Great Societies Quotes

#1. It will be said that great societies cannot exist without government.

Thomas Jefferson

#2. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#3. Civilized people can talk about anything. For them no subject is taboo ... In civilized societies there will be no intellectual bogeys at sight of which great grownup babies are expected to hide their eyes.

Clive Bell

#4. I know I don't look old, but I'm beginning to feel it in my heart ... I need a holiday. A very long holiday. And I don't expect I shall return.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#5. It is useless to deny, and impossible to conceal, that a great part of Europe, the whole of Italy and France, and a great portion of Germany, to say nothing of other countries - is covered with a network of these secret societies, just as the superfices of the Earth are being covered with railroads.

Benjamin Disraeli

#6. The main goal is to increase diversity. The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity. This is true for culture or evolution, for species and also for whole societies. If you become a monoculture, you are at great risk of perishing.

George M. Church

#7. Imbalance of reason and emotion may explain the tenacity of religion in societies: world religions are optimized to tap into the emotional networks, and great arguments of reason amount to little against such magnetic pull.

David Eagleman

#8. It is perfectly possible that a grandfather can have a more scientific mind than his grandchildren! Societies do not always go forward! Sometimes old generations are much luckier!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#9. The things we love individually not only determine our character, but what a society loves collectively shapes its culture. This latter idea was the heart of Augustine's great work City of God. He believed societies are the mutual associations of individuals united by what they love in common.

Timothy J. Keller

#10. The great cause which divides our countries is not to be decided by individual animosities. The harmony of private societies cannot weaken national efforts.

Thomas Jefferson

#11. Democracy represents the disbelief in all great men and in all elite societies: everybody is everybody's equal.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#12. I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and listened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers and leopard-societies.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould

#13. Societies need heroes. So we travel to places where the revisionists cannot dismantle the great.

David Gemmell

#14. My soul is a canvas stretched across four wooden corners and tacked with copper nails that sink into the edges of timber like teeth. My art is nothing less than my salvation.

Keariene Muizz

#15. Adorable children are considered to be the general property of the human race. Rude children belong to their mothers.

Judith Martin

#16. It is one of history's great ironies that capitalists built decent and humane societies on the basis of an amoral approach to the economics of pricing, whereas socialists built exploitative and inhumane societies on the basis of a morally inflamed approach to economics.

Kevin D. Williamson

#17. It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art.

Henry Louis Gates

#18. Sacrifice, which is the passion of great souls, has never been the law of societies.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#19. The original of all great and lasting societies consisted not in the mutual good will men had toward each other, but in the mutual fear they had of each other.

Thomas Hobbes

#20. Love is like the air we breathe. It may not always be seen, but it is always felt, used and needed.

John The Apostle

#21. Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.

Joan Didion

#22. America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.

Bill Bryson

#23. By the time my first album was out, I had been out in Jamaica three or four years, but I had hits out at that time that were bona fide hits.

Sean Paul

#24. The greatest historical events in the twentieth century - in fact, in all of human history - have been the overthrow of capitalism and establishment of societies run by and for the working class in the two great communist revolutions in Russia and China.

Grover Furr

#25. For every Aruna story we hear there are hundreds of thousands that will never be heard, swept under the great rug of shame societies have so eloquently woven. It is up to us to speak up, to lift this heavy rug and reveal the ugliness it conceals.

Aysha Taryam

#26. Love is the beauty and the strength of all societies and the great pleasure of our lives on earth.

John Bunyan

#27. Alchemy is glorious, gritty, and gruesome, forcing one to mature spiritually."

-from my weblog posted today on diavirginia

Dia Virginia Rigden

#28. If we want to sum up the theory of evolution by natural selection in two words, which have great relevance for all societies and businesses, we should simply remember: diversity works.

Richard Koch

#29. Humility is the great preserver of peace and order in all Christian churches and societies, consequently pride is the great disturber of them, and the cause of most dissensions and breaches in the church.

Matthew Henry

#30. Although failure is a great teacher, we cannot afford the time to learn from our failures. Human societies cannot be subjected to such a process.

Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum

#31. Teachers still command great respect in the families and societies of many Asian cultures.

Andy Hargreaves

#32. I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies - in great towns and great crowds. It's a plant that takes time and space and air; and London society is a huge "squash", as we elegantly call it - an elbowing, pushing, perspiring, chattering mob.

Henry James

#33. It explains the great quandary of why the most depressed societies are those with the fewest wants.

Hugh Howey