers.
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Author Unknown Quotes
We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
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Milton Friedman Quotes
I think societal instinct much deeper than sex instinct - and societal repression much more devastating.
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D.H. Lawrence Quotes
The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.
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Theodore Roosevelt Quotes
There is no hope for a civilization which starts each day to the sound of an alarm clock.
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Author Unknown Quotes
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.
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Erich Fromm Quotes
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
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Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes
Society is always engaged in a vast conspiracy to preserve itself - at the expense of the new demands of each new generation.
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John Haynes Holmes Quotes
Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.
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John Lahr Quotes
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
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Dwight D. Eisenhower Quotes
Most of our diversions do not so much delay death as accustom us to it.
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Mignon McLaughlin Quotes
Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
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Russell Baker Quotes
The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet how can anyone speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed? With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?
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Emma Goldman Quotes
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.
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Thomas Szasz Quotes
Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.
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Bill Vaughan Quotes
People have become as processed as food.
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Astrid Alauda Quotes
You make me sick! You are offered meat and you choose a banana-split-with-nuts.
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Martin H. Fischer Quotes
How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young?
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Paul Sweeney Quotes
The world is so dreadfully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.
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Ronald Firbank Quotes
If living conditions don't stop improving in this country, we're going to run out of humble beginnings for our great men.
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Russell P. Askue Quotes
So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.
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Henry George Quotes
Cell phones are the latest invention in rudeness.
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D.H. Mondfleur Quotes
Most people are willing to pay more to be amused than to be educated.
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Robert C. Savage Quotes
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
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Lily Tomlin Quotes
Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.
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Norbert Wiener Quotes
We have produced a world of contented bodies and discontented minds.
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Adam Clayton Powell Quotes
Yes, I am positive that one of the great curatives of our evils, our maladies, social, moral, and intellectual, would be a return to the soil, a rehabilitation of the work of the fields.
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Charles Wagner Quotes
Failure seems to be regarded as the one unpardonable crime, success as the all-redeeming virtue, the acquisition of wealth as the single worthy aim of life. The hair-raising revelations of skullduggery and grand-scale thievery merely incite others to surpass by yet bolder outrages and more corrupt combinations.
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Charles Francis Adams Quotes
There comes a time when a woman needs to stop thinking about her looks and focus her energies on raising her children. This time comes at the moment of conception. A child needs a role model, not a supermodel.
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Astrid Alauda Quotes
The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded.
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Edmund Burke Quotes
The trouble with our age is that it is all signposts and no destination.
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The War Cry Quotes
There is no appeal from the ways of the world, which must continue on its own terms or take us all down with it into chaos and confusion.
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Mark van Doren Quotes
Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion?
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William Lloyd Garrison Quotes
Death is losing its terror. It is the emergency exit for a world that is becoming more frightening death ever was.
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Julian Green Quotes
Most people are awaiting Virtual Reality; I'm awaiting virtuous reality.
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Eli Khamarov Quotes
You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.
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Charles Kuralt Quotes
Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.
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Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Quotes
Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.
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Mignon McLaughlin Quotes
Speed kills colour - the gyroscope, when turning at full speed, shows up gray.
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Paul Morand Quotes
Information and communications technology unlocks the value of time, allowing and enabling multi-tasking, multi-channels, multi-this and multi-that.
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Li Ka Shing Quotes
Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an afterlife.
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Arianna Stassinopoulos Quotes
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.
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Arnold Toynbee Quotes
Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all.
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Norbert Wiener Quotes
The first gold star a child gets in school for the mere performance of a needful task is its first lesson in graft.
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Philip Wylie Quotes