Society quotes
565 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside society — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"You must believe that you can help bring about a better world. A good society is produced only by good individuals, just as truly as a majority in a presidential election is produced by the votes of single electors."
"Half of your power lies in your sameness with others. The other half lies in your uniqueness."
"A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions."
"In that, we agreed with Andrew Carnegie, who said that huge fortunes that flow in large part from society should in large part be returned to society. In my case, the ability to allocate capital would have had little utility unless I lived in a rich, populous country in which enormous quantities of marketable securities were traded and were sometimes ridiculously mispriced. And fortunately for me, that describes the U.S. in the second half of the last century."
"Time and time again I have been persuaded that a huge potential of goodwill is slumbering within our society. It's just that it's incoherent, suppressed, confused, crippled and perplexed."
"Society does not love its unmaskers."
"If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false statement I could never stay there five minutes. But why come out? The streetis as false as the church, and when I get to my house, or to my manners, or to my speech, I have not got away from the lie."
"The evolution of a highly destined society must be moral; it must run in the grooves of the celestial wheels."
"When a man meets his make, society begins."
"Besides the general infusion of wit to heighten civility, the direct splendor of intellectual power is ever welcome in fine society, as the costliest addition to its rule and its credit."
"A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and, however he may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be saidto have arrived at self-possession."
"Society is frivolous, and shreds its day into scraps, its conversation into ceremonies and escapes."
"Society cannot do without cultivated men. As soon as the first wants are satisfied, the higher wants become imperative."
"It is the fine souls who serve us, and not what is called fine society. Fine society is only a self-protection against the vulgarities of the street and the tavern."
"In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense."
"In civilized society we all depend upon each other, and our happiness is very much owing to the good opinion of mankind."
"There is a point, and it is reached more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of the arts and literature becomes an attack on the life of society."
"The very existence of society depends on the fact that every member of it tacitly admits he is not the exclusive possessor of himself, and that he admits the claim of the polity of which he forms a part, to act, to some extent, as his master."
"Without society, and a society to our taste, men are never contented."
"Agreeable society is the first essential in constituting the happiness and of course the value of our existence."
