Society Quotes, Quotations, and Sayings

371 Society Quotes
“All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.”
Edward Gibbon Quotes
“Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut.”
Daniel Greenberg Quotes
“The best way to turn a woman's head is to tell her she has a beautiful profile.”
Sacha Guitry Quotes
“The best way I know to win an argument is to start by being in the right.”
Lord Hailshan Quotes
“Man is a luxury loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rational or too serious to be tempted by baubles.”
Eric Hoffer Quotes
“The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product.”
Eric Hoffer Quotes
“The smashing of idols is in itself such a preoccupation that it is almost impossible for the iconoclast to look clearly into a future when there will not be many idols left to smash.”
Walter Lippmann Quotes
“The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence.”
Eric Hoffer Quotes
“What the intellectual craves above all else is to be taken seriously, to be treated as a decisive force in shaping history. He is far more at home in a society that weighs his every word and keeps close watch on his attitudes then in a society that cares not what he says or does. He would rather be persecuted than ignored.”
Eric Hoffer Quotes
“We know that words cannot move mountains, but they can move the multitude; and men are more ready to fight and die for a word than for anything else. Words shape thought, stir feeling, and beget action; they kill and revive, corrupt and cure. The "men-of-words"- priests, prophets, intellectuals- have played a more decisive role in history than military leaders, statesmen, and businessmen.”
Eric Hoffer Quotes
“The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth century ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.”
Eric Hoffer Quotes
“One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.”
Eric Hoffer Quotes
“Where intellectuals have played a role in history, it has not been so much by whispering words of advice into the ears of political overlords as by contributing to the vast and powerful currents of conceptions and misconceptions that sweep human action along.”
Thomas Sowell Quotes
“Much of what sophisticates loftily refer to as the "complexity" of the real world is in fact the inconsistency in their own minds.”
Thomas Sowell Quotes
“The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.”
Eric Hoffer Quotes
“All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance.”
Eric Hoffer Quotes
“However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.”
Eric Hoffer Quotes
“There is a fundamental difference between the appeal of a mass movement and the appeal of a practical organization. The practical organization offers opportunities for self-advancement, and its appeal is mainly to self-interest. On the other hand, a mass movement, particularly in its active, revivalist phase, appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.”
Eric Hoffer Quotes
“A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaningless of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring upon them an absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves- and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.”
Eric Hoffer Quotes
“The vigor of a mass movement stems from the propensity of its followers for united action and self-sacrifice. When we ascribe the success of a movement to its faith, doctrine, propaganda, leadership, ruthlessness and so on, we are but referring to instruments of unification and to means used to inculcate a readiness for self-sacrifice. It is perhaps impossible to understand the nature of a mass movement unless it is recognized that their chief preoccupation is to foster, perfect and perpetuate a facility for united action and self-sacrifice.”
Eric Hoffer Quotes
“The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led.”
Eric Hoffer Quotes
“We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.”
Eric Hoffer Quotes
“There is apparently no surer way of turning a thing into its opposite than by exaggerating it.”
Eric Hoffer Quotes
“In human affairs, the best stimulus for running ahead is to have something we must run from.”
Eric Hoffer Quotes
“A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.This minding of other people's business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor's shoulder or fly at his throat.”
Eric Hoffer Quotes
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