This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"In the state of nature... all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by protection of the laws." - Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu
"Nothing more assimilates a man to a bast than living among freedmen, himself a slave. Such people as these are natural enemies of society; and their number must be dangerous." - Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu
"The United States in the 1980s may be the first society in history in which children are distinctly worse off than adults." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan, aka "Pat"
"Every society has a tendency to reduce its opponents to caricatures." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"You are to consider that learning is of great use to society; and though it may not add to the stock, it is a necessary vehicle to transmit to others. Learned men are the cisterns of knowledge, not the fountainhead." - James Northcote
"The open society, the unrestricted access to knowledge, the unplanned and uninhibited association of men for its furtherance - these are what may make a vast, complex, ever growing, ever changing, even more specialized and expert technological world, nevertheless a world of human community." - Robert Oppenheimer, fully Julius Robert Oppenheimer
"This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality." - Robert Oppenheimer, fully Julius Robert Oppenheimer
"Dissimulation is the only thing that makes society possible; without its amenities the world would be a bear-garden." - Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, preferred to be called Marie Louise de la Ramée NULL
"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
"Our responsibility as educators is to teach youth to have respect for those who differ from the customary ways as well as for those who conform. In simpler words, we have a profound obligation both to education and to society itself to support and strengthen the right to be different, and to create a sound respect for intellectual superiority." - Robert C. Pooley, fully Robert Cecil Pooley
"Justice is that which is most primitive in the human soul, most fundamental in society, most sacred among ideas, and what the masses demand today with most ardor. It is the essence of religions and at the same time the form of reason, the secret object of faith, and the beginning, middle and end of knowledge. What can be imagined more universal, more strong, more complete than justice?" - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
"Be very circumspect in the choice of thy company. In the society of thine equals thou shalt enjoy more pleasure; in the society of thy superiors thou shalt find more profit. To grow worse; the best means to grow better is to be the worst there." - Francis Quarles
"The great achievements have always been individualistic. Indeed, any original achievement implies separation from the majority. Though society may honor achievement, it can never produce it." - George Charles Roche III
"Every society to which you remain bound robs you of a part of your essence, and replaces it with a speck of the gigantic personality which is its own." - José Enrique Rodó, fully José Enrique Rodó Piñeyro
"Every political society is composed of other smaller societies of different kinds, each of which has its interests and its rules of conduct: but those societies which everybody perceives, because they have an external and authorized form, are not the only ones that actually exist in the State... Unhappily personal interest is always found in inverse ratio to duty, and increases in proportion as the association grows narrower, and the engagement less sacred; which irrefragably proves that the most general will always the most just also, and that the voice of the people is in fact the voice of God." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"Man has other enemies more formidable, against which he is not provided with such means of defense: these are the natural infirmities of infancy, old age, and illness of every kind, melancholy proofs of our weakness, of which the two first are common to all animals, and the last belongs chiefly to man in a; state of society." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: "Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one! " - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"The want of occupation is no less the plague of society than of solitude." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"Court the society of a superior, and make much of the opportunity; for in the company of an equal thy good fortune must decline." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL
"Society is the master, and man is the servant." - George Augustus Sala, fully George Augustus Henry Sala
"Privacy is absolutely essential to maintaining a free society. The idea that is at the foundation of the notion of privacy is that the citizen is not the tool or the instrument of government - but the reverse... If you have no privacy, it will tend to follow that you have no political freedom, no religious freedom, no freedom of families to make their own decisions [regarding having children]. All these freedoms tend to reinforce on another." - Benno C. Schmidt, Jr.
"No doubt solitude is wholesome, but so is abstinence after a surfeit. The true life of man is in society." - William Gilmore Simms
"Living a good deal alone will, I believe, correct me of my faults; for a man can do without his own approbation in much society, but he must make great exertions to gain it when he lives alone. Without it I am convinced solitude is not to be endured." - Sydney Smith
"Wit gives to life one of its best flavors; common-sense leads to immediate action, and gives society its daily motion; large and comprehensive views, its annual rotation; ridicule chastises folly and imprudence, and keeps men in their proper sphere; subtlety seizes hold of the find threads of truth; analogy darts away in the most sublime discoveries; feeling paints all the exquisite passions of man’s soul, and rewards him by a thousand inward visitations for the sorrows that come from without." - Sydney Smith
"I believe democracy to be of all forms of government the most natural and the most consonant with individual liberty. In it no one transfers his natural right so absolutely that he has no further voice in affairs, he only hands it over to the majority of a society, whereof he is a unit. Thus all men remain, as they were in the state of nature, equals." -
"This is the end I aim at: to acquire knowledge of the union of mind with the whole of nature... To do this it is necessary first to understand as much of nature as suffices for acquiring such knowledge, and second to form a society of the kind which permits as many as possible to acquire such knowledge. Third, attention must be paid to moral philosophy... Fourthly, because health is no small means to achieving this end, the whole of medicine must be worked out. And fifthly... because it is possible to gain more free time and convenience in life, mechanics is in no way to be despised." -
"“It is not safe to be alone,” nor can all which the cold-hearted, pedant stuns our ears with upon the subject ever give one answer of satisfaction to the mind; in the midst of the loudest vauntings of philosophy, nature will have her yearnings for society and friendship. A good heart wants something to be kind to; and the best parts of our blood, and the purest of our spirits suffer most under the destitution." - Lawrence Sterne, alternatively Laurence Sterne
"It is the little things in life that are the sublime things. It is the minor parts of the great drama which make up the whole. The handclasp, the smile, the words of confidence or encouragement; these are the strength and bulwark of society, business, religion - and home life. Without them, there would be no trust; without trust, our world would collapse." - John Randolph Stidman
"There is no excuse for poverty in a society which can spend $80 billion a year on its war machine." - I. F. Stone, fully Isidor Feinstein Stone, born Isidor Feinstein
"Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society." - William Makepeace Thackeray
"Amid the ruins which surround me I shall dare to say that revolutions are not what I most fear for coming generations?... It is believed by some that modern society will be always changing its aspect; for myself, I fear that it will ultimately be too invariably fixed in the same institutions, the same prejudices, the same manners, so that mankind will be stopped and circumscribed; that the mind will swing backwards and forwards forever without begetting fresh ideas; that man will waste his strength in bootless and solitary trifling, and, though in continual motion, that humanity will cease to advance." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
"The diploma gives society a phantom guarantee and its holders phantom rights. The holder of a diploma passes officially for possessing knowledge... comes to believe tht society owes him something. Never has a convention been created which is more unfortunate, for every one - the state, the individual (and, in particular, culture)." - Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry
"In short, human society is a product of evolution. It is created by natural selection and environmental pressures which bring individuals together in a special and powerful way, but it requires no physical change or mutation. It is a composition of ideas and beliefs - a new and essentially psychic phenomenon. A kind of supermind." - Lyall Watson
"The home... is the lens through which we get our first look at marriage and all civic duties; it is the clinic where, by conversation and attitude, impressions are created with respect to sobriety and reverence; it is the school where lessons of truth or falsehood, honesty or deceit are learned; it is the mold which ultimately determines the structure of society." - Perry F. Webb, fully Perry Flynt Webb or Perry Flint Webb
"Human society is based on want. Life is based on want. Wild-eyed visionaries may dream of a world without need. Cloud-cuckoo-land. It can't be done." - H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells
"He owes it to himself, to his friends, to society and to the community in general to live up to his best spiritual possibilities." - Lillian Whiting
"Men and women are biological facts. Ladies and gentleman - citizens - are social artifacts, works of political art. They carry the culture that is sustained by wise laws, and traditions of civility. A the end of the day we are right to judge a society by the character of the people it produces. That is why statecraft is, inevitably, soulcraft." - George Frederick Will
"One ought to love society, if he wishes to enjoy solitude. It is a social nature that solitude works upon with the most various power. If one is misanthropic, and betakes himself to loneliness that he may get away from hateful things, solitude is a silent emptiness to him." - Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann
"In the past, traditional art was based on making manifest what is enduring in man, like love, jealously, hatred, envy and greed… Today art has to look again at these unchanging qualities, because society is no longer unchanging. It is up to art today to show us what has become of these unchanging qualities in the world which is moving and changing." - Tawfiq al-Hakim or Tawfik el-Hakim
"They are quite different from us, and yet they are human beings! They have their customs and we have ours. Each side thinks his are the only right ones… These customs are not so important after all. It seems that the rules of life a society sets up for itself cannot be the last criterion of “good” and “bad,” “beneficial” and “harmful.”" - Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, known also as Fares Chidiac, Faris Al Chidiac
"To “lose self” in a Society of some kind is the only means of saving self." - Robert Hugh Benson