Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.
~ Edward Abbey

The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.
~ Lord Acton

American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
~ Henry Brooks Adams

The happiness of society is the end of government.
~ John Adams

Society lives by faith, and develops by science.
~ Henri Frederic Amiel

Nor was civil society founded merely to preserve the lives of its members; but that they might live well: for otherwise a state might be composed of slaves, or the animal creation... nor is it an alliance mutually to defend each other from injuries, or for a commercial intercourse. But whosoever endeavors to establish wholesome laws in a state, attends to the virtues and vices of each individual who composes it; from whence it is evident, that the first care of him who would found a city, truly deserving that name, and not nominally so, must be to have his citizens virtuous.
~ Aristotle

Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.
~ James Baldwin

Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.
~ Simone De Beauvoir

I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.
~ Emily Bronte

Society is indeed a contract. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
~ Edmund Burke

Society is now one polished horde, formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.
~ Lord Byron

We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named ''fair competition'' and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.
~ Thomas Carlyle

Society is composed of two great classes, those that have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.
~ Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort

Society is divided into two classes, the shearers and the shorn.
~ Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort

We can imagine a society in which no one could survive as a social being because it does not correspond to biologically determined perceptions and human social needs. For historical reasons, existing societies might have such properties, leading to various forms of pathology.
~ Noam Chomsky

The circumstances of human society are too complicated to be submitted to the rigor of mathematical calculation.
~ Marquis De Custine

You can tell all you need to about a society from how it treats animals and beaches.
~ Frank DeFord

Man's characteristic privilege is that the bond he accepts is not physical but moral; that is, social. He is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience superior to his own, the superiority of which he feels. Because the greater, better part of his existence transcends the body, he escapes the body's yoke, but is subject to that of society.
~ Emile Durkheim

Society always consists in the greatest part, of young and foolish persons.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson