Quotes on Society
“Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Neil Gaiman, Society
“Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Neil Gaiman, Society, Truth
"Where I'm from, Bastrop, Louisiana, you played football, basketball, and baseball; you ran track - and that was about it."
Ronnie Coleman, Society
"Human beings are a disease. A cancer of this planet." – Agent Smith (The Matrix)
The Matrix, Society
"Choice is an illusion created between those with power and those without." – Merovingian (The Matrix Reloaded)
The Matrix, Society, Power
“I’m rich and they can’t take it, I’m just happy that we made it.”
King Von, Society, Wealth, Goals
“They just saying sh*t, you know.”
King Von, Society
“Y’all broadcasting the wrong sh*t.”
King Von, Society
“They don’t want you to jet ski.”
DJ Khaled, Society
“They don’t want you to win. They don’t want you to have the No. 1 record in the country. They don’t want you to get healthy. They don’t want you to exercise. And they don’t want you to have that view.”
DJ Khaled, Society
“The business of America is business.”
Calvin Coolidge, Business, Society
“They criticize me for harping on the obvious; if all the folks in the United States would do the few simple things they know they ought to do, most of our big problems would take care of themselves.”
Calvin Coolidge, Society, Goals, Criticism, Problems
“I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom.
Until we can reestablish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty.”
Calvin Coolidge, Society, Government, Goals, Freedom
“This country would not be a land of opportunity, America could not be America, if the people were shackled with government monopolies.”
Calvin Coolidge, Society, Government
“Chapter 95
Fairfield, Connecticut – May 8, 2015
“No nation ever had an army large enough to guarantee it against attack in time of peace, or ensure it of victory in time of war.”
Calvin Coolidge, Society, Anger and Fighting
“About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.”
Calvin Coolidge, Society
“The nation which forgets its defenders will itself be forgotten.”
Calvin Coolidge, Society
“Civilization and profits go hand in hand.”
Calvin Coolidge, Society
“When a man begins to feel that he is the only one who can lead in this republic, he is guilty of treason to the spirit of our institutions.”
― Calvin Coolidge, The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge
Calvin Coolidge, Society
“People gonna be they own individuals and have they own worlds and I can’t knock it.”
Kendrick Lamar, Society
“Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation; that 'tis hardly to be conceived, that an englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for't.. And truly, I should have taken Sr. Rt: Filmer's "Patriarcha" as any other treatise, which would perswade all men, that they are slaves, and ought to be so, for such another exercise of wit, as was his who writ the encomium (praise) of Nero, rather than for a serious discourse meant in earnest, had not the gravity of the title and epistle, the picture in the front of the book, and the applause that followed it, required me to believe, that the author and publisher were both in earnest. I therefore took it into my hands with all the expectation and read it through with all the attention due to a treaties, that made such a noise at its coming abroad and cannot but confess my self mightily surprised, that in a book which was to provide chains for all mankind, I should find nothing but a rope of sand, useful perhaps to such, whose skill and business it is to raise a dust, and would blind the people, the better to mislead them, but in truth is not of any force to draw those into bondage, who have their eyes open, and so much sense about them as to consider, that chains are but an ill wearing, how much care soever hath been taken to file and polish them.”
― John Locke, Second Treatise of Government
John Locke, Freedom, Society
“Wherever, therefore, any number of men so unite into one society, as to quit everyone his executive power of the law of nature, and to resign it to the public, there, and there only, is a political or civil society. [....] Hence it is evident that absolute monarchy, which by some men [e.g., Hobbes] is counted the only government in the world, is indeed inconsistent with civil society, and so can be no form of civil government at all.”
― John Locke, Second Treatise of Government
John Locke, Government, Society
“Revolt is the right of the people.”
John Locke, Society
“Parents wonder why the streams are bitter, when they themselves poison the fountain.”
John Locke, Society
“Young people are dying for no reason all over the world that don’t know why. It’s ugly, everywhere.”
Ice Cube, Society
“France and the whole of Europe have a great culture and an amazing history. Most important thing, though, is that people there know how to live! In America they've forgotten all about it. I'm afraid that the American culture is a disaster.”
Johnny Depp, Society
“They stick you with those names, those labels -- ‘rebel’ or whatever; whatever they like to use. Because they need a label; they need a name. They need something to put the price tag on the back of.”
Johnny Depp, Society
“Everything here is edible; even I'm edible. But that, dear children, is cannibalism, and is in fact frowned upon in most societies.”
Johnny Depp, Society
“I think everybody's nuts.”
Johnny Depp, Society
“America is dumb. It's like a dumb puppy that has big teeth that can bite and hurt you, aggressive. My daughter is four, my boy is one. I'd like them to see America as a toy, a broken toy. Investigate it a little, check it out, get this feeling and then get out.”
Johnny Depp, Society, Goals
“The problem is that everybody treats teenagers like they're stupid.”
Johnny Depp, Society, Problems
Society has made us believe you should look like an 18-year-old model all your life.
Clint Eastwood, Society
Society is at odds with itself.
Clint Eastwood, Society
“To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.” (This is also one of the best quotes about Paris.)
Victor Hugo, Society
“To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!”
Victor Hugo, Society
“There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.”
Victor Hugo, Society
“A great nation is not saved by wars, it is saved by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks.”
William James, Society
“When a thing is new, people say: ‘It is not true.’ Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: ‘It is not important.’ Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say: ‘Anyway, it is not new.”
William James, Society
“We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”
William James, Society
“The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease.”
William James, Society, Success
“This is where the children of honest poverty have the most precious of all advantages over those of wealth. The mother, nurse, cook, governess, teacher, saint, all in one; the father, exemplar, guide, counselor, and friend! Thus were my brother and I brought up. What has the child of millionaire or nobleman that counts compared to such a heritage?”
― Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie, Society
“If the newspapers begin to publish stories about wars, and the people begin to think and talk of war in their daily conversations, they soon find themselves at war. People get that which their minds dwell upon, and this applies to a group or community or a nation of people, the same as to an individual.”
Andrew Carnegie, Goals, Society
“We cannot afford to lose the Negro. We have urgent need of all and more. Let us therefore turn our efforts to making the best of him.”
Andrew Carnegie, Goals, Society
“To summarize what I have said: Aim for the highest; never enter a bar-room; do not touch liquor, or if at all only at meals; never speculate; never indorse beyond your surplus cash fund; make the firm’s interest yours; break orders always to save owners; concentrate; put all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket; expenditure always within revenue; lastly, be not impatient, for, as Emerson says, “no one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourselves.” I congratulate poor young men upon being born to that ancient and honourable degree which renders it necessary that they should devote themselves to hard work. A basketful of bonds is the heaviest basket a young man ever had to carry. He generally gets to staggering under it. We have in this city creditable instances of such young men, who have pressed to the front rank of our best and most useful citizens. These deserve great credit. But the vast majority of the sons of rich men are unable to resist the temptations to which wealth subjects them, and sink to unworthy lives. I would almost as soon leave a young man a curse, as burden him with the almighty dollar. It is not from this class you have rivalry to fear. The partner’s sons will not trouble you much, but look out that some boys poorer, much poorer than yourselves, whose parents cannot afford to give them the advantages of a course in this institute, advantages which should give you a decided lead in the race–look out that such boys do not challenge you at the post and pass you at the grand stand. Look out for the boy who has to plunge into work direct from the common school and who begins by sweeping out the office. He is the probable dark horse that you had better watch.”
― Andrew Carnegie, The Road To Business Success
Andrew Carnegie, Goals, Society
“People will always talk, so lets give them sumthin to talk about.”
Lady Gaga, Goals, Society
“We must remember that we cannot insulate our children from the uncertainties of the world in which we live or from the impact of the problems which confront us all. What we can do and what we must do is to equip them to meet these problems, to do their part in the total effort, and to build up those inner resources of character which are the main strength of the American people.”
Harry Truman, Goals, Society
“Without a strong educational system democracy is crippled. Knowledge is not only key to power. It is the citadel of human freedom.”
Harry Truman, Intelligence/Wisdom, Society, Power, Freedom
“There is not really anything new, if you know what has gone before. What is new to people is what they do not know about their history or the history of the world.”
Harry Truman, Intelligence/Wisdom, Society
“I think this country is great on account of its small educational institutions, more than anything else. In institutions such as these the teachers and professors can give individual attention to each member of class.”
Harry Truman, Intelligence/Wisdom, Society
“There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.”
Harry Truman, Intelligence/Wisdom, Society
“For our day, and our children’s day, education must become a continuing adventure in human understanding, shared by all.”
Harry Truman, Intelligence/Wisdom, Society
“If peace is to endure, education must establish the moral unity of mankind.”
Harry Truman, Intelligence/Wisdom, Society
“If you work hard and play by the rules, this country is truly open to you. You can achieve anything.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Society
“I always believed in shooting for the top, and to become an American is like becoming a member of the winning team.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Society, Goals
“The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn't the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.”
John Lennon, Society
“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.”
John Lennon, Society
“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives.”
John Lennon, Society
“Remember, upon the conduct of each depends the fate of all.”
Alexander the Great, Society
“Capitalism – which in its purest form is entrepreneurism even among the poorest of the poor – does work; but those who make money from it should put back into society, not just sit on it as if they are hatching eggs.”
― Richard Branson, Losing My Virginity: How I've Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way
Richard Branson, Society, Goals
“Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.”
― Stephen King , The Stand
Stephen King, Belief, Society
“Schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It's accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics.”
Stephen King, Society
“Dr. Martin Luther King is not a black hero. He is an American hero.”
Morgan Freeman, Society
“The struggle of the Black people in the United States for emancipation is a component part of the general struggle of al the people of the world against U.S. imperialism, a component part of the contemporary world revolution. I call on the workers, peasants, and revolutionary intellectuals of all countries and all who are willing to fight against U.S. imperialism to take action and extend strong support to the struggle of the Black people in the United States! People of the whole world, unite still more closely and launch a sustained and vigorous offensive against our common enemy, U.S. imperialism, and its accomplices! It can be said with certainty that the complete collapse of colonialism, imperialism, and all systems of exploitation, and the complete emancipation of all the oppressed peoples and nations of the world are not far off.”
Mao Zedong, Society, Freedom
“The mountain goddess if she is still there...
Will marvel at a world so changed.”
Mao Zedong, Society
“Under the white population of the United States of America only the reactionary classes oppress the black population. Under no circumstance can they represent the workers, farmers and revolutionary intellectuals and other enlighted people who form the majority of the white population.”
― Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung
Mao Zedong, Society
“If the U.S. monopoly capitalist groups persist in pushing their policies of aggression and war, the day is bound to come when they will be hanged by the people of the whole world. The same fate awaits the accomplices of the United States.”
― Mao Tse-tung, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung
Mao Zedong, Society
“A country that does not know how to read and write is easy to deceive.”
Che Guevara, Intelligence/Wisdom
“The walls of the educational system must come down. Education should not be a privilege, so the children of those who have money can study.”
― Che Guevara, Che Guevara Talks to Young People
Che Guevara, Intelligence/Wisdom
“The first duty of a revolutionary is to be educated.”
Che Guevara, Intelligence/Wisdom
“It is there, in the final moments, for people whose farthest horizon has always been tomorrow, that one comprehends the profound tragedy circumscribing the life of the proletariat the world over.” ― Ernesto Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey
Che Guevara, Society
“A multitude of people and yet a solitude.”
A Tale of Two Cities, Society
“The Cosmos extends, for all practical purposes, forever. After a brief sedentary hiatus, we are resuming our ancient nomadic way of life. Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds throughout the Solar System and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the Universe come from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Nature, Society, Science
“Perhaps the records will never be intercepted. Perhaps no one in five billion years will ever come upon them. Five billion years is a long time. In five billion years, all human beings will have become extinct or evolved into other beings, none of our artifacts will have survived on Earth, the continents will have become unrecognizably altered or destroyed, and the evolution of the Sun will have burned the Earth to a crisp or reduced it to a whirl of atoms.
Far from home, untouched by these remote events, the Voyagers, bearing the memories of a world that is no more, will fly on.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Society
“For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Society
“For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads: "We came in peace for all Mankind." As the United States was dropping 7 ½ megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Society
“.. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the 'Momentary' masters of a 'Fraction' of a 'Dot' ”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Society
“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Society, Science
“Whatever the reason we first mustered the _Apollo_ program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of _Apollo_. What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival.
Travel is broadening. It's time to hit the road again.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Society, Technology, Goals
“The American and Russian capabilities in space science and technology mesh; they interdigitate. Each is strong where the other is weak. This is a marriage made in heaven - but one that has been surprisingly difficult to consummate.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot, Society, Technology, Goals
“The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.”
Erma Bombeck, Society
“When humor goes, there goes civilization.”
Erma Bombeck, Society
“You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.”
Erma Bombeck, Society
“Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.”
Margaret Sanger, Society
“The lack of balance between the birth-rate of the "unfit" and the "fit," admittedly the greatest present menace to the civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. The example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit, and therefore less fertile, parents of the educated and well-to-do classes. On the contrary, the most urgent problem to-day is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”
― Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization
Margaret Sanger, Society, Problems
“Progeny. We want fewer and better children who can be reared up to their full possibilities in unencumbered homes, and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon us.”
― Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization
Margaret Sanger, Goals, Society
“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members. [Explaining rationale for using prominent black leaders to advocate birth control and abortion]”
Margaret Sanger, Goals, Society
“Against the State, against the Church, against the silence of the medical profession, against the whole machinery of dead institutions of the past, the woman of today arises.”
Margaret Sanger, Sex, Belief, Society
“It was a country . . . that he and his people had known how to use and abuse, but not how to preserve.”
Wendell Berry, Society
“The crisis of community has its source in the corruption of character.”
Wendell Berry, Society
“The only true and effective "operator's manual for spaceship earth" is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.”
Wendell Berry, Society
“There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, one with one another and with the place and all the living things.”
Wendell Berry, Society
“People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.”
Wendell Berry, Society
“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
Wendell Berry, Society
“Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”
Wendell Berry, Society
“No man will ever be whole and dignified and free except in the knowledge that the men around him are whole and dignified and free, and that the world itself is free of contempt and misuse.”
Wendell Berry, Society, Freedom
“The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.”
Wendell Berry, Society, Freedom
“It is certain, I think, that the best government is the one that governs the least. But there is a much-neglected corollary: the best citizen is the one who least needs governing.”
Wendell Berry, Society, Government
“You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.”
Wendell Berry, Society, Goals
“The significance of the dance in the education and socialisation of Samoan children is two-fold. In the first place it effectively offsets the rigorous subordination in which children are habitually kept. Here the admonitions of the elders change from "Sit down and keep still!" to "Stand up and dance!" The children are actually the centre of the group instead of its barely tolerated fringes.”
― Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation
Margaret Mead, Society
“The young, free to act on their initiative, can lead their elders in the direction of the unknown... The children, the young, must ask the questions that we would never think to ask, but enough trust must be re-established so that the elders will be permitted to work with them on the answers.”
Margaret Mead, Society
“Sisters is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.
Margaret Mead, Society
“An ideal culture is one that makes a place for every human gift.”
Margaret Mead, Society
“We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.”
Margaret Mead, Society
“If the future is to remain open and free, we need people who can tolerate the unknown, who will not need the support of completely worked out systems or traditional blueprints from the past.”
Margaret Mead, Society
“Young people are moving away from feeling guilty about sleeping with somebody to feeling guilty if they are *not* sleeping with someone.”
Margaret Mead, Society
“For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.”
Margaret Mead, Society
“No society has ever yet been able to handle the temptations of technology to mastery, to waste, to exuberance, to exploration and exploitation. We have to learn to cherish this earth and cherish it as something that's fragile, that's only one, it's all we have. We have to use our scientific knowledge to correct the dangers that have come from science and technology.”
Margaret Mead, Society, Technology
“If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse gift will find a fitting place.”
Margaret Mead, Society, Goals
“Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.”
Margaret Mead, Society, Opportunities
“Never ever depend on governments or institutions to solve any major problems. All social change comes from the passion of individuals.”
Margaret Mead, Society, Government
“Never depend upon institutions or government to solve any problem. All social movements are founded by, guided by, motivated and seen through by the passion of individuals.”
Margaret Mead, Society, Government
“Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to run.”
Margaret Mead, Society, Anger and Fighting, Problems
“Every student of political science, every student of political economy, every student of economics knows that the race can only be saved through a solid industrial foundation; that the race can only be saved through political independence. Take away industry from a race, take away political freedom from a race and you have a slave race.”
Marcus Garvey, Government, Business, Society
“Having had the wrong education as a start in his racial career, the Negro has become his own greatest enemy. Most of the trouble I have had in advancing the cause of the race has come from Negroes. Booker Washington aptly described the race in one of his lectures by stating that we were like crabs in a barrel, that none would allow the other to climb over, but on any such attempt all would continue to pull back into the barrel the one crab that would make the effort to climb out. Yet, those of us with vision cannot desert the race, leaving it to suffer and die.”
Marcus Garvey, Intelligence/Wisdom, Society
“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots.”
Marcus Garvey, Intelligence/Wisdom, Society
“Ideals of liberty , freedom and righteousness do not prosper in the 20th century excepts they coincide with oil, rubber, gold, diamond, coal, iron, sugar, coffee, and such other minerals and products desired by the privileged, capitalists and leaders who control the system of government.”Marcus Garvey, Freedom, Society
“I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together.”
Marcus Garvey, Society
“Chance has never yet satisfied the hope of a suffering people.”
Marcus Garvey, Society
“No one knows when the hour of Africa’s Redemption cometh. It is in the wind. It is coming. One day, like a storm, it will be here.”
Marcus Garvey, Society
“Melanin currently worth over $380 a gram more than gold that makes Black people black.”
Marcus Garvey, Society
“Africa has produced countless numbers of men and women, in war and in peace, whose lustre and bravery outshine that of any other people. Then why not see good and perfection in ourselves?”
Marcus Garvey, Society
“Africans are raising the cry of “AFRICA FOR THE AFRICANS”, those at home and those abroad.”
Marcus Garvey, Society
“Somebody said (but if it were not said, then I say it now), that " the laws of our civilization have but one interpretation for the poor and ignorant and for those of wealth and power, there are many interpretations, hence the poor are generally convicted on the one, while the rich are freed on the many interpretations.”
Marcus Garvey, Society
“If the Negro is not careful he will drink in all the poison of modern civilization and die from the effects of it.”
Marcus Garvey, Society
“The race needs workers at this time, not plagiarists, sopists and mere imitators; but men and women who are able to create, to originate and improve, and thus make an independent racial contribution to the world and civilisation.”
Marcus Garvey, Society
“Prohibition is to abstain from intoxicating liquor, as it makes us morbid and sometimes drunk. But we get drunk every day, nevertheless, not so much by the strength of what we sip from the cup, but that which we eat, the water we drink, and the air we inhale, which at fermentation conspire at eventide to make us so drunk and tired that we lose control of ourselves and fall asleep. Everybody is a drunkard, and if we were to enforce real prohibition we should all be dead.”
Marcus Garvey, Society
“we were like crabs in a barrel, that none would allow the other to climb over, but on any such attempt all would continue to pull back into the barrel the one crab that would make the effort to climb out.”
Marcus Garvey, Society
“It is hoped that when the time comes for American and West Indian Africans to settle in Africa, they will realize their responsibility and their duty. It will not be to go to Africa for the purpose of exercising an over-lordship over the natives, but it shall be the purpose of the Universal Negro Improvement Association to have established in Africa that brotherly cooperation which make the interest of the African native and the American and West Indian African one and the same, that is to say, we shall enter into a common partnership to build up Africa in the interest of our race.”
Marcus Garvey, Society, Goals
“Being democratic is not enough, a majority cannot turn what is wrong into right. In order to be considered truly free, countries must also have a deep love of liberty and an abiding respect for the rule of law.”
Margaret Thatcher, Government, Society
“More than they wanted freedom, the Athenians wanted security. Yet they lost everything—security, comfort, and freedom. This was because they wanted not to give to society, but for society to give to them. The freedom they were seeking was freedom from responsibility. It is no wonder, then, that they ceased to be free. In the modern world, we should recall the Athenians' dire fate whenever we confront demands for increased state paternalism.”
Margaret Thatcher, Freedom, Society
“In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.”
Margaret Thatcher, Freedom, Society
“Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.”
Margaret Thatcher, Society
“well it used to be about trying to do something, now it is about trying to be someone.”
Margaret Thatcher, Society
“For every idealistic peacemaker willing to renounce his self-defence in favour of a weapons-free world, there is at least one warmaker anxious to exploit the other's good intentions.”
Margaret Thatcher, Society, Anger and Fighting
“I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand 'I have a problem, it is the government's job to cope with it!' or 'I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!'; 'I am homeless, the government must house me!' and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society?
"There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.
"It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations.”
Margaret Thatcher, Government, Society
“Law and order is a social service. Crime and the fear which the threat of crime induces can paralyse whole communities, keep lonely and vulnerable elderly people shut up in their homes, scar young lives and raise to cult status the swaggering violent bully who achieves predatory control over the streets. I suspect that there would be more support and less criticism than today's political leaders imagine for a large shift of resources from Social Security benefits to law and order - as long as rhetoric about getting tough on crime was matched by practice.”
Margaret Thatcher, Government, Society
“I think we've been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with it. 'I have a problem, I'll get a grant.' 'I'm homeless, the government must house me.' They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.”
Margaret Thatcher, Government, Society
“Do you know, one of the greatest problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas? Now, thoughts and ideas, that interests me.”
Margaret Thatcher, Government, Society
“Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.”
Robert Frost, Freedom, Society
"Be courageous. I have seen many depressions in business. Always America has emerged from these stronger and more prosperous. Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith! Go forward!"
Thomas Edison, Courage, Goals, Society
“What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds.”
Will Rogers, Society
“The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has.”
Will Rogers, Government, Society
“you can't say civilization don't advance, in every war they kill you in a new way.”
Will Rogers, Society
“It was worthwhile to come here only to see why Europe is rotting, why all this people – good for nothing – are the cause of all the Hitlers and Mussolinis.”
Frida Kahlo, Society
“People in general are scared to death of the war and all the exhibitions have been a failure, because the rich don’t want to buy anything.”
Frida Kahlo, Society
“The most important thing for everyone in Gringolandia is to have ambition and become ‘somebody,’ and frankly, I don’t have the least ambition to become anybody.”
Frida Kahlo, Society, Goals
“It is terrifying to see the rich having parties day and night while thousands and thousands of people are dying of hunger.”
Frida Kahlo, Society
“This upper class is disgusting and I’m furious at all these rich people here, having seen thousands of people in abject squalor.”
Frida Kahlo, Society
“The greater part of mankind may be divided into two classes; that of shallow thinkers who fall short of the truth; and that of abstruse thinkers who go beyond it.”
David Hume, Society
“Disbelief in futurity loosens in a great measure the ties of morality, and may be for that reason pernicious to the peace of civil society.”
David Hume, Society
“How could politics be a science, if laws and forms of government had not a uniform influence upon society?”
David Hume, Government, Society
“Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.”
David Hume, Government, Society
“It's when we start working together that the real healing takes place... it's when we start spilling our sweat, and not our blood.”
David Hume, Society
“The world runs on individuals pursuing their self-interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way.”
Milton Friedman, Goals, Society
“When government – in pursuit of good intentions – tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost comes in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom.”
Milton Friedman, Government, Society, Freedom
“The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.”
Milton Friedman, Government, Society
“It’s so easy to be great these days, because everyone else is so weak.”
David Goggins, Success, Society
“If you want to be one of the few to defy those trends in our ever-softening society, you will have to be willing to go to war with yourself and create a whole new identity, which requires an open mind.”
David Goggins, Goals, Society
“How wonderful are the women and men in the world who feed us. Especially those who feed us with no salary. The mothers—I thought. The wives.”
Katharine Hepburn, Society
“There is still so much in the world worth fighting for. So much that is beautiful, so many wonderful people working to reverse the harm, to help alleviate the suffering. And so many young people dedicated to making this a better world. All conspiring to inspire us and to give us hope that it is not too late to turn things around, if we all do our part.”
Jane Goodall, Hope, Society, Goals
“In all my lectures and books, I focus on reasons for hope. But today, it’s getting harder and harder to take that message of hope around the world. Todays’ young people—everywhere I go—they’re so excited and empowered. We’re listening to their voices. That gives us a reason to hope.”
Jane Goodall, Hope, Society
“But consumers, at least if they’re not living in poverty, have an enormous role to play, too. If you don’t like the way the business does its business, don’t buy their products. This is beginning to create change. People should think about the consequences of the little choices they make each day.”
Jane Goodall, Society
“Young people, when they understand the problems, are empowered to take action. When we listen to their voices (they) actually are changing the world and making it better for people, for animals, and for the environment because everything is interconnected.”
- After winning the BBVA Foundation Worldwide Award for Biodiversity
Jane Goodall, Society
“Surely, we do not want to live in a world without the great apes, our closest living relatives in the animal kingdom? A world where we can no longer marvel at the magnificent flight of bald eagles or hear the howl of wolves under the moon? A world not enhanced by the sight of a grizzly bear and her cubs hunting for berries in the wilderness? What would our grandchildren think if these magical images were only to be found in books?”
- In a statement in defense of The Endangered Species Act
Jane Goodall, Nature, Society
“Fortunately, nature is amazingly resilient: places we have destroyed, given time and help, can once again support life, and endangered species can be given a second chance. And there is a growing number of people, especially young people, who are aware of these problems and are fighting for the survival of our only home, Planet Earth. We must all join that fight before it is too late.”
Jane Goodall, Nature, Society, Goals
“Of course, a great deal of our onslaught on Mother Nature is not really lack of intelligence but a lack of compassion for future generations and the health of the planet: sheer selfish greed for short-term benefits to increase the wealth and power of individuals, corporations and governments. The rest is due to thoughtlessness, lack of education, and poverty. In other words, there seems to be a disconnect between our clever brain and our compassionate heart. True wisdom requires both thinking with our head and understanding with our heart.”
- From The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times
Jane Goodall, Intelligence/Wisdom, Kindness, Nature, Society, Business, Government
“I truly believe that the number of good and decent people in the world form by far the greatest percentage of the world population. And while there are those who are ruthless in their desire for ever more wealth and power, a great deal of harm is done simply through ignorance or the desperation of poverty or by those who have been misled.”
- Reflecting on the 20th anniversary of 9/11
Jane Goodall, Society
“I do see the difference now between me and other men. When a disaster happens, I act, and they make excuses.”
Florence Nightingale, Society
“The question is very understandable, but no one has found a satisfactory answer to it so far. Yes, why do they make still more gigantic planes, still heavier bombs and, at the same time, prefabricated houses for reconstruction? Why should millions be spent daily on the war and yet there's not a penny available for medical services, artists, or for poor people?
Why do some people have to starve, while there are surpluses rotting in other parts of the world? Oh, why are people so crazy?”
Anne Frank, Society
“If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.”
Anne Frank, Society
“The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands - the ownership and control of their livelihoods - are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.”
Helen Keller, Justice, Society
"His ideas of marriage were, consequently, quite unlike those of the great majority of his acquaintances, for whom getting married was one of the numerous facts of social life. For Levin it was the chief affair of life, on which its whole happiness turned."
Tolstoy (Leo Tolstoy), Love, Happiness, Society
"The French fashion — of the parents arranging their children’s future — was not accepted; it was condemned. The English fashion of the complete independence of girls was also not accepted, and not possible in Russian society. The Russian fashion of matchmaking by the officer of intermediate persons was for some reason considered disgraceful; it was ridiculed by everyone, and by the princess herself. But how girls were to be married, and how parents were to marry them, no one knew."
Tolstoy (Leo Tolstoy), Society
"If you're in the luckiest 1% of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99%."
Warren Buffet, Society, Kindness
"What we learn from history is that people don't learn from history."
Warren Buffet, Intelligence/Wisdom, Society
"For 240 years, it's been a terrible mistake to bet against America, and now is no time to start."
Warren Buffet, Society
"We always live in an uncertain world. What is certain is that the United States will go forward over time."
Warren Buffet, Society
"I think it’s important to hold a mirror up to society and yourself."
Ricky Gervais, Goals, Society
"During the 1960s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered."
Andy Warhol, Society
"What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good."
Andy Warhol, Society, Wealth
"It’s not what you are that counts, it’s what they think you are."
Andy Warhol, Society
"Everyone needs to be valued. Everyone has the potential to give something back."
Princess Diana, Society
"The biggest disease the world suffers from in this day and age is the disease of people feeling unloved."
Princess Diana, Society, Love
"I like to be a free spirit. Some don't like that, but that's the way I am."
Princess Diana, Goals, Freedom, Society
"The greatest problem in the world today is intolerance. Everyone is so intolerant of each other."
Princess Diana, Society
"Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity."
Audre Lorde, Society
"In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior."
Audre Lorde, Society
"What better way is there to police the streets of a minority community than to turn one generation against the other?"
Audre Lorde, Society
"Revolution is not a one-time event."
Audre Lorde, Society
"As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become ‘other,’ the outsider whose experience and tradition is too ‘alien’ to comprehend."
Audre Lorde, Society
"For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, our feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets."
Audre Lorde, Society, Sex, Art
"The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future."
Audre Lorde, Society, Life
"What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope."
Audre Lorde, Society, Honesty , Hope
"For Black women as well as Black men, it is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others—for their use and to our detriment."
Audre Lorde, Society
"Within each one of us there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust."
Audre Lorde, Society
"We share a common interest, survival, and it cannot be pursued in isolation from others simply because their differences make us uncomfortable."
Audre Lorde, Goals, Society
"Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all."
Audre Lorde, Society
"Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all."
Audre Lorde, Society
"When we love children, we acknowledge by our every action that they are not property, that they have rights - that we respect and uphold their rights."
bell hooks, Society
"To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination."
bell hooks, Society
"We judge on the basis of what somebody looks like, skin color, whether we think they’re beautiful or not. That space on the Internet allows you to converse with somebody with none of those things involved."
bell hooks, Society, Technology
"All too often in our society it is assumed that one can know all there is to know about black people by merely hearing the life story and opinions of one black person."
bell hooks, Society
"The rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged."
bell hooks, Anger and Fighting, Society
"Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power - not because they don't see it, but because they see it and they don't want it to exist."
bell hooks, Power, Society
"Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair."
bell hooks, Hope, Society
"I say dance, they say ‘How high?'"
Michael Scott, Society, Goals
"Society teaches us that having feelings and crying is bad and wrong. Well, that’s baloney, because grief isn’t wrong. There’s such a thing as good grief. Just ask Charlie Brown."
Michael Scott, Society
"Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity."
James Baldwin, Society
"People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy."
James Baldwin, Society, Love, Death
"To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time."
James Baldwin, Society
"It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind."
James Baldwin, Intelligence/Wisdom, Society
"The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose."
James Baldwin, Society
"The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated."
James Baldwin, Intelligence/Wisdom, Society
"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them."
James Baldwin, Society
"The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless."
James Baldwin, Society
"Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?"
James Baldwin, Society
"The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing."
James Baldwin, Society
"Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality."
James Baldwin, Society, Love
"In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood."
Henry David Thoreau, Society
"Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth."
Henry David Thoreau, Society
"Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. what a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate."
Henry David Thoreau, Society, Goals
"Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, 'I will simply be."
Henry David Thoreau, Society, Goals
"I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society."
Henry David Thoreau, Happiness, Friendship, Society
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."
Henry David Thoreau, Goals, Society
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
Henry David Thoreau, Society
"Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new."
Henry David Thoreau, Society
"Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?"
Henry David Thoreau, Society
"Any fool can make a rule And any fool will mind it."
Henry David Thoreau, Society
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away."
Henry David Thoreau, Society
"Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations."
Henry David Thoreau, Intelligence/Wisdom, Wealth, Society
"I’m stranger. You’re stranger. Together, we are… strangers."
Alice in Wonderland, Society
"I went to a hunting party once, I didn’t like it. Terrible people. They all started hunting me!"
Alice in Wonderland, Society
"If everybody minded their own business,” the Duchess said, in a hoarse growl, “the world would go round a deal faster than it does."
Alice in Wonderland, Society
"We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad."
Alice in Wonderland, Society
"Visit either you like: they’re both mad."
Alice in Wonderland, Society
"Why, the language down there in the far South is just as different from ours in Maryland as you think. They laughed when they heard me talk and I couldn’t understand them no how."
Harriet Tubman, Society
"Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude."
Frederick Douglass, Freedom, Society
"A smile or a tear has not nationality; joy and sorrow speak alike to all nations, and they, above all the confusion of tongues, proclaim the brotherhood of man."
Frederick Douglass, Society
"The life of a nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous."
Frederick Douglass, Society
"In a composite nation like ours, as before the law, there should be no rich, no poor, no high, no low, no white, no black, but common country, common citizenship, equal rights and a common destiny."
Frederick Douglass, Society
"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others."
Frederick Douglass, Freedom, Power, Society
"What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?
I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages."
Frederick Douglass, Freedom, Justice, Society
"Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe."
Frederick Douglass, Justice, Society
"It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."
Frederick Douglass, Society
"Are you going to cater to the whims and prejudices of people? We draw out from other people our own thought. If, when you go out to organize, you go with a broad spirit, you will create and call out breadth and toleration. You had better organize one woman on a broad platform than 10,000 on a narrow platform of intolerance and bigotry."
Susan B Anthony, Society
"Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputations... can never effect a reform."
Susan B Anthony, Society
"I beg you to speak of Woman as you do of the Negro, speak of her as a human being, as a citizen of the United States, as a half of the people in whose hands lies the destiny of this Nation."
Susan B Anthony, Society
"Whoever controls work and wages, controls morals."
Susan B Anthony, Society
"Woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself."
Susan B Anthony, Society
"For a man is not only a biological but a social product, and the social environment of individuals in the process of education, is the home. Scientific pedagogy will seek in vain to better the new generation if it does not succeed in influencing also the environment within which this new generation grows!"
Maria Montessori, Society, Intelligence/Wisdom
"This is what is intended by education as a help to life; an education from birth that brings about a revolution: a revolution that eliminates every violence, a revolution in which everyone will be attracted towards a common center. Mothers, fathers, statesmen all will be centered upon respecting and aiding this delicate construction which is carried on in psychic mystery following the guide of an inner teacher. This is the new shining hope for humanity. It is not so much a reconstruction, as an aid to the construction carried out by the human soul as it is meant to be, developed in all the immense potentialities with which the new-born child is endowed."
Maria Montessori, Goals, Society
"But the love of man for man is a far more tender thing, and so simple that it is universal. To love in this way is not the privilege of any especially prepared intellectual class, but lies within the reach of all men."
Maria Montessori, Society, Love
"As a rule, however, we do not respect our children. We try to force them to follow us without regard to their special needs. We are overbearing with them, and above all, rude; and then we expect them to be submissive and well-behaved, knowing all the time how strong is their instinct of imitation and how touching their faith in and admiration of us."
Maria Montessori, Society
"Children become like the things they love."
Maria Montessori, Society, Love
"We wish the old things because we cannot understand the new, and we are always seeking after that gorgeousness which belongs to things already on the decline, without recognising in the humble simplicity of new ideas the germ which shall develop in the future."
Maria Montessori, Society, Ideas
"We shall walk together on this path of life, for all things are part of the universe and are connected with each other to form one whole unity."
Maria Montessori, Society, Life
"If salvation and help are to come, it is through the child ; for the child is the constructor of man."
Maria Montessori, Society
"Children are human beings to whom respect is due, superior to us by reason of their innocence and of the greater possibilities of their future."
Maria Montessori, Society
"The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed."
George Orwell, Society, Freedom
"All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting."
George Orwell, Society
"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
George Orwell, Society
"Sanity is not statistical."
George Orwell, Society
"We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them."
George Orwell, Society
"On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time."
George Orwell, Society, Kindness
"I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane."
George Orwell, Society
"The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better."
George Orwell, Freedom, Happiness, Society
"Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad."
George Orwell, Truth, Society
"Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one."
George Orwell, Society
"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."
George Orwell, Society
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
George Orwell, Society
"Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it."
George Orwell, Society, Intelligence/Wisdom
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
George Orwell, Society
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
George Orwell, Society
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer..."
Thomas Paine, Society, Government
"That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations is as shocking as it is true..."
Thomas Paine, Anger and Fighting, Society
"One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise, she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion."
Thomas Paine, Society, Government
"Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher."
Thomas Paine, Society, Government, Happiness
"A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody."
Thomas Paine, Society
"When we see the Earth from space, we see ourselves as a whole. We see the unity, and not the divisions. It is such a simple image with a compelling message; one planet, one human race."
Stephen Hawking, Society
"We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet."
Stephen Hawking, Society
"It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. Its a crazy world out there. Be curious."
Stephen Hawking, Society
"What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long."
Thomas Sowell, Society, Freedom
"If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily "socially constructed" notions, then all that is left is consensus--more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia."
Thomas Sowell, Society
"To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by “society”."
Thomas Sowell, Society
"A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests."
Thomas Sowell, Society, Freedom
"Most officially “poor” Americans today have things that middle-class Americans of an earlier time could only dream about—including color TV, videocassette recorders, microwave ovens, and their own cars. Moreover, half of all poor households have air-conditioning. Leftist redistribution of income could never accomplish that, because there are simply not enough rich people for their wealth to have such a dramatic effect on the living standards of the poor, even if it was all confiscated and redistributed. Moreover, many attempts at redistributing wealth in various countries around the world have ended up redistributing poverty.
After all, rich people can see the political handwriting on the wall, and can often take their money and leave the country, long before a government program can get started to confiscate it. They are also likely to take with them skills and entrepreneurial experience that are even harder to replace than the money."
Thomas Sowell, Government, Wealth, Society
"The concept of “microaggression” is just one of many tactics used to stifle differences of opinion by declaring some opinions to be “hate speech,” instead of debating those differences in a marketplace of ideas. To accuse people of aggression for not marching in lockstep with political correctness is to set the stage for justifying real aggression against them."
Thomas Sowell, Society
"Hilary Clinton said you know, it takes a village to raise a child and somebody said it takes a village idiot to believe that … it is part of the whole thing of third parties wanting to make decisions for which they pay no price for when they’re wrong."
Thomas Sowell, Society
"Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late."
Thomas Sowell, Society
"Whenever someone refers to me as someone "who happens to be black," I wonder if they realize that both my parents are black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what was going on."
Thomas Sowell, Society
"It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing 'compassion' for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about."
Thomas Sowell, Government, Business, Society
"Liberals seem to assume that, if you don’t believe in their particular political solutions, then you don’t really care about the people that they claim to want to help."
Thomas Sowell, Society
"I think we're raising whole generations who regard facts as more or less optional. We have kids in elementary school who are being urged to take stands on political issues, to write letters to congressmen and presidents about nuclear energy.
They're not a decade old, and they're being thrown these kinds of questions that can absorb the lifetime of a very brilliant and learned man. And they're being taught that it's important to have views, and they're not being taught that it's important to know what you're talking about.
It's important to hear the opposite viewpoint, and more important to learn how to distinguish why viewpoint A and viewpoint B are different, and which one has the most evidence or logic behind it. They disregard that. They hear something, they hear some rhetoric, and they run with it."
Thomas Sowell, Society
"Don't you get tired of seeing so many "non-conformists" with the same non-conformist look?"
Thomas Sowell, Society
"What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month, and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are generally given 'class' labels on the basis of their transient location in the income stream. If most Americans do not stay in the same broad income bracket for even a decade, their repeatedly changing 'class' makes class itself a nebulous concept. Yet the intelligentsia are habituated, if not addicted, to seeing the world in class terms."
Thomas Sowell, Society
"No government of the left has done as much for the poor as capitalism has. Even when it comes to the redistribution of income, the left talks the talk but the free market walks the walk.
What do the poor most need? They need to stop being poor. And how can that be done, on a mass scale, except by an economy that creates vastly more wealth? Yet the political left has long had a remarkable lack of interest in how wealth is created. As far as they are concerned, wealth exists somehow and the only interesting question is how to redistribute it."
Thomas Sowell, Government, Wealth, Society
"We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did."
Thomas Sowell, Society
"What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?"
Thomas Sowell, Government, Wealth, Society
"One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain."
Thomas Sowell, Society
"If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago and a racist today."
Thomas Sowell, Society
"One of the consequences of such notions as ‘entitlements’ is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence."
Thomas Sowell, Society
"The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy."
Thomas Sowell, Government, Society
"Since this is an era when many people are concerned about 'fairness' and 'social justice,' what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?"
Thomas Sowell, Society, Wealth
"When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination."
Thomas Sowell, Society
"Racism does not have a good track record. It's been tried out for a long time and you'd think by now we'd want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management."
Thomas Sowell, Society
"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good."
Thomas Sowell, Society
"It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites."
Thomas Sowell, Society
"I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money."
Thomas Sowell, Society, Wealth
"Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment and merging of races, and we are still far from this blissful realization."
Tesla, Society
"When we speak of man, we have a conception of humanity as a whole, and before applying scientific methods to the investigation of his movement we must accept this as a physical fact. But can anyone doubt to-day that all the millions of individuals and all the innumerable types and characters constitute an entity, a unit? Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them. I cut myself in the finger, and it pains me: this finger is a part of me. I see a friend hurt, and it hurts me, too: my friend and I are one. And now I see stricken down an enemy, a lump of matter which, of all the lumps of matter in the universe, I care least for, and it still grieves me. Does this not prove that each of us is only part of a whole?
For ages this idea has been proclaimed in the consummately wise teachings of religion, probably not alone as a means of insuring peace and harmony among men, but as a deeply founded truth. The Buddhist expresses it in one way, the Christian in another, but both say the same: We are all one. Metaphysical proofs are, however, not the only ones which we are able to bring forth in support of this idea. Science, too, recognizes this connectedness of separate individuals, though not quite in the same sense as it admits that the suns, planets, and moons of a constellation are one body, and there can be no doubt that it will be experimentally confirmed in times to come, when our means and methods for investigating psychical and other states and phenomena shall have been brought to great perfection. Still more: this one human being lives on and on. The individual is ephemeral, races and nations come and pass away, but man remains. Therein lies the profound difference between the individual and the whole."
Tesla, Society, Friendship, Belief, Science
"What we now want is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth, and the elimination of egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife... Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment..."
Tesla, Society
"I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility."
John Wayne, Society
"I'd like to know why well-educated idiots keep apologizing for lazy and complaining people who think the world owes them a living."
John Wayne, Society
"We saw that our attackers were also victims, victims of a negative indoctrination that taught the false values of superiority and inferiority, the sanction of violence and brutality, and the justification of inhumanity and hate."
John Lewis, Society
"No government, no multinational corporation, no agency at all could counter the mandates of a unified world community. And that is why so much energy and resources are invested in division and separation."
John Lewis, Government, Business, Society
"the question for us as a society is whether we participate in any way in the corruption of the defenseless, the undereducated, and the poor in spirit. We may not be able to stop the violence of others, but we can stop our own. A child is born in innocence, and this violence does not emerge out of thin air. It is created, fomented, and nurtured in them to their detriment."
John Lewis, Society
"We have a “fast-food mentality” that expects an instant return on our investment of time, attention, and effort, a return that is concrete and clear. We are so comfortable charging forward and succeeding through our aggression and innovation that the idea of patience can seem contrary to our instincts."
John Lewis, Society
"Instead of suggesting that people with cultures and customs we do not understand, people with different color skin, or those who speak another language are somehow beneath us, instead of developing an elaborate rationale to justify our discomfort, it is more honest to simply admit our insecurity and gain acceptance."
John Lewis, Society
"What is the purpose of a nation if not to empower human beings to live better together than they could individually? When government fails to meet the basic needs of humanity for food, shelter, clothing, and even more important—the room to grow and evolve—the people will begin to rely on one another, to pool their resources and rise above the artificial limitations of tradition or law. Each of us has something significant to contribute to society be it physical, material, intellectual, emotional, or spiritual."
John Lewis, Society, Government
"Lynching and vigilantism were considered duties, the necessary protection of men who were guarding the sanctity of social boundaries and the “purity” of their lineage. No matter the rationale, these ideas put a virtuous face on centuries of brutal history that actually robbed our aggressors of their moral grounding and made them creative participants in violence."
John Lewis, Society
"each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself."
John Lewis, Society
"Governments and corporations do not live. They have no power, no capacity in and of themselves. They are given life and derive all their authority from their ability to assist, benefit, and transform the lives of the people they touch. All authority emanates from the consent of the governed and the satisfaction of the customer."
John Lewis, Government, Business, Society
"The only reason unjust systems exist is that the masses of people silently give their consent and believe these systems are necessary—whether for their security or survival."
John Lewis, Society
"I have seen this restlessness among the people before. It was in another millennium, another decade, and at another time in our history, but it pushed through America like a storm. In ten short years, there was a tempest that transformed what the American Revolution did not address, what the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were afraid to confront, what the Civil War could not unravel, what Reconstruction tried to mediate, and Jim Crow did its best to retrench. This mighty wind made a fundamental shift in the moral character of our nation that has reached every sector of our society. And this history lends us one very powerful reminder today: Nothing can stop the power of a committed and determined people to make a difference in our society."
John Lewis, Society
"It is so strange to me that we have learned to fly in the air like birds, learned to swim in the ocean like fish, shoot a rocket to the moon, but we have not yet learned how to live together in harmony with one another."
John Lewis, Society
"As citizens, we knew we had ceded some of our individual rights to society in order to live together as a community. But we did not believe this social contract included support for an immoral system. Since the people invested government with its authority, we understood that we had to obey the law. But when law became suppressive and tyrannical, when human law violated divine principles, we felt it was not only our right, but our duty to disobey. As Henry Thoreau strongly believed, to comply with an unjust system is to accept abuse. It is not the role of the citizen to follow the government down a path that violates his or her own conscience."
John Lewis, Society, Government, Freedom
"We are one people, one family, the human family, and what affects one of us affects us all."
John Lewis, Society
"Rioting is not a movement. It is not an act of civil disobedience. I think it is a mistake for people to consider disorganized action, mayhem, and attacks on other people and property as an extension of any kind of movement. It is not. It is simply an explosion of emotion. That's all. There is nothing constructive about it. It is destructive."
John Lewis, Society
"How narrow we selfish conceited creatures are in our sympathies! How blind to the rights of all the rest of creation!"
John Muir, Society
"Most people are on the world, not in it — have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them — undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate."
John Muir, Society
"The few who do are the envy of the many who only watch."
Jim Rohn, Society
"We will all profit from a more diverse, inclusive society, understanding, accommodating, even celebrating our differences, while pulling together for the common good."
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Society
"the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government."
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Freedom, Society, Government
"For both men and women the first step in getting power is to become visible to others, and then to put on an impressive show. . . . As women achieve power, the barriers will fall. As society sees what women can do, as women see what women can do, there will be more women out there doing things, and we’ll all be better off for it."
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Power, Sex, Society
"It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones."
Nelson Mandela, Society
"There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children."
Nelson Mandela, Society
"There is in every one of us, even those who seem to be most moderate, a type of desire that is terrible, wild, and lawless."
Plato, Society
"Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses."
Plato, Society
"good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws."
Plato, Society
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."
Plato, Society
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light."
Plato, Society
"Today we are faced with the pre-eminent fact that if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships, the ability of all peoples of all kins to live together and to work together in the same world at peace."
FDR- Franklin D. Roosevelt, Society
"There is nothing so American as our national parks. The scenery and the wildlife are native. The fundamental idea behind the parks is native. It is, in brief, that the country belongs to the people, that it is in process of making for the enrichment of the lives of all of us. The parks stand as the outward symbol of the great human principle."
FDR- Franklin D. Roosevelt, Society
"Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off."
FDR- Franklin D. Roosevelt, Society
"Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough."
FDR- Franklin D. Roosevelt, Kindness, Freedom, Society
"A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people."
FDR- Franklin D. Roosevelt, Society
"Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists."
FDR- Franklin D. Roosevelt, Society
"Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause. I had hoped that liberal and enlightened thought would have reconciled the Christians so that their religious fights would not endanger the peace of Society."
George Washington, Belief, Society
"Nothing is more essential, than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated."
George Washington, Society
"The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible."
George Washington, Government, Society
"The Nation, which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. ... The Nation, prompted by ill-will and resentment, sometimes impels to war the Government, contrary to the best calculations of policy. The Government sometimes participates in the national propensity, and adopts through passion what reason would reject; at other times, it makes the animosity of the nation subservient to projects of hostility instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives. The peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of Nations has been the victim."
George Washington, Government, Society
"No punishment, in my opinion, is too great, for the man who can build his greatness upon his country's ruin."
George Washington, Justice, Society
"Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened."
George Washington, Government, Society
"Citizens by birth or choice of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections. The name of American, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations."
George Washington, Society
"Where are our Men of abilities? Why do they not come forth to save their Country?"
George Washington, Society
"Nothing can illustrate these observations more forcibly, than a recollection of the happy conjuncture of times and circumstances, under which our Republic assumed its rank among the Nations; The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period, the researches of the human mind, after social happiness, have been carried to a great extent, the Treasures of knowledge, acquired by the labours of Philosophers, Sages and Legislatures, through a long succession of years, are laid open for our use, and their collected wisdom may be happily applied in the Establishment of our forms of Government; the free cultivation of Letters, the unbounded extension of Commerce, the progressive refinement of Manners, the growing liberality of sentiment... have had a meliorating influence on mankind and increased the blessings of Society. At this auspicious period, the United States came into existence as a Nation, and if their Citizens should not be completely free and happy, the fault will be entirely their own."
George Washington, Intelligence/Wisdom, Happiness, Government, Society
"Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism."
George Washington, Society
"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."
Thomas Jefferson, Government, Society
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Thomas Jefferson, Freedom, Society
"Animals don't lie. Animals don't criticize. If animals have moody days, they handle them better than humans do."
Betty White, Society
"I look forward to a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose."
JFK- John F. Kennedy, Government, Society
"The rising tide lifts all the boats."
JFK- John F. Kennedy, Society
"We need men who can dream of things that never were."
JFK- John F. Kennedy, Society
"Without debate, without criticism no administration and no country can succeed and no republic can survive."
JFK- John F. Kennedy, Government, Society, Criticism
"If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."
JFK- John F. Kennedy, Society
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
JFK- John F. Kennedy, Society
"Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
JFK- John F. Kennedy, Society
"A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane and smells like Cheetah."
Ronald Reagan, Society
"Socialists ignore the side of man that is the spirit. They can provide you shelter, fill your belly with bacon and beans, treat you when you're ill, all the things guaranteed to a prisoner or a slave. They don't understand that we also dream."
Ronald Reagan, Society
"Status quo, you know, is Latin for 'the mess we're in'.."
Ronald Reagan, Society
"We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions."
Ronald Reagan, Society
"A great democracy has got to be progressive or it will soon cease to be great or a democracy."
Teddy Roosevelt, Society
"Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism, and the effort to destroy them would be futile unless accomplished in ways that would work the utmost mischief to the entire body politic. We can do nothing of good in the way of regulating and supervising these corporations until we fix clearly in our minds that we are not attacking the corporations, but endeavoring to do away with any evil in them. We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth."
Teddy Roosevelt, Society, Wealth
"Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike."
Teddy Roosevelt, Society
"We despise and abhor the bully, the brawler, the oppressor, whether in private or public life, but we despise no less the coward and the voluptuary. No man is worth calling a man who will not fight rather than submit to infamy or see those that are dear to him suffer wrong."
Teddy Roosevelt, Society
"In this country we have no place for hyphenated Americans."
Teddy Roosevelt, Society
"The reason fat men are good natured is they can neither fight nor run."
Teddy Roosevelt, Society
"To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed."
Teddy Roosevelt, Society
"In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people."
Teddy Roosevelt, Society
"Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country."
Teddy Roosevelt, Society
"The things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead of duty first and love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life."
Teddy Roosevelt, Society
"Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance."
Teddy Roosevelt, Society
"To educate a person in the mind but not in morals is to educate a menace to society."
Teddy Roosevelt, Intelligence/Wisdom, Society
"People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."
Teddy Roosevelt, Society
"Since the world has existed, there has been injustice. But it is one world, the more so as it becomes smaller, more accessible. There is just no question that there is more obligation that those who have should give to those who have nothing."
Audrey Hepburn, Society
"...anyone who attempts to do both, to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue his individual goal, becomes neurotic."
Carl Jung, Society
"The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories."
Carl Jung, Society
"Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent."
Carl Jung, Society
"The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents."
Carl Jung, Society
"People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls."
Carl Jung, Society
"If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be content to take their own and depart."
Socrates, Society
"I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world."
Socrates, Society
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
Socrates, Society
"The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law."
Aristotle, Society, Government
"It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen."
Aristotle, Society
"Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god."
Aristotle, Society
"Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well."
Aristotle, Intelligence/Wisdom, Society
"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society."
Mark Twain, Society
"The only very marked difference between the average civilized man and the average savage is that the one is gilded and the other is painted."
Mark Twain, Society
"If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed."
Mark Twain, Society
"Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it."
Mark Twain, Society
"There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined."
Mark Twain, Society
"If I am a star, the people made me a star."
Marilyn Monroe, Society
"I think there’s two things in human beings…that they want to be alone, but they also want to be together."
Marilyn Monroe, Society
"A little consideration, a little thought for others, makes all the difference."
Winnie the Pooh, Society
"Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet."
Bob Marley, Society
"I wish they would only take me as I am."
Van Gogh, Society
"One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. Today, our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change."
Martin Luther King Jr., Society
"Another way that you love your enemy is this: When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it. There will come a time, in many instances, when the person who hates you most, the person who has misused you most, the person who has gossiped about you most, the person who has spread false rumors about you most, there will come a time when you will have an opportunity to defeat that person. It might be in terms of a recommendation for a job; it might be in terms of helping that person to make some move in life. That’s the time you must do it. That is the meaning of love. In the final analysis, love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It’s not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system."
Martin Luther King Jr., Anger and Fighting, Love, Society
"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."
Martin Luther King Jr., Society
"We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
Martin Luther King Jr., Society
"People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don&pos;t know each other because they have not communicated with each other."