Quotes About The Individual And Society

#1. Education has in America's whole history been the major hope for improving the individual and society.

Gunnar Myrdal

#2. Mental or spiritual health, which is rationality, makes for progress, and the future demands greater and greater mental or spiritual health, greater and greater rationality. The brain must dominate and direct both the individual and society in the time to come, not the belly and the heart.

Jack London

#3. The semimetaphysical problems of the individual and society, of egoism and altruism, of freedom and determinism, either disappear or remain in the form of different phases in the organization of a consciousness that is fundamentally social.

Margaret Mead

#4. Morality arose largely as an empirical defence of the individual and society. Ever since intelligent beings began to be in contact, and consequently in friction, they have felt the need to guard themselves against each other's encroachments.

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

#5. The transcendent importance of love and goodwill in all human relations is shown by their mighty beneficent effect upon the individual and society.

George David Birkhoff

#6. ...the fight that political philosophers have always identified as the central conflict in human history: that between the individual and society. Thus far, scholars have shown little interest in finding this conflict in American history...

Thaddeus Russell

#7. The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining.

Gore Vidal

#8. The traitor of other races is generally confined to the mediocre or irresponsible individual, but, unfortunately, the traitors among the Negro race are generally to be found among the men with the highest place in education and society, the fellows who call themselves leaders.

Marcus Garvey

#9. Our goals can only be achieved with a society that respects and equally protects the rights of every human being, old and young, rich and poor, regardless of gender, color, race, or creed. We must reject the initiation of violence by individuals or government as morally repugnant.

Ron Paul

#10. The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence.

Eric Hoffer

#11. It takes an open minded individual to look beyond a disability, and see, that ability has so much more to offer,
than the limitations society tries to place upon them.

Robert M. Hensel

#12. Many an individual has turned from the mean, personal, acquisitive point of view to one that sees society as a whole and works for its benefit. If there has been such a change in one person, there can be the same change in many.

Mahatma Gandhi

#13. Individual talent is too sporadic and unpredictable to be allowed any important part in the organization society. Social systems which endure are built on the average person who can be trained to occupy any position adequately if not brilliantly.

Stuart Chase

#14. You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society. That is why we must go on to think of the second thing: of morality inside the individual.

C.S. Lewis

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

Jacques Ellul

#16. Education is not a product but a relationship and a process; a relationship between student and lecturer, and process by which knowledge transforms the individual.

Kenan Malik

#17. Since the individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining, the average man must take to daydreaming.

Gore Vidal

#18. The way we live has less to do with individual choices and more to do with the general bent of our society than many of us realize. We forget that we don't need everything.

David Suzuki

#19. Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually.

James A. Michener

#20. Society flourishes when and only when its molecular unit, the family, flourishes. We know that lasting improvement comes only in the small increments produced by individuals adhering to the simple rules of life ...

George Will

#21. Once it has been perceived that the division of labour is the essence of society, nothing remains of the antithesis between individual and society. The contradiction between individual principle and social principle disappears.

Ludwig Von Mises

#22. One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.

Robert Musil

#23. Perhaps I should stop seeing myself as an individual and start identifying myself with the totality, but I just can't do that.

Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold

#24. Wherever the Bible has been consistently applied, it has dramatically changed the civilization and culture of those who have accepted its teaching. No other book has ever so dramatically changed the individual lives and society in general.

John F. Walvoord

#25. Our ethics and systems of justice, our entire moral order, are founded on the notion of society as a collective of individual selves-- autonomous, introspective, accountable agents. If this self-reflective, moral agent is revealed to be illusory, what then?

Paul Broks

#26. Freedom is valued in a culture that wants to encourage dissent and to stimulate originality and independence. It belongs to a society which is open to change, and which esteems the agent of change, the individual, above its own peace of mind.

Jacob Bronowski

#27. The role of the teacher remains the highest calling of a free people. To the teacher, America entrusts her most precious resource, her children; and asks that they be prepared ... to face the rigors of individual participation in a democratic society.

Shirley Hufstedler

#28. It is only when the individual is good that society will progress. When the society and the nation is based on the observance of human values.

Sathya Sai Baba

#29. Government has no right to control individual liberty beyond what is necessary to the safety and well-being of society. Such is the boundary which separates the power of the government and the liberty of the citizen or subject in the political state.

John C. Calhoun

#30. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.

Albert Einstein

#31. I think liberals have to come to terms with the market and embrace market mechanisms as the only way to run a society that produces widespread material well-being and respects individual rights and liberties.

Douglas Massey

#32. We don't need a weakened government but a strong government that would take responsibility for the rights of the individual and care for the society as a whole.

Vladimir Putin

#33. Food that is necessary for man's existence is as sacred as life itself. Everything that is indispensable for its preservation is the common property of society as a whole. It is only the surplus that is private property and can be safely left to individual commercial enterprise.

Maximilien Robespierre

#34. My whole theory for the improvement of society is based on a belief in the discipline and the education of the individual to self-control and right doing, for the sake of right doing. I have never seen fundamental improvements imposed from the top by ordinances and laws.

Ida Tarbell

#35. The disturbed individual who believes himself to be Christ, or to receive messages from God, is something of a cliche in our society. Ever since Sigmund Freud, many people have associated religiosity with neurosis and mental illness.

Robert Winston

#36. The line between good and evil does not lie between "us" and "them," between the West and the rest, between Left and Right, between rich and poor. That fateful line runs down the middle of each of us, every human society, every individual.

N. T. Wright

#37. A business enterprise must continue beyond the lifetime of the individual or of the generation to be capable of producing its contributions to economy and to society.

Peter Drucker

#38. What the individual can do is to give a fine example, and to have the courage to uphold ethical values .. in a society of cynics.

Albert Einstein

#39. History shows, in my opinion, that no nation can survive the tension, conflict and antagonism of two competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; it is a curse for a society to be bilingual.

Richard Lamm

#40. The protection of human rights to promote the dignity of the individual is too important a matter for symbolic gestures alone. It is only through the pursuit of practical and effective efforts to promote human rights that we show our real commitment to the welfare of individuals and society.

Alexander Downer

#41. The strains and stresses suffered by the individual in society are grounded in the normal functioning of that society (and of the individual!) rather than in its disturbances and diseases.

Herbert Marcuse

#42. Democracy without respect for individual rights sucks. It's just ganging up against the weird kid, and I'm always the weird kid.

Penn Jillette

#43. When the common good of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals.

Ayn Rand

#44. The individual can maintain himself in a society definitely organized only through possessing an equally definite mental and moral constitution. This is what the neuropath lacks. His state of disturbance causes him to be constantly taken by surprise by circumstances.

Emile Durkheim

#45. The restaurant business is robust and successful precisely because individual restaurants are vulnerable and short-lived. Taleb wishes that society honoured ruined entrepreneurs as richly as it honours fallen soldiers.

Matt Ridley

#46. Society is just a structure with no soul. The soul is of the individual. One individual outweighs all societies. And, one individual's revolution outweighs all revolutions in the whole of history, because one man can become the womb for God to be reborn.

Rajneesh

#47. In baseball you have individual responsibility, and if you fail it, you get an error. But at the same time, your focus is on the common goal of the team to win. This is part of what resonates with people about baseball. This is how they would like society to work.

Jed S. Rakoff

#48. Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe.

Philip Guston

#49. Put together all the existing families and you have society. It is as simple as that. Whatever kind of training took place in the individual family will be reflected in the kind of society that these families create.

Virginia Satir

#50. I only want to work with transparent ideas and accessible technologies that 'spotlight' the individual's role in society through creativity. I try to live an open-source life.

Chris Jordan

#51. If society is to progress on a truly humanistic basis, without being subject to mental epidemics and virulent social diseases to which the subconscious falls an easy victim, the personal consciousness of every individual should be cultivated to the highest degree possible.

Boris Sidis

#52. The most important factor for the development of the individual is the structure and the values of the society into which he was born.

Erich Fromm

#53. A great revolution in just one single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a society and, further, will enable a change in the destiny of humankind.

Daisaku Ikeda

#54. Show me a first-generatio n fortune and I'll show you a successful partnership between a talented individual and society's invisible venture capitalist, the commons.

William H. Gates, Sr.

#55. Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.

John Stuart Mill

#56. The problem with the old ideology was that it suppressed the individual by starting with society. But it is from a sense of individual duty that we connect the greater good and the interests of the community

Tony Blair

#57. All other things held constant, to the extent that an individual or society sees, believes in, and acts in abundance, so will it have wealth and happiness.

David Cameron Gikandi

#58. Each individual of the society has a right to be protected by it in the enjoyment of his life, liberty, and property, according to standing laws.

John Adams

#59. 'Illustrado' is not an autobiography. Only the ideas are autobiographical; the ideas of bitterness, frustration, unchanging society, an individual lost, social awkwardness ... The book satirises archetypes from across Filipino society, and I felt that the least I could do was offer myself up, too.

Miguel Syjuco

#60. That the equalization of property exercises an influence on political society was clearly understood even by some of the old legislators. Laws were made by Solon and others prohibiting an individual from possessing as much land as he pleased;

Aristotle.

#61. I'm humbled and enormously grateful to be connected to [Franz] Kafka in a any way. He is one of the writers I admire. I think he has been a big influence on me. I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society - which is true in all his books.

Alan Lightman

#62. But secondly you say 'society must exact vengeance, and society must punish'. Wrong on both counts. Vengeance comes from the individual and punishment from God.

Victor Hugo

#63. The difference between a heel and a coward and one who jumps in the fire and one who runs away from the fire; is up to the individual in how they manage a given situation.

Stephen Richards

#64. In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

#65. The most costly disease is boredom costly for both individual and society.

Norman Cousins

#66. Society has changed so dramatically that it's empowered the individual, and technology has a lot to do with that. Years ago, if you had a bad experience at a restaurant, you could complain to the manager. Maybe you could picket. Now, you go online and write a review that may go viral.

Brad Katsuyama

#67. Stories matter. They shape our lives, expectations, and dreams. They are the warp and weave of our human existence, binding us into a fabric far stronger than any individual element

Bascomb James

#68. The symbolism - and the substantive significance - of planting a tree has universal power in every culture and every society on Earth, and it is a way for individual men, women and children to participate in creating solutions for the environmental crisis.

Al Gore

#69. God is a complex of ideas formed by the tribe, the nation, and humanity, which awake and organize social feelings and aim to link the individual to society and to bridle the zoological individualism.

Maxim Gorky

#70. Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief.

Aldo Leopold

#71. Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.

George Santayana

#72. We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all.

Malcolm Gladwell

#73. Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations.

Mikhail Bakunin

#74. The conclusion, therefore, is that there are two major forces in society: love, which multiplies the species, and the nose, which subordinates it to the individual. Procreation, equilibrium.

Machado De Assis

#75. You can never really understand an individual unless you also understand the society,historical time period in which they live,personal troubles, and social issues

C. Wright Mills

#76. I believe love to be hurtful to society, and to the individual happiness of men. I believe, in short, that love does more harm than good.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#77. The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.

Thomas Jefferson

#78. Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by power and by force, whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual.

Albert Einstein

#79. My view ... would be that we are entering upon a new and interim society which is neither capitalist nor socialist, but in which we can achieve central planning without loss of individual initiative, by the mere process of absorbing initiative in the function of planning.

John Grierson

#80. I fail to understand why gethes (Humans), talk about individuals versus society. They are the same thing. The action of every individual counts, and those individual acts of personal responsibility accumulate to create society. Snowflakes are equally blind to their role in causing avalanches.

Karen Traviss

#81. I should like [people] to like the purely individual thing in themselves, which makes them act in singleness. and They only like to do the collective thing.

D.H. Lawrence

#82. The short story is the art form that deals with the individual when there is no longer a society to absorb him, and when he is compelled to exist, as it were, by his own inner light.

Frank O'Connor

#83. In a society of ideological believers, nothing is more ridiculous than the individual who doubts and does not conform.

John Ralston Saul

#84. In order to arrive to a more realistic view of society, it must be recognized that there are individual differences that cannot be eradicated by the most rigid curriculum, and that various individuals will choose different educational curricula if allowed to do so.

Carl Eckart

#85. When individuals change, society will change. And when society changes, the whole world will change. The welfare of the individual is bound up with the welfare of society as a whole.

Sathya Sai Baba

#86. It is my view that our society can be no more stable than the foundation of individual family units upon which it rests. Our government, our institutions, our schools ... indeed, our way of life are dependent on healthy marriages and loyalty to the vulnerable little children around our feet.

James Dobson

#87. The question is not, will there be difficulties and threats to our existence, but how will we deal with them and what can we learn from them. How can they become blessings to society, as a life threatening disease is to an individual, by teaching us about the meaning of our life and existence?

Bernie Siegel

#88. When we deny the poor and the vulnerable their own human dignity and capacity for freedom and choice, it becomes self-denial. It becomes a denial of both our collective and individual dignity, at all levels of society.

Jacqueline Novogratz

#89. The creation of a more peaceful and happier society has to begin from the level of the individual, and from there it can expand to one's family, to one's neighborhood, to one's community and so on.

Dalai Lama

#90. A civilized society is formed when every individual in that society are bound to obey the rules and regulation which is for the benefit of their own society.

Santosh Kalwar

#91. No society can function as a society, unless it gives the individual member social status and function, and unless the decisive social power is legitimate.

Peter Drucker

#92. It's society that disables an individual by not investing in enough creativity to allow for someone to show us the quality that makes them rare and valuable and capable.

Aimee Mullins

#93. Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities, and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order, then these possibilities will have a chance, and you will get Progress.

T. E. Hulme

#94. I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man's spiritual growth.

Rachel Carson

#95. Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.

Albert Einstein

#96. We are all connected directly or indirectly.
We are all related closely or distantly.
We are all the offspring of the same family.
Better an individual and you better society.

Matshona Dhliwayo

#97. Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against "society," that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship.

Emma Goldman

#98. Aesthetic matters are fundamental for the harmonious development of both society and the individual.

Friedrich Schiller

#99. The ideal society has yet to be built - one which balances nicely collective well-being and individual well-being.

Peace Pilgrim

#100. That I have the right to express myself freely at all times in all circumstances entails the idea that free speech is a 'basic human right' possessed by each individual, and, as such, trumps the interests of the society or group, including my neighbour.

Tom Stoppard