Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

Society is like a large piece of frozen water; and skating well is the great art of social life.

The Don Quixote of one generation may live to hear himself called the savior of society by the next.

A system in which the two great commandments were, to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour's wife.

Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.

If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.

Very often the quiet fellow has said all he knows.

Society is like air; very high up, it is sublimated--too low down, a perfect choke-damp.

Human civilization is not something achieved against nature; it is rather the outcome of the working of the innate qualities of man.

The more backwoodish a social group, juvenile or adult, the stricter its conception of the normal, and the readier it will ridicule any departure from it.

The philosophy called individualism is a philosophy of social cooperation and the progressive intensification of the social nexus.

Society is joint action and cooperation in which each participant sees the other partner's success as a means for the attainment of his own.

The collective matrix of a science at a given time is determined by a kind of establishment, which includes universities, learned societies, and, more recently, the editorial offices of technical journals. Like other establishments, they are consciously or unconsciously bent on preserving the status quo- partly because unorthodox innovations are a threat to their authority, but also because of the deeper fear that their laboriously erected an intellectual edifice might collapse under the impact.

The individual is not a killer, but the group is, and by identifying with it the individual is transformed into a killer.

Society is only possible on these terms, that the individual finds therein a strengthening of his own ego and his own will.

When reality becomes unbearable, the mind must withdraw from it and create a world of artificial perfection. Plato's world of pure Ideas and Forms, which alone is to be considered as real, whereas the world of nature which we perceive is merely its cheap Woolworth copy, is a flight into delusion.

...the cosmology of a given age is not the result of unilinear, "scientific" development, but rather the most striking, imaginative symbol of its mentality- the projection of its conflicts, prejudice and specific ways of double-think onto the graceful sky.

...in the course of the last century science has become so dizzy with its successes, that it has forgotten to ask the pertinent questions- or refused to ask them under the pretext that they are meaningless, and in any case not the scientists concern.

...the self-assertive tendency is the dynamic expression of the holon's wholeness, the integrative tendency, the dynamic expression of its partness.

Wherever we find orderly, stable systems in Nature, we find that they are hierarchically structured, for the simple reason that without such structuring of complex systems into sub-assemblies, there could be no order and stability- except the order of a dead universe filled with a uniformly distributed gas.

...man has an irrepressible tendency to read meaning into the buzzing confusion of sights and sounds impinging on his senses; and where no agreed meaning can be found, he will provide it out of his own imagination.