Top 100 Quotes About Societies
#1. The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology.
J.G. Ballard
#2. I think it is better for societies if no one dominates forever.
Jean Louis
#3. Based on a lifetime of observations and a few decades in the markets, I understand that societies, beliefs and fashions all move in long arcs of time. We call these arcs several things: cycles, periods, eras.
Barry Ritholtz
#4. In societies no less than individuals, acknowledging our limitations may ultimately be more humane than denying them.
Steven Pinker
#5. British physician Cyril Donnison in 1938 in Civilization and Disease, hypertension was already among the best-documented examples of a disease that seemed specific to Western societies and the more affluent social classes elsewhere.
Gary Taubes
#7. All societies that maintain armies maintain the belief that some things are more valuable than life itself.
Michael Billig
#8. I think that we live in a highly specialized, technologically advanced society. Highly developed societies tend to have very remote understandings about what underlies our prosperity.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#9. Governor Ford is sworn to support the Constitution of the United States and also of this State Illinois, and these constitutions guarantee religious as well as civil liberty to all religious societies whatever.
Joseph Smith Jr.
#11. 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
#12. Democratic societies can't force people. Therefore they have to control what they think.
Noam Chomsky
#13. Politics is a way of ruling in divided societies without undue violence ... politics is not just a necessary evil; it is a realistic good.
Bernard Crick
#14. It seems that soccer tournaments create those relationships: people gathered together in pubs and living rooms, a whole country suddenly caring about the same event. A World Cup is the sort of common project that otherwise barely exists in modern societies.
Simon Kuper
#15. In the birth of societies it is the chiefs of states who give it its special character; and afterward it is this special character that forms the chiefs of state.
Baron De Montesquieu
#16. Citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for meaningful democracy.
Noam Chomsky
#17. This book is my response to these developments: It is an appreciation of the flourishing that was the humanistic treasure of the modern era. It is also a plea to restore what has been lost and not to reject out of hand the modern values that inspired the broad prosperity of modern societies.
Edmund S. Phelps
#18. When discussing complex systems like brains and other societies, it is easy to oversimplify: I call this Occam's lobotomy.
I. J. Good
#19. 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
#20. Education enables people and societies to be what they can be.
Bill Richardson
#21. Lest those islands still seem to you too remote in space and time to be relevant to our modern societies, just think about the risks ... of our increasing globalization and increasing worldwide economic interdependence.
Jared Diamond
#22. Someday, the capitalist system will disappear in the United States, because no social class system has been eternal. One day, class societies will disappear.
Fidel Castro
#23. Societies that do not eat people are fascinated by those that do.
Ronald Wright
#24. If women can organize missionary societies, temperance societies, and every kind of charitable organization ... why not permit them to be ordained to preach the Gospel and administer the sacraments of the Church?
Frances E. Willard
#25. In societies where one sees a higher prevalence of 'modern values' - individualism, vitalism and self-expression - there's also higher reported job satisfaction.
Edmund Phelps
#26. The man who is seeking truth is free of all societies and cultures.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#27. Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of "wrong" ideas.
Octavia E. Butler
#28. There were incredibly complex societies already existing in North America long before Europeans arrived. So many people think that before European contact it was just Natives huddling around a fire, waiting for civilization to come save them. But that was not the case.
Joseph Boyden
#29. The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#30. If you can write, you can read. And if you can read, you can better understand the world and its different societies. Knowledge is the key to destroying prejudice and individual hate, which always culminates in violence against the innocent.
The Black Rose
#31. Change in the societies at the very bottom must come predominantly from within; we cannot impose it on them.
Paul Collier
#32. I felt condemned to obscurity and to celibacy. But when one is driven by passion, one can live on almost nothing, and I was driven by passion for writing. One does not starve in modern, Western societies, and one can do without such amenities as the telephone, a car, entertainment.
Alain Robbe-Grillet
#33. One of the problems we're facing is, in my view, that there are no globalized, youth-led, grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across Muslim-majority societies.
Maajid Nawaz
#34. The reason I made women's issues central to American foreign policy, was not because I was a feminist, but because we know that societies are more stable if women are politically and economically empowered.
Madeleine Albright
#35. At the heart of science lies discovery which involves a change in worldview. Discovery in science is possible only in societies which accord their citizens the freedom to pursue the truth where it may lead and which therefore have respect for different paths to that truth.
John Charles Polanyi
#36. Knowledge leads towards different kind of societies then those societies don't relate with each other because people in those societies think, act and reacts with their knowledge that create different ways of life and different recognitions of humans.
Zaman Ali
#37. Fleetingly, unnervingly, I understand what he's saying but cannot accept a world that is so brutally black and white. Murder, rape and torture are the apparatus of terrorists, not of civilized societies. If we become like them, what hope do we have?
Michael Robotham
#38. Poverty is not the simple result of bad geography, bad culture, bad history. It's the result of us: of the ways that people choose to organize their societies.
Adam Davidson
#39. Democratic societies can no longer give religious fanatics a free hand to abuse and murder non believers. Such action betrays contempt for the basic human rights which animate any democracy with meaning.
Armstrong Williams
#40. Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.
Jane Jacobs
#41. Some societies are also more optimistic than others: the U.S. and Australia are my two picks Tell a European you think there's a housing bubble and you'll have a reasonable discussion. Tell an Australian and you'll have World War III. Been there, done that!
Jeremy Grantham
#42. Humans build their societies around consumption of fossil water long buried in the earth, and these societies, being based on temporary resources, face the problem of being temporary themselves.
Charles Bowden
#43. In most of history, societies have not been free. It's a very rare society that is free. The default condition of human societies is tyranny.
Michael Novak
#44. The average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.
H.L. Mencken
#45. Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!
Marvin Minsky
#46. Societies cannot move forward without law, and our constitution is the cornerstone of the law and our National Assembly is its umbrella and fortress.
Hamad Bin Isa Al Khalifa
#47. The condition of women in Islamic societies as a whole is also far from desirable. However, we should acknowledge that there are differences. In certain countries, the conditions are much better and in others much worse.
Shirin Ebadi
#48. Goldman Sachs believes that economically empowering women globally is one of the best investments to grow economies, create jobs, and build more prosperous societies.
Dina Powell
#49. In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.
Guy Debord
#50. It is imperative for many branches of fundamentalist christianity to constantly feel conspired against ... so they cite humanist manifestos and theosophical societies and concoct these vast and dark organizations that exist nowhere but in the minds of those who conceive these theories.
J. Michael Straczynski
#51. In traditional societies, nature was seen as one's wife, but the modern West turned it into a prostitute.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
#52. According to a charming law of nature which is evident even in the most sophisticated societies, we live in complete ignorance of whatever we love.
Marcel Proust
#53. The simple facts of Chadian life - what it takes to survive in that kind of climate with nothing but a hut and some animals - stunned me. And this made me realize, perhaps for the first time, how easy my life was compared to those of people in less privileged societies.
Alex Honnold
#54. The important question of how poverty can be remedied is one which agitates and torments modern societies especially
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#55. Trade creates jobs and lifts people out of poverty. And when that happens, societies stabilize and grow. And there is nothing like a stable society to fight terrorism and strengthen democracy, freedom and rule of law.
Dennis Hastert
#56. Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama; fathers and sons, martyred heroes, star-crossed lovers, the deaths of kings - stories that taught us of the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility.
Tom Hiddleston
#57. There is only one revolution tolerable to all men, all societies, all political systems: Revolution by design and invention.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#58. If we become one of those societies that attack success, why not come as certain there will be a lot less success? And that's not who we are.
Mitt Romney
#59. With true light comes instruments of peace. It's best when such peace begins in an American home and spread out throughout the many homes, villages and societies in the world.
Erwin K. Thomas
#60. Societies aren t made of sticks and stones, but of men whose individual characters, by turning the scale one way or another, determine the direction of the whole.
Plato
#61. If every citizen can get rid of indiscipline syndrome, we have immense potential to build more productive, conflict-free, harmonious and peaceful communities, societies, cities, nations and world.
Vishwas Chavan
#62. In pluralistic, democratic societies, there is the freedom to adopt the religion of your choice. This is good. This lets curious people like you run around on the loose!
Dalai Lama
#63. In many shamanic societies, people who complain of being disheartened ... or depressed would be asked, ... When did you stop dancing? ... This is because dancing is a universal healing salve.
Gabrielle Roth
#64. Beneath the broad tides of human history there flow the stealthy undercurrents of the secret societies, which frequently determine in the depth the changes that take place upon the surface.
A. E. Waite
#65. If we want developed societies with women doctors, political leaders, teachers, bus drivers, and computer programmers, we will need qualified people to give loving care to their children. And there is no reason why every society should not enjoy such loving paid child care.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#66. It's quite easy for schisms to develop in societies, in villages, cities or countries.
Rory Kinnear
#67. It's the most familial-based societies where the sense of obligation is strongest, that breed the worst nepotism and cronyism.
Franklin Foer
#68. The movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract.
Henry James Sumner Maine
#69. In aristocratic societies, rich people used to commission exquisite paintings for their walls.
Brad Holland
#70. Even more so in nonindustrialized cultures than in modern Western societies, music is and was part of the fabric of everyday life.
Daniel J. Levitin
#71. We use the metaphor of waves that rise and fall in societies, perhaps forgetting that the actual waves of the ocean are purely opportunistic, small irregularities in water that, snagging a fortunate gust, rise and break like monsters, for no greater cause than their own accidental invention.
Adam Gopnik
#72. Girls and women are most victimised in societies where boys and men are disempowered.
Jacqueline Novogratz
#73. There are poor societies which have too little; but where is the rich society that says: 'Halt! We have enough'? There is none.
E.F. Schumacher
#74. Leadership is not only about producing results or measuring success with statistics. Leadership is doing something with significance that makes families, organizations, societies, nations, and the world a better place before you die.
Farshad Asl
#75. A useful analogy is to see traditional societies as relying on instantaneous (or minimally delayed) and constantly replenished solar income, while modern civilization is withdrawing accumulated solar capital at rates that will exhaust it in a tiny fraction of the time that was needed to create it.
Vaclav Smil
#76. The moment one begins thinking about morality in terms of well-being, it becomes remarkably easy to discern a moral hierarchy across human societies.
Sam Harris
#77. Terrorism takes us back to ages we thought were long gone if we allow it a free hand to corrupt democratic societies and destroy the basic rules of international life.
Jacques Chirac
#78. Once you get to the Enlightenment, the way that powers get to be hyperpowers isn't just by conquest. It's through commerce and innovation. Societies like the Dutch Republic and the United States used tolerance to become a magnet for enterprising immigrants.
Amy Chua
#79. So, at one extreme you have indigenous, tribal societies trying to stem the race to disaster. At the other extreme, the richest, most powerful societies in world history, like the United States and Canada, are racing full-speed ahead to destroy the environment as quickly as possible.
Noam Chomsky
#80. There's always going to be a fight between mainstream and underground because the mainstream is a very small bubble, and the underground scene is a very small bubble, and they both see themselves as secret societies.
Dawn Angelique
#81. In America, you don't even have proper holidays. It's really one of the most prosperous slave societies in history. People work their asses off all year long and get two weeks off! It's incredible.
Pankaj Mishra
#82. I think when religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism - as well as Christianity and Judaism - were founded, at that time societies were generally male-dominated. So, therefore this social notion also influenced religion.
Dalai Lama
#83. The poorest and most backward societies are always those that put women down.
Isabel Allende
#84. I always believe that every one of us is working hard not only for our own performance but also to give something significant back to the societies we live in.
Yani Tseng
#85. In all societies, both women and men are powerfully conditioned to repress the daily realities of (sexual harassment and workplace glass ceilings) and to collude with the rest of society in keeping these dimensions of shared experiences hidden.
William Keepin
#86. No despotism, no privileged monopolies, no police societies, no divine rights of the emirs or feudal landlords or shady priests and sheikhs. All had the same equal footing - the rich and the poor, the noble and the common.
Rami Ollaik
#87. I think, certainly in the more civilized societies, women's roles are growing in power all of the time.
Sally Quinn
#88. In the West, especially after World War II, the government came to be seen as so successful that it could fulfill all the obligations that in less modern societies are fulfilled by the family.
Lee Kuan Yew
#89. In countries where associations are free, secret societies are unknown. In America there are factions, but no conspiracies.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#90. So many of the fantasy stories I encountered growing up were set in worlds that were largely modelled on medieval Europe in one way or another. Lots of white folks in feudal societies, castles and kings, that kind of thing.
Chris Roberson
#91. Any serious shift towards more sustainable societies has to include gender equality.
Helen Clark
#92. Charlie Wind once told me we must keep the animals on Earth, for they know everything: how to keep warm, predict the storms, live in darkness or blazing sun, how to navigate the skies, to organize societies, how to make chemicals and fireproof skins. The animals know the Earth as we do not.
Jean Craighead George
#93. Law is the essential foundation of stability and order both within societies and in international relations.
J. William Fulbright
#94. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery.
Paul Graham
#95. Many ancient (and contemporary) societies considered the sexually awakened female
as both auspicious and dangerous.
Srinivasan
#96. It is the business of future to be dangerous ... The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
Alfred North Whitehead
#97. Because I'm a doctor, I know when you have an injury it will heal if it's clean enough to heal; if your injury is dirty, it won't heal. And so when you are talking in societies, we are also talking in healing processes, and for a good healing process, you need to make things right.
Michelle Bachelet
#98. Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.
Jean-Francois Lyotard
#99. There is danger that totalitarian governments, not subject to vigorous popular debate, will underestimate the will and unity of democratic societies where vital interests are concerned.
John F. Kennedy
#100. Societies accomplished important goals that still elude politicians, specialists in public policy, social reformers, and philanthropists. They successfully created vast social and mutual aid networks among the poor that are now almost entirely absent in many atomistic inner cities.
David T. Beito
