Society Quotations
Authors that have more than 2 quotes:
Mignon McLaughlin
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| Failure seems to be regarded as the one unpardonable crime, success as the all-redeeming virtue, the acquisition of wealth as the single worthy aim of life. The hair-raising revelations of skullduggery and grand-scale thievery merely incite others to surpass by yet bolder outrages and more corrupt combinations. |
| - Charles Francis Adams |
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| Everything is for the eye these days - TV, Life, Look, the movies. Nothing is just for the mind. The next generation will have eyeballs as big as cantaloupes and no brain at all. |
| - Fred Allen |
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| The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. |
| - Marcus Aurelius Antoninus |
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| This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims. |
| - Matthew Arnold |
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| It'll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| The trouble with the laws these days is that criminals know their rights better than their wrongs. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| When Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he said, "It would be nice." |
| - Unknown Author |
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| There is no hope for a civilization which starts each day to the sound of an alarm clock. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Oh, for the good old days when people would stop Christmas shopping when they ran out of money. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| The twentieth century seems afflicted by a gigantic... power failure. Powerlessness and the sense of powerlessness may be the environmental disease of the age. |
| - Russell Baker |
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| Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things. |
| - Russell Baker |
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| I don't believe medical discoveries are doing much to advance human life. As fast as we create ways to extend it we are inventing ways to shorten it. |
| - Christian Barnard |
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| No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously. |
| - Dave Barry |
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| It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence. |
| - Jacques Barzun |
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| When people go to work, they shouldn't have to leave their hearts at home. |
| - Betty Bender |
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| I've been reading a lot lately about Indian captives. One woman who had been captured by the Indians and made a squaw was resentful when she was rescued because she'd found that there was a lot more work to do as the wife of a white man. |
| - Stephen Vincent Benét |
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| The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. |
| - Omar Bradley |
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| You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it. |
| - Art Buchwald |
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| If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all. |
| - Pearl S. Buck |
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| The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded. |
| - Edmund Burke |
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| Society is composed of two great classes - those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners. |
| - Sébastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort |
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| It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake. |
| - Norman Douglas |
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| A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. |
| - Dwight D. Eisenhower |
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| Those persons who are burning to display heroism may rest assured that the course of social evolution will offer them every opportunity. |
| - Havelock Ellis |
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| Fame is proof that the people are gullible. |
| - Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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| What's wrong with this world is, it's not finished yet. It is not competed to the point where man can put his final signature to the job and say, "It is finished. We made it and it works." |
| - William Faulkner |
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| The thoughts of Plato and Machiavelli... don't seem quite enough armor for a world beset with splitting the atoms, urban guerrillas, nineteen varieties of psychotherapists, amplified guitars, napalm, computers, astronauts, and an atmosphere polluted simultaneously with auto exhaust and TV commercials. |
| - John Fischer |
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| Life has been reduced to getting food out of cans. |
| - Martin H. Fischer |
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| The public is hedged about by so many goddam bookkeepers that no time is left in which to produce. More time is spent in carrying out garbage than in carrying in food. |
| - Martin H. Fischer |
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| We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork. |
| - Milton Friedman |
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| The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots. |
| - Erich Fromm |
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| I am not quite sure what the advantage is in having a few more dollars to spend if the air is too dirty to breathe, the water too polluted to drink, the commuters are losing out in the struggle to get in and out of the city, the streets are filthy, and the schools so bad that the young perhaps wisely stay away, and the hoodlums roll citizens for some of the dollars they saved in the tax cut. |
| - John Kenneth Galbraith |
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| The men of the technostructure are the new and universal priesthood. Their religion is business success; their test of virtue is growth and profit. Their bible is the computer printout; their communion bench is the committee room. |
| - John Kenneth Galbraith |
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| There is more to life than increasing its speed. |
| - Mahatma Gandhi |
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| Nothing can be more readily disproved than the old saw, "You can't keep a good man down." Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down. |
| - John W. Gardner |
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| Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion? |
| - William Lloyd Garrison |
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| We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe. |
| - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
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| The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet how can anyone speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?... With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities? |
| - Emma Goldman |
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| The world is changing so fast I've got societal vertigo. |
| - Terri Guillemets |
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| Pharmaceutical companies will soon rule the world if we keep letting them believe we are a happy, functional society so long as all the women are on Prozac, all children on Ritalin, and all men on Viagra. |
| - Terri Guillemets |
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| If some people got their rights they would complain of being deprived of their wrongs. |
| - Oliver Herford |
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| It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste. |
| - Oliver Wendell, Sr. Holmes |
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| In spite of all our speeding it's still the style to be late. |
| - Kin Hubbard |
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| Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. |
| - Aldous Huxley |
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| In nature, there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences. |
| - Robert Greene Ingersoll |
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| I believe that one of the great problems for us as individuals is the depression and the tension resulting from existence in a world which is increasingly less pleasing to the eye. |
| - Lady Bird Johnson |
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| Think what a better world it would be if we all, the whole world, had cookies and milk about three o'clock every afternoon and then lay down on our blankets for a nap. |
| - Barbara Jordan |
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| You taught me to be nice, so nice that now I am so full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion. |
| - Garrison Keillor |
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| Most people are awaiting Virtual Reality; I'm awaiting virtuous reality. |
| - Eli Khamarov |
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| The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. |
| - Martin Luther, Jr. King |
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| There's a standard formula for success in the entertainment medium, and that is: "Beat it to death if it succeeds." |
| - Ernie Kovacs |
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| One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame, we have killed off so much real shame as well. |
| - Louis Kronenberger |
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| You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars. |
| - Charles Kuralt |
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| I think societal instinct much deeper than sex instinct - and societal repression much more devastating. |
| - D.H. Lawrence |
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| Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own. |
| - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg |
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| It isn't so much that hard times are coming; the change observed is mostly soft times going. |
| - Groucho Marx |
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| Most of our diversions do not so much delay death as accustom us to it. |
| - Mignon McLaughlin |
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| Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers. |
| - Mignon McLaughlin |
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| The three horrors of modern life - talk without meaning, desire without love, work without satisfaction. |
| - Mignon McLaughlin |
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| With each passing year, one has less to say, and knows better how to say it. |
| - Mignon McLaughlin |
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| American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's-license age than at voting age. |
| - Marshall McLuhan |
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| The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we're passing one another without a look of recognition. |
| - Henry Miller |
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| You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world. |
| - Octave Mirbeau |
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| We are living in a world today where lemonade is made from artificial flavors and furniture polish is made from real lemons. |
| - Alfred E. Newman |
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| Beggars should be abolished. It annoys one to give to them, and it annoys one not to give to them. |
| - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche |
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| If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on the human face - forever. |
| - George Orwell |
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| The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun. |
| - George Orwell |
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| The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies. |
| - Cesare Pavese |
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| I never expected to see the day when girls would get sunburned in the places they do now. |
| - Will Rogers |
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| The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life. |
| - Theodore Roosevelt |
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| People haven't time to learn anything. They buy things ready-made in stores. But since there are no stores where you can buy friends, people no longer have friends. |
| - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry |
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| In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning. |
| - Carl Sandburg |
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| Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness. |
| - George Bernard Shaw |
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| An open society is a society which allows its members the greatest possible degree of freedom in pursuing their interests compatible with the interests of others, Soros said. The Bush administration merely has a narrower definition of self-interest. It does not include the interests of others. |
| - George Soros |
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| Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. |
| - Gertrude Stein |
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| How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young? |
| - Paul Sweeney |
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| Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility. |
| - Thomas Szasz |
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| Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic. |
| - Thomas Szasz |
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| What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? |
| - Henry David Thoreau |
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| One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition. |
| - Alvin Toffler |
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| The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat. |
| - Lily Tomlin |
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| The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenceless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenceless against ourselves. |
| - Arnold Toynbee |
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| The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be. |
| - Paul Valéry |
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| Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them. |
| - Bill Vaughan |
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| Man is the animal that intends to shoot himself out into interplanetary space, after having given up on the problem of an efficient way to get himself five miles to work and back each day. |
| - Bill Vaughan |
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| I always turn to the sports section first. The sports section records people's accomplishments; the front page nothing but man's failures. |
| - Earl Warren |
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| The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it. |
| - Daniel Webster |
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| I believe... that security declines as security machinery expands. |
| - E.B. White |
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| Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions. |
| - Norbert Wiener |
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| Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all. |
| - Norbert Wiener |
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| You can say this for ready-mixes - the next generation isn't going to have any trouble making pies exactly like mother used to make. |
| - Earl Wilson |
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| I think God's going to come down and pull civilization over for speeding. |
| - Steven Wright |
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| The first gold star a child gets in school for the mere performance of a needful task is its first lesson in graft. |
| - Philip Wylie |
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