Quotes about Society
There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.
What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.
Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.
Many of the greatest things man has achieved are not the result of consciously directed thought, and still less the product of a deliberately co-ordinated effort of many individuals, but of a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand.
No human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society.
The more the state "plans" the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.
The more civilized we become, the more relatively ignorant must each individual be of the facts on which the working of his civilization depends.
To understand our civilisation, one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection - the comparative increase of population and wealth - of those groups that happened to follow them.
It is safe to wager that every public idea and every accepted convention is sheer foolishness, because it has suited the majority.
Mathematics knows no races or geographic boundaries; for mathematics, the cultural world is one country.
No nation, no religion, no economic system, no body of knowledge, is likely to have all the answers for our survival. There must be many social systems that would work far better than any now in existence. In the scientific tradition, our task is to find them.
Give to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself - that is my doctrine.