Quotes about Society

You have become acquainted with the characters. You have joined them in the imaginary world wherein they dwell, consented to the laws of their society, breathed its air, tasted its food, traveled its highways. Now you must follow them through their adventures.

Israel is the only democratic country in the Middle East.

You can transform your nation into a prison because you are committed to an ideology.

If you are happy, all of us will profit from it. Society will profit from it. All living beings will profit from it.

Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.

I am increasingly persuaded that the earth belongs exclusively to the living and that one generation has no more right to bind another to it's laws and judgments than one independent nation has the right to command another.

We are afraid of the known and afraid of the unknown. That is our daily life and in that there is no hope, and therefore every form of philosophy, every form of theological concept, is merely an escape from the actual reality of what is. All outward forms of change brought about by wars, revolutions, reformations, laws and ideologies have failed completely to change the basic nature of man and therefore of society.

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

A nation which expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, expects that which never was and never will be.

New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.

The care of human life and happiness, and their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of a good government.

Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions or property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. Letter to James Madison, October 28, 1785