This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable." - William J. Brennan, Jr.
"In any society, the artist has a responsibility. Their effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of nonconformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is very important." - Luis Buñuel, fully Luis Buñuel Portolés
"Most people accept life scripts from the environment (family, society) into which they have grown. However, there is always the opportunity to write a new script." - Tom Butler-Bowdon
"I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man’s spiritual growth." - Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
"Whoever hesitates while waiting for ideas to triumph among the masses before initiating revolutionary action will never be a revolutionary. Humanity will, of course, change. Human society will, of course, continue to develop – in spite of men and the errors of men. But that is not a revolutionary attitude." - Fidel Castro, fully Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz
"Man in the present state of society appears to me to be ore corrupted by his reason than his passions." - Nicolas Chamfort,fully Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort, also spelled Nicholas
"The basis of society, of any society, is a certain pride in obedience. When this pride no longer exists, the society collapses." - Emil M. Cioran
"We were never promised a life free from fear and struggle. We were offered the hope that by committing ourselves to the struggle for a righteous society in solidarity with the wretched of the earth we would discover the secret of life." - Sheila Collins
"The great fault of modern democracy - a fault that is common to the capitalist and the socialist - is that it accepts economic wealth as the end of society and the standard of personal happiness." - Christopher Henry Dawson
"The apportioning of blame [is] the means by which society obtains a modicum of revenge for the wrong it has suffered, expiates its own guilt for such responsibility as it may have had for the event in question, and finally seeks to prevent a repetition of the disaster." - Norman F. Dixon
"Is there a spiritual reality, inconceivable to us today, which corresponds in history to the physical reality which Einstein discovered and which led to the atomic bomb? Einstein discovered a law of physical change: the way to convert a single particle of matter into enormous physical energy. Might there not also be, as Gandhi suggested, an equally incredible and [as yet] undiscovered law of spiritual change, whereby a single person or small community of persons could be converted into an enormous spiritual energy capable of transforming a society and a world?" - James W. Douglass
"The cult of the hero is the absolutely necessary complement of the massification of society… The individual who is prevented by circumstances from becoming a real person, who can no longer express himself through personal thought or action, who finds his aspirations frustrated, projects onto the hero all he would wish to be. He lives vicariously and experiences the athletic or amorous or military exploits of the god with whom he lives in spiritual symbiosis." - Jacques Ellul
"The real religious problem of our society is to secure the general acceptance of a religion adapted to the requirements of continuous progress towards an ideal, consisting of all humanity." - Charles A. Ellwood
"[A] society that pulls the needs of its children dead is a society “progressing” rapidly toward moral ruin." - Jean Bethke Elshtain
"Each society and each age must find the institutionalized form of reverence which derives vitality from its world image." - Erik Erickson
"We need to recognize that both the society and the individual are essential to a morality which we can use in the next century. If we could enter the next century with a wider recognition of the balance - and get away form either collectivistic excesses or the celebration of radical individualism - I think we’d be better for it." - Amitai Etzioni, born Welker Falk
"I believe that our choice between two models of psychiatry is really a choice between two competing sets of moral values that will ultimately determine the kind of society we live in. One is the Psychotherapeutic Model’s ideal of healing the soul with its values of self-awareness, autonomy, personal growth, an I-Thou spirit of love, respect, and compassion for others, and an acceptance of moral responsibility for our own egoistic impulses and emotions. The other is the Medical Model’s ideal of quick fix, with its swimming-pool values of stability and conformity, and an I-It orientation toward material success and other superficial addictive pleasures" - Elio Frattaroli
"Once a doctrine, however irrational, has gained power in a society, millions of people will believe in it rather than feel ostracized and isolated." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"If we always live our lives with a view to the worst possible outcome of anything, then we will become a much diminished society. Every human endeavor has risk attached." - Frank Furedi
"It is earnestly desired that each man should be wise enough to govern himself without the intervention of any compulsory restraint; and, since government, even in its best state, is an evil, the object principally to be aimed at is that we should have as little of it as the general peace of human society permit." - William Godwin
"Our society has progressed largely because of our creativity and inquisitiveness – and because we’re competitive. We’re driven by the desire to develop products and services which are more ingenious than what others have put forth. Competition is inherently good, but when it is tainted with excess greed or negative motives, there can be harmful results. How we compete is very important to our Souls." - Tom Gregory
"Too much to live with, too little to live for… In our own day this question of life purpose is more urgent than ever. Three factors have converged to fuel a search for significance without precedent in human history. First, the search for the purpose of life is one of the deepest issues of our experiences as human beings. Second, the expectation that we can all live purposeful lives has been given a gigantic boost by modern society’s offer of the maximum opportunity for choice and change in all we do. Third, our fulfillment is thwarted by this stunning fact: Out of more than a score of great civilizations in human history, modern Western civilization is the very first to have a no agreed-on answer to the question of the purpose of life… Most of us in the midst of material plenty, have spiritual poverty." - Os Guiness
"Scientism and anthropocentric humanism are the attractive blooms that adorn a nearly rootless society." - Georgia Harkness
"Business has become, in this last half century, the most powerful institution on the planet. The dominant institution in any society needs to take responsibility for the whole." - Willis Harman
"Not the extremists but the great, white midstream America - i.e. Christian America - produces and preserves the racial chasm in American society." - Kyle Haselden
"The evolution of consciousness requires a wide range of opportunities and a playing field that affords almost unlimited options for development. If human life represents a learning process, then society is the ideal school that affords an extremely wide range of options for numerous levels of consciousness to develop, progress, define, identify, and grasp endless subtleties as well as learn more gross lessons. The ego is extremely tenacious and therefore often seems to require extreme conditions before it lets go of a positionality. It often takes the collective experience of millions of people over many centuries to learn even what appears upon examination to be a simple and obvious truth, namely, that peace is better than war or love is better than hate." - David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
"If no charismatic emerges, people may be truly bereft and lost in a sea of forces and pressures beyond their adaptive capacity. The society may die. If someone does emerge, the people may understandably attribute his rise to “divine grace.” Indeed, if he exercises leadership, he may well save his community and help it to renew itself. First, he binds people together by powerfully articulating their values, hopes, and pains. Second, he weaves their hopes into some image of the future. And third, he provides energy, strategy, and faith that the vision can be realized." - Ronald A. Heifetz
"The “societal purpose” of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state. The media serve this purpose in many ways: through selection of topics, distribution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and tone, and by keeping debate within the bounds of acceptable premises." - Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
"Society is like a lawn where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiling verdure of a velvet surface. He, however, who would study nature in its wilderness and variety, must plunge into the forest, must explore the glen, must stem the torrent, and dare the precipice." - Washington Irving
"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education." - Thomas Jefferson
"Reading, reflection and time have convinced me that the interests of society require the observation of those moral precepts only in which all religions agree (for all forbid us to murder, steal, plunder, or bear false witness) and that we should not intermeddle with the particular dogmas in which all religions differ, which are totally unconnected with morality." - Thomas Jefferson
"Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment… I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." - Thomas Jefferson
"Democracy is not a mere consequence, a certain stage in the development of society. It is the condition on which the survival of productive forces depends." - Wei Jingsheng or Jing-sheng
"To receive and to communicate assistance, constitutes the happiness of human life: man may indeed preserve his existence in solitude, but can enjoy it only in society." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"It is our first duty to serve society, and, after we have done that, we may attend wholly to the salvation of our own souls. A youthful passion for abstracted devotion should not be encouraged." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else… Nothing has a more diverse and alienating effect upon society than this moral complacency and lack of responsibility, and nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement more than the mutual withdrawal of projections." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
"Empathy is not merely the basic principle of artistic creation. It is also the only path by which one can reach the truth about life and society." - Kafū Nagai, pen name for Nagai Sōkichi
"The moment you have protected an individual, you have protected society." - Kenneth Kaunda, fully Kenneth David Kaunda
"Alienation is a form of living death. It is the acid of despair that dissolves society." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the light and give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has remind us (Moral Men - Immoral Society), groups tend to be more immoral than individuals." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Worldliness is not, in the last analysis, love of possessions, or the habit of courting great personages. It is simply the weakness of fibre which makes us take our standards from the society round us." - Ronald Knox, fully Ronald Arbuthnott Knox
"Anarchism (from the Greek… contrary to authority), the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government – Harmony in such a society not being obtained by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted form the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being." - Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
"Like all evolution in nature, the slow evolution of society is followed from time to time by periods of accelerated evolution which are called revolutions." - Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
"It is not enough for the whole oikoumene, both Rome and the World Council of Churches, to address fine speeches to the `outer world,’ to society at large, and `inside’ between the Churches, merely to set up everlasting mixed commissions, arrange polite mutual visits, indulge in endless academic dialogue without practical consequences. There must be genuine, increasing integration of the different Churches." -
"After being subjected to a degradation ceremonial known as psychiatric examination, [the patient] is bereft of his civil liberties in being imprisoned in a total institution known as a “mental” hospital. More completely, more radically than anywhere else in our society, he is invalidated as a human being." -
"The evil of the Holocaust was realized through the exercise of a certain kind of power – coercive power. It was a power that sought to dominate and control. It was a power legitimated through law, buttressed by propaganda, augmented by terror, and affected through all the institutions of society." - Mary Jo Leddy
"It is taken for granted in adult society that we cannot all be generalists skilled in every area of learning and mastery. Nevertheless, we apply tremendous pressure on our children to be good at everything. Every day they are expected to shine in math, reading, writing, speaking, spelling, memorization, comprehension, problem solving, socialization, athletics, and following verbal directions. Few if any children can master all of these “trades.” And none of us adults can. In one way or another, all minds have their specialties and their families." - Mel Levine, formally Melvin D Levine
"Schools cannot be ethical bystanders at a time when our society is in deep moral trouble. Rather, schools must do what they can to contribute to the character of the young and the moral health of the nation." - Thomas Lickona, fully Thomas Edward Lickona