Mass Society Quotes

#1. For the amoral herd that fears boredom above all else, everything becomes entertainment. Sex and sport, politics and the arts are transformed into entertainment ... Nothing is immune from the demand that boredom be relieved (but without personal involvement, for mass society is a spectator society).

Merold Westphal

#2. It is the tragic story of the cultural crusader in a mass society that he cannot win, but that we would be lost without him.

Paul Lazarsfeld

#3. Mass society has displaced real community, where people function together and account for their own lives.

John Zerzan

#4. If you have a problem in mass society, you call the cops. The experts. You no longer have any operative connection with yourself or others, or with a functioning community.

John Zerzan

#5. [The PlayStation 2 is a] historic, a mass-market appliance that fundamentally changes society in the way the printing press did.

Trip Hawkins

#6. Now that is the real thing, the straight goods from the mass unconscious, friend; that little girl is a witch. There's just no place for her to function in this society. She'd have seen the devil, if she hadn't been brought up on The Bionic Man and all those Star Trek reruns.

William Gibson

#7. In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time.

Karl Marx

#8. The great force for forging a society into a solid mass has always been war.

William Graham Sumner

#9. If we look at the black record of mass murder, exploitation, and tyranny levied on society by governments over the ages, we need not be loath to abandon the Leviathan State and ... try freedom.

Murray Rothbard

#10. Every important change in our society, for the good, at least, has taken place because of popular pressure-pressure from below, from the great mass of people.

Edward Abbey

#11. If you ask an economist what's driven economic growth, it's been major advances in things that mattered - the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.

Larry Page

#12. The "dangerous class," the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

Friedrich Engels

#13. The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.

Eric Hoffer

#14. No genuine change in society ever occurs without the mass public getting behind a cause. The good guys in government are counting on enough of us common people waking up and demanding more rights and greater freedoms.

James Morcan

#15. A nation is not defined by its borders or the boundaries of its land mass Rather, a nation is defined by adverse people who have been unified by a cause and a value system and who are committed to a vision for the type of society they wish to live in and give to the future generations to come.

Fela Durotoye

#16. It can be said that there are four basic and primary things that the mass of people in a society wish for: to live in a safe environment, to be able to work and provide for themselves, to have access to good public health and to have sound educational opportunities for their children.

Nelson Mandela

#17. The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.

Boris Pasternak

#18. The wealth of the well-to-do of an industrial society is both the cause and effect of the masses' well-being.

Ludwig Von Mises

#19. Unquestioning automatons
blindly marching to the beat -
an eerie crunching sound
hoards of shuffling feet ...
(from silent moments)

Muse

#20. When we begin to think like everybody else thinks, that is dangerous. Individualism is part of our divine endowment. God made us as individuals and we are responsible before Him.

Dr. J. Otis Yoder

#21. Currently, U.S. society has been encouraged by its political and subsidized mass-media intelligentsia to view U.S. life as a continual "morning in America" paradise, where the only social problems occur in the inner cities. Psychologists call this denial.

Ishmael Reed

#22. Ex-cons always say, "You never know what makes the wheels go round until you've done time in the joint." This is even more true of psychiatric hospitals. It is a perfect mass hypostatization of society, the organization of the Social Lie.

Kenneth Rexroth

#23. The way in which the vast mass of the poor are treated by modern society is truly scandalous. They are herded into great cities where they breathe a fouler air than in the countryside which they have left.

Friedrich Engels

#24. We have hardly an adequate idea how all-powerful law is in forming public opinion, in giving tone and character to the mass of society.

Ernestine Rose

#25. Ants are terrifying, having survived for 130 million years, evolving into a monarchical society of soldiers with bizarre levels of self sacrifice. Ants keep slaves. I don't crush them, it's pointless, they outnumber humans tenfold by body mass.

Pega Rose

#26. Too many so-called leaders of the movement have been made into celebrities and their revolutionary fervor destroyed by mass media. They become Hollywood objects and lose identification with the real issues. The task is to transform society; only the people can do that

Huey Newton

#27. The mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers, and miserable workers. Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.

John Ruskin

#28. Educating the masses was intended only to improve the relationship between the top and the bottom of society. Not for changing the nature of the relationship.

John Ralston Saul

#29. Mass media provides the essential link between the individual and the demands of the technological society.

Jacques Ellul

#30. I could see the reflection of the moon on the water's surface, tantalisingly teasing me forward, that was my target ... swimming towards the moon and freedom. I could smell the brine and sense the power of the mass I was in, it engulfed me, yet I was one with it.

Stephen Richards

#31. Cinema is mass media, it is both overtly gross and exciting. It is our great mirror of society.

Nicolas Winding Refn

#32. In meeting Betty Jo he had learned that there was a large substratum of society that was totally unaffected by this middle-class prototype, that a huge and indifferent mass of persons had virtually no ambitions and no values whatever.

Walter Tevis

#33. Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.

Victor Hugo

#34. 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

#35. The organization of American society is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously unenlightened, misled by mass media notoriously phony.

Paul Goodman

#36. Mass indoctrination of uneducated young men with such ideas is in itself a lethal danger to society and to international order.

Christopher Hitchens

#37. All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarise that society. We can brutalise it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.

William Bernbach

#38. Our mass media have little difficulty in selling particular interests as those of all sensible men. The political needs of society become individual needs and aspirations, their satisfaction promotes business and the commonweal, and the whole appeals to be the very embodiment of Reason.

Herbert Marcuse

#39. Time and circumstance made me into this Manson guy, Satan. Society wanted to buy this evil, mass-murdering-devil-fiend. I'm nobody. I'm the hobo in line. Give me a bottle of wine and put me on a train. I don't fit into the world you guys live in, so I live over there in the shadows of it.

Charles Manson

#40. I feel ... an ardent desire to see knowledge so disseminated through the mass of mankind that it may, at length, reach even the extremes of society: beggars and kings.

Thomas Jefferson

#41. Of all the simplifications to which the human spirit naturally inclines, unable to reconcile itself to the complexity of the real, there is none more dangerous than the attempt to integrate the whole of society in one vast, permanent action group.

Bertrand De Jouvenel

#42. They can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society.

James Madison

#43. The social potential movement is on the threshold of a mass awakening, seeking to carry into society what individuals have learned spiritually and personally.

Barbara Marx Hubbard

#44. The systematic study of mass psychology revealed to students the potentialities of invisible government of society by manipulation of the motives which actuate man in the group.

Edward Bernays

#45. We have power as consumers. We can exercise that power all the time by not choosing to invest time, energy or funds to support the production of mass media images that do not reflect life-enhancing values, that undermine a love ethic.

Bell Hooks

#46. Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in
themselves.

Erich Fromm

#47. t is rational to be weary of mass migration. Logically thinking, it signals an awareness that we do not produce a sufficient quantity of resources to feed, home and clothe our own, so how can we become an idyllic multicultural society, which provides equally for everyone?

Anita B. Sulser PhD

#48. The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.

Christopher Lasch