The Darwinian insight can be turned upside down and grotesquely misused: Voracious robber barons may explain their cut throat practices by an appeal to Social Darwinism; Nazis and other racists may call on “survival of the fittest” to justify genocide. But Darwin did not make John D. Rockefeller or Adolf Hitler. Greed, the Industrial Revolution, […]
Society Quotes
I have repeatedly stressed that the selfish impulses of man constitute a much less historic danger than his integrative tendencies. To put it in the simplest way: the individual who indulges in an excess of aggressive self-assertiveness incurs the penalties of society-he outlaws himself, he contracts out of the hierarchy. The true believer, on the […]
Who does not in some sort live to others, does not live much to himself.
Human society is like an arch, kept from falling by the mutual pressure of its parts.
No company is preferable to bad, because we are more apt to catch the vices of others than their virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health.
The nature of a society is largely determined by the direction in which talent and ambition flow – by the tilt of the social landscapes.
Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.
The pillars of truth and the pillars of freedom – they are the pillars of society.
To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.
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.
