Top 100 Great Society Quotes
#1. Socialism is simply a re-assertion of that tribal ethics whose gradual weakening had made an approach to the Great Society possible.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#2. Poverty is less a matter of income than of prospects. While the incomes of the poor have steadily risen through Great Society largesse, their prospects have plummeted as families have broken into dependent fragments.
George Gilder
#3. The press is dying to paint me as now trying to undo the New Deal. I remind them I voted for F.D.R. 4 times. I'm trying to undo the "Great Society." It was L.B.J.'s war on poverty that led to our present mess.
Ronald Reagan
#4. That bitch of a war killed the lady I really loved
the Great Society.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#5. 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.
#6. I believe we can continue the Great Society while we fight in Vietnam.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#7. But, most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#8. A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions.
Alfred North Whitehead
#9. But we look back now, and we realize the Great Society was not a success.
Alphonso Jackson
#10. LBJ held up Detroit as a model of what the Great Society could accomplish. He was right.
Mark Steyn
#11. So here is the Great Society. It's the time - and it's going to be soon - when nobody in this country is poor.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#12. If liberalism discredited itself, Obama woulda never gotten elected, and the New Deal woulda gone by the wayside, and LBJ woulda never gotten the Great Society. Liberalism does not discredit itself. It has to be explained and beaten back.
Rush Limbaugh
#13. A third place to build the Great Society is in the classrooms of America. There your children's lives will be shaped. Our society will not be great until every young mind is set free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination. We are still far from that goal.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#14. It is incumbent upon each of us to improve spending and savings practices to ensure our own individual financial security and preserve the collective economic well-being of our great society.
Ron Lewis
#15. In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#16. All great cathedrals began their building by the placement of a single stone. The building unit of a great society is the individual.
L. Ron Hubbard
#17. Don't let the politicians chip away at the New Deal and the Great Society programs like Social Security and Medicare, that puts a floor beyond which the elderly, the sick, the powerless do not starve or lack for medicine or shelter.
Helen Thomas
#18. Simple old-fashioned values that come from a sense of community are the key to a great society. I believe we all have that sense from childhood memories, when life was simple. It's those memories that should drive us to reflect on our values.
Lindsay Fox
#19. Life in a great society, or for that matter in a small, is a web of tangled relations of all sorts, whose adjustment so that it may be endurable is an extraordinarily troublesome matter.
Learned Hand
#20. This nation, this generation, in this hour has man's first chance to build a Great Society, a place where the meaning of man's life matches the marvels of man's labor.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#21. For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ's Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population.
Mark Steyn
#22. We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#23. In the Great Society, work shall be an outlet for mans interests and desires. Each individual shall have full opportunity to use his capacities in employment which satisfies personally and contributes generally to the quality of the Nations life.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#24. I was a Great Society liberal on domestic issues. People ask me, 'How do you go from Walter Mondale to Fox News?' The answer is, 'I was young once.' End of answer.
Charles Krauthammer
#25. The great society is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goods than with the quantity of their goods.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#26. The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and enlarge his talents.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#27. There is One great society alone on earth: The noble living and the noble dead.
William Wordsworth
#28. If I had been elected president in 1948, history would be vastly different. I believe we would have stemmed the growth of Big Government, which had begun with the New Deal and culminated with the Great Society.
Strom Thurmond
#30. I, a product of the New Frontier and Great Society, honestly believed that the world pretty much owed me a living
all I had to do was wait around in order to live better than my parents.
Anthony Bourdain
#31. After Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the belief in decent housing as a political right or social obligation was supplanted in the U.S. by the notion that suitable shelter should be an act of charity.
Martin Filler
#32. The results of the Great Society experiments started coming in and began showing that, for all its good intentions, the War on Poverty was causing irreparable damage to the very communities it was designed to help.
Charles Krauthammer
#33. Once A. K. Coomaraswamy, the great twentieth-century Indian expert on traditional metaphysics and art, said that in modern society the artist is a special kind of person, while in traditional society every person is a special kind of artist.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
#34. The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it. We have talked enough; but we have not listened. And by not listening we have failed to concede the immense complexity of our society - and thus the great gaps between ourselves and those with whom we seek understanding.
William H. Whyte
#35. Compassion is not a dirty word. Compassion is not a sign of weakness. In my view, compassion in politics and in public policy is in fact a hallmark of great strength. It is a hallmark of a society which has about it a decency which speaks for itself.
Kevin Rudd
#36. I think it's great that we have organisations like Greenpeace. In a pluralistic society, we want to have people who point out all the problems that the Earth could encounter. But we need to understand that they are not presenting a full and rounded view.
Bjorn Lomborg
#37. The freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.
Noam Chomsky
#38. Our society is the product of several great religious and philosophical traditions. The ideas of the Greeks and Romans, Christianity, Judaism, humanism and the Enlightenment have made us who we are.
Jan Peter Balkenende
#39. The great drama of Russian history has been between its state and society. Put simply, Russia has always had too much state and not enough society.
Fareed Zakaria
#40. Many economists are great believers in the idea that everything in nature is competitive and that we should set up a society which is competitive to reflect that. Anyone who cannot keep up, well, too bad.
Frans De Waal
#41. If we want a great future in this world, we have to take God at his word, and God makes it really clear that society and civilization is held together by the glue of families ... This is where the next generation of human beings are incubated and nurtured and matured - in homes. In families.
Kirk Cameron
#42. One great feature of modern society is the institutionalized respect we give to processes designed to destroy the past.
Lawrence Lessig
#43. The current moral decay perceived in society has often been blamed on the lack of God in the public schools. During the Great Depression God was prominent in the schools, hence She must have caused the depression. Challenge my logic.
Eric Welch
#44. One of the great responsibilities we have as a society is to educate ourselves, along with the next generation, about which substances are worth ingesting, and for what purpose, and which are not.
Sam Harris
#45. I believe that with great wealth comes great responsibility, a responsibility to give back to society and a responsibility to see that those resources are put to work in the best possible way to help those most in need.
Bill Gates
#46. 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
#47. Our great progressive struggles have been waged to make sure ordinary citizens, and not just the rich and privileged, share in the benefits of a free society.
Bill Moyers
#48. Every effort to make society sensitive to the importance of the family, is a great service to humanity.
Pope John Paul II
#49. I don't really think that, as a society, we [americans] want to confer blessings on generation after generation who contribute nothing to society, simply because somebody in the far distant past happened to amass a great sum of wealth.
Warren Buffett
#50. Anger at injustice has righted more wrongs than most other things, and it is one of the great creative forces in a civilized society.
Anne Perry
#51. In the very darkness of a stupid society, even a little candle deserves a great honour!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#52. Artists are a very important part of our society because they make a great contribution to our values. The artist creates a value system that we all grow up on, whether we know it or not.
Roy DeCarava
#53. Cinema is mass media, it is both overtly gross and exciting. It is our great mirror of society.
Nicolas Winding Refn
#54. In this kind of super-capitalistic society, everything is turned into money. And one of the great things about art is it isn't worth anything. It's absolutely free. It's going to get made no matter what.
Brice Marden
#55. Socrates said the perfect society would be based on a great lie. People would be told that lie from the cradle, and they would believe it, because human beings need to make order out of chaos.
Anne Frasier
#56. What I condemn are our system of values and the men who don't acknowledge how great, difficult, but ultimately beautiful women's share in society is.
Anne Frank
#57. To what level of depravity has a society descended when it condemns a man simply because he is strong and great?
Ayn Rand
#58. Capitalism is being attacked not because it is inefficient or misgoverned but because it is cynical. And indeed a society based on the assertion that private vices become public benefits cannot endure, no matter how impeccable its logic, no matter how great its benefits.
Peter Drucker
#59. I am not fully forgiven until I allow God to write his new dream for my life on the blackboard of my mind.. God has a great plan to redeem society. He needs me and wants to use me.
Robert H. Schuller
#60. The indifference, callousness, and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering towards animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of human spirit.
Ashley Montagu
#61. Sweden is a great country. What is not so great is that we have a society that, in a way, says it's great if you don't look right, if you don't look left, if you just look straight forward.
Michael Nyqvist
#62. This became Delacroix 's theme: that the achievements of the spirit all that a great library contained were the result of a state of society so delicately balanced that at the least touch they would be crushed beneath an avalanche of pent-up animal forces.
Kenneth Clark
#63. The outstanding truths of life, the great and unquestioned phenomena of society, are not to be argued away as myths and vagaries when they do not fit within our little moulds. If necessary, we must remake the moulds.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
#64. I think it's great now that we seem to be in an era where it's OK to be gay and I think that the society in North America has had more of a problem with it than any other society.
Jason Priestley
#65. We are an aspirational society. We believe that circumstances of your birth do not determine your outcome. You shouldn't have to be born to wealthy parents or the right zip code to be successful and do great things in our country!
Bobby Jindal
#66. It's great that Time is moving in the direction of validating those who, by choice or circumstance, will never be parents. But the point is not simply that society should stop judging those of us who don't have children. It's that society actually needs us. Children need us.
Meghan Daum
#67. The actual and potential harm of use of the drug is not great enough to justify intrusion by the criminal law into private behavior, a step which our society takes only 'with the greatest reluctance'.
Raymond P. Shafer
#68. Technological society has succeeded in multiplying the opportunities for pleasure, but it has great difficulty in generating joy.
Pope Paul VI
#69. Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes, but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.
Graham Greene
#70. Income inequality has no necessary connection with poverty, the lack of material resources for a decent life, such as adequate food, shelter, and clothing. A society with great income inequality may have no poor people, and a society with no income inequality may have nothing but poor people.
Robert Higgs
#71. The two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.
Oscar Wilde
#72. Society is not merely a select body of spiritual or intellectual persons, but a great organism composed of all kinds of members, a net containing bad and good.
Robert Hugh Benson
#73. A great artist can change society because of the entertaining and mesmerizing quality of his or her art.
Jeffrey Lewis
#74. Our society has changed in unforeseeable ways since Social Security was created. For example, we are living longer, healthier, and more productive lives and while this is all great news, this has also placed added pressure on America's retirement system.
Norm Coleman
#75. Successfully reframing the climate debate in the United States from one based on environmental values to one based on health values ... holds great promise to help American society better understand and appreciate the risks of climate change ...
George Mason
#78. All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust, and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society.
Edmund Burke
#79. Anarchists know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals.
Lucy Parsons
#80. It was a rude and simple society and there were no laws to punish a starving man for expressing his need for food, such as have been established in a more humanitarian age; and the lack of any organised police permitted such persons to pester the wealthy without any great danger.
G.K. Chesterton
#81. Why were we so full of hope in those days? Looking back, I see so clearly that violence was worsening. Living through that time, we didn't see that. We believed in our capacity to grow a great country. A just society.
Kaimana Wolff
#82. I'm sure mothers are important across every culture, but particularly in Korean society, the role of the mother is of great importance.
Bong Joon-ho
#83. I gather they are even vaguely pacifist, not on moral grounds but from an ingrained habit of belittling anything that concerns the great mass of their fellow men and from a dash of purely fashionable and literary communism.
C.S. Lewis
#84. If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
Charles Darwin
#85. There are a lot of great animal rights organizations who save dogs and save cats, but the Humane Society is actually really good at working with Congress and getting legislation actually passed.
Moby
#86. Technological considerations are of great importance to architecture and cities in the informational society.
Kenzo Tange
#87. Society is composed of two great classes
those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.
Sebastien Chamfort
#88. The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.
Albert Camus
#89. In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society.
Noam Chomsky
#90. In following your inclinations and moving toward mastery, you make a great contribution to society, enriching it with discoveries and insights, and making the most of the diversity in nature and among human society.
Robert Greene
#91. In civilized society [a person] stands at all times in need of the cooperation and assistance of great multitudes," Smith wrote, "while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons.
Arthur Herman
#92. At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it.
Whittaker Chambers
#93. Society in itself is no great harm, but unsatisfied social aspirations are a bad and ugly business. We must certainly accept, and we will.
Leo Tolstoy
#94. The man is really looking for self-esteem, and he seeks to find it by winning the esteem of others. In our society, the fastest and surest way to do this is by amassing a great deal of money. So the money becomes a substitute, a symbol, for the esteem.
Sydney J. Harris
#95. As a nation, we owe a great deal to the National Audubon Society, one of our most distinguished and important environmental organizations, and all those who work to protect America's open land and waterways.
Louis Bacon
#96. There are a great many people in our society who are happy, but since they don't know they're happy, they're not happy.
Theodore Isaac Rubin
#97. The great majority of Americans do not know much about Islam but nonetheless fear it as violent, expansionist and alien to their society. The problem to overcome is not hatred, but ignorance.
Tariq Ramadan
#98. Technological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truely totalitarian universe in which society and nature, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe.
Herbert Marcuse
#99. Our modern history begins in 1788 with the dumping of the human detritus of Britain ... Yet repositioned in the sunlight , they flourished. ...This was colonial Australia's great gift to the world: practical proof that, when it comes to human society, the soil is more important than the seed.
Richard Glover
#100. The crime against nature will never make any great progress in society unless people are prompted to it by some particular custom.
Baron De Montesquieu
