“The despotism of custom is everywhere standing up to human advancement.”
More from John Stuart Mill on Society
“The worth of a state in the long run is the worth of the individuals composing it.”
“The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.”
“Command and obedience are but unfortunate necessities of human life: society in equality is its normal state.”
Others on Society
Martin Luther King
3 quotes“A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment...”
Barbara Tuchman
3 quotes“No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society.”
Lily Tomlin
3 quotes“The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.”
D.H. Lawrence
3 quotes“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
George Orwell
2 quotes“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossi...”
Karl Marx
2 quotes“Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these indivi...”
Adam Smith
2 quotes“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”
Lord Byron
2 quotes“Society is now one polished horde Formed of two mighty tribes the Bores and Bored.”
Margaret Mitchell
2 quotes“There’s just as much money to be made in the wreck of a civilization as in the upbuilding of one.”
Anne Rice
1 quote“I saw my real gods . . the gods of most men. Food, drink, and security in conformity.”
George Eliot
1 quote“Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.”
William Butler
1 quote“Style personality - deliberately adopted and therefore a mask - is the only escape from the hot-faced bargainers and mo...”