Society

Isaac Asimov (in Foundation, 1951) - Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.

Isaac Asimov (in Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Questions, 1988) - The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Olivier Babeau - C’est une grande consolation, pour les médiocres, d’imaginer que les autres réussissent forcément pour d’autres raisons que leur travail et leur talent.

Tristan Bernard (gravé sur son buste à Paris 17ème) - Ne compter que sur soi-même et encore pas beaucoup.

Yogi Berra - Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.

Isaiah Berlin - It is very difficult to get people to tolerate each other unless they have tried intolerance and failed.

Chip Berlet - The word “conspiracy” is from the Latin term for “breathing together,” and, as it suggests, a real conspiracy requires two or more individuals. Conspiracism, however, requires only one person with a fertile imagination.

Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing (in The Big Sort, 2008) - Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes.

Arthur Bloch (author of Murphy's Law) - Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.

Jacques Brel (in Les gens, 1953) - Les gens qui ont bonne conscience ont souvent mauvaise mémoire.

Albert Camus (Combat, 1948) - When we are among people who think they are absolutely right, we suffocate. French original: Nous étouffons parmi les gens qui croient avoir absolument raison.

George Carlin (1990) - Think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are stupider than that.

Gérald Bronner - Les produits de la peur sont d'excellents produits sur un marché dérégulé.

Claude Chabrol (in Pensées, répliques et anecdotes, 2002) - Il faut accepter d'être parfois le pigeon, parfois la statue. English: You have to accept the fact that sometimes you are the pigeon, and sometimes you are the statue.

Chinese proverb - The twisted tree lives out its life, the straight tree ends up as at the carpenter's.

Coluche - Qui vole un œuf vole un bœuf; mais celui qui vole un bœuf est vachement costaud.

Pierre Desproges - La danse est l'expression verticale d'une frustration horizontale.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (in The Brothers Karamazov) - The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular.

Ethiopian proverb - When the great lord passes, the wise peasant bows low and silently farts.

Adam Ferguson - (in An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1767) - Mankind have always wandered or settled, agreed or quarrelled, in troops and companies.

Benjamin Franklin (letter to Jane Mecom, Nov. 1, 1773) - If you make yourself a sheep, the wolves will eat you.

Attribué à Charles de Gaulle à la vue de l'inscription "Mort aux cons" - Vaste programme!

Clifford Geertz (in The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973) - [Culture is] a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.

André Gide (in Voyage au Congo, 1927) - Moins le blanc est intelligent, plus le noir lui paraît bête.

Roger Gould (in Collision of wills, 2003) - The default assumption in many natural sciences is that until a potential factor has been shown to be important, it is assumed not to be. In the human sciences, the contrary holds: one must demonstrate that a factor is not relevant before disregarding it.

Michel Hastings (2002) - Les meilleurs ennemis, contrairement à une idée reçue, ne se recrutent pas dans la différence, mais dans la ressemblance et la proximité.

Joseph Heath - The world has changed to a remarkable degree: stores are open at all hours, the internet never sleeps, entertainment is available at any time, in any form. Each one of these changes has resulted in an expansion of choice and, in some respects, personal freedom. Yet it has also created an environment that is more taxing, by transferring the burden of self-control from society to the individual.

Robert Kim Henderson - Challenging the elite is often an audition to become a member of the elite.

Robert Kim Henderson - Men bond by insulting each other and not really meaning it; women bond by complimenting each other and not really meaning it.

Alfred Hitchcock - Revenge is sweet and not fattening.

Eric Hoffer - When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

Ryan Holiday (in Perennial seller, 2017) - Luck is polarizing. The successful like to pretend it does not exist. The unsuccessful or the jaded pretend that it is everything. Both explanations are wrong.

Frank McKinney Hubbard - Honesty pays, but it doesn't seem to pay enough to suit some people.

Siri Hustvedt -  What the satirist requires (...) is moral urgency, a faith that he truly knows what is good and what is bad and that the fools and nitwits and dunderheads skewered in his paragraphs are getting their just deserts.

Aldous Huxley (in Crome Yellow, 1921) - Eccentricity...It's the justification of all aristocracies. It justifies leisured classes and inherited wealth and privilege and endowments and all the other injustices of that sort.

William Ralph Inge (1929) - What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

Jewish Yemenite proverb - Give someone nuts and he will throw the shells at you.

Lyndon B. Johnson - If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

Daniel Kahneman (in Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011) - Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty.

Walt Kelly (Cartoonist) - We have met the enemy and he is us.

Donald Kingsbury - Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems.

Mark Knopfler (The Bug, 1991) - Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.

Mitchell Landers & Daniel Sznycer - Compared with non-human animals, status in humans depends less heavily on fighting ability or readiness to submit to the powerful and more heavily on the individual's ability and willingness to confer benefits and to abide by the coordinated values of fellow group members. 

Fran Lebowitz (in Social Studies, 1981) - The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.

Fran Lebowitz - I believe in talking behind peoples' backs. That way, they hear it more than once.

Philippe Lemoine (2021) - My theory of society is that conformism explains 80% of things, stupidity another 15% and the rest is just the various factors that people think explain everything.

David Lykken (in The Antisocial Personalities, 1995) - We could avoid two thirds of all crime simply by putting all able-bodied young men in cryogenic sleep from the age of 12 through 28.

Groucho Marx - The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.

Groucho Marx - These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others.

Charles Mackay - Men go mad in herds but only come to their senses one by one.

Saint Matthew (VII, 6) - Nolite mittere margaritas ante porcos. English: Do not cast pearls before swine.

Somerset Maugham (in A Writer's Notebook, 1946) - If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie. 

Philippe Meyer - On peut changer de trottoir sans changer de métier.

Ian Morris - Large groups of humans, as opposed to individual humans, are all much the same. If you pluck two random people from a crowd, they may be as different as can be imagined, but if you round up two complete crowds they will tend to mirror each other rather closely.

Gary Saul Morson (2019) - People sometimes ask the reason for slavery, but since slavery was practiced everywhere for most of human history, the right question is the opposite one: why was slavery eventually abolished in many places?

John Fletcher Moulton, Baron Moulton - Human action can be divided into three domains. At one end is the law at the other is free choice and between them is the realm of manners.

Friedrich Nietzsche (in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1885) - Whatever one brings into solitude grows in it, even the inner beast. On this score, solitude is ill-advised for many. German original: In der Einsamkeit wächst, was Einer in sie bringt, auch das innere Vieh. Solchergestalt widerräth sich Vielen die Einsamkeit. 

Blaise Pascal - On vit seul comme on meurt seul, les autres n'y font rien.

David Pinsof - Morality emerged not as a force for good, but as a tool for social competition and domination.

Jules Renard (in Journal, 16 mai 1894) - Il ne suffit pas d'être heureux, il faut encore que les autres ne le soient pas.

Jean Renoir (in La règle du jeu, 1939) - Tu comprends, sur cette Terre, il y a quelque chose d’effroyable, c’est que tout le monde a ses raisons.

Attribué à Michel Rocard - Toujours préférer l'hypothèse de la connerie à celle du complot. La connerie est courante. Le complot exige un esprit rare.

Paul A. Samuelson - Women are just men with less money.

Friedrich Schiller (in Die Jungfrau von Orleans, 1801) - Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens. Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.

Coltan Scrivner - Laughter at something signals that you have similar perspectives on the issue raised in the joke. It's a signal of group cohesion/coalition.

George Bernard Shaw - The secret of success is to offend the greatest number of people.

Georg Simmel (in Philosophie des Geldes, 1900) - Exchange is one of the purest and most primitive form of human socialization; it creates a society, in place of a mere collection of individuals.

Justin E. Smith - The desire to impose rationality, to make people or society more rational, mutates, as a rule, into spectacular outbursts of irrationality.

Steve Stewart-Williams - Treating men and women the same makes them different, and treating them differently makes them the same. (The gender-equality paradox)

Rory Sutherland  - Irrational people are much more powerful than rational people, because their threats are so much more convincing.

Edward Teach - Bullying succeeds because the bully doesn't care about society's rules while the victim is castrated by them.

Margaret Thatcher (interviewed in Women's Own, October 31st, 1987) - I think we've been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with it. 'I have a problem, I'll get a grant.' 'I'm homeless, the government must house me.' They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.

William and Dorothy Thomas (1928 - "Thomas theorem") - If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

Traditional - Fake it till you make it.

Traditionnel - A force de vouloir rentrer dans le moule, on finit par ressembler à une tarte.

Vauvenargues - L'art de plaire est l'art de tromper.

Guardian reader "Vernington" - The working classes have only their labour to sell. The middle classes have their skills to sell. And the upper classes have only their ancestral homes to sell.

Voltaire (in Mémoires pour servir à la vie de M. de Voltaire, 1770) - Comme je ne pouvais assurément, ni rendre les hommes raisonnables, ni le parlement moins pédant, ni les théologiens moins ridicules, je continuai à être heureux loin d'eux.

Edward Osborne Wilson (2009) What we have in human nature is our inheritance from a prehistoric past going back millions of years. We do have strong predispositions—you can call them instincts—that become dangerous in modern society. So, what we should do is conduct the best research we can, in biology and the social sciences, and find out what it is to be human. And then recognize that these are particular flaws in our nature in a modern techno-scientific world, and work with that knowledge to pull us on through. 

Patrick Winston (Artificial Intelligence - MIT) - The success of your careers will be determined by how well you speak, by how well you write, and by the quality of your ideas, in that order.

Yiddish saying - A lie you must not tell; the truth you don't have to tell (A ligen tor men nit zogen; dem emess iz men nit m'chuyev zogen).  

Yiddish saying - Before you utter a word you are the master; afterwards you're a fool (Aider me zogt arois s'vort, iz men a har; dernoch iz men a nar).

Yiddish saying - If you want people to think you are wise, agree with them.

Yiddish saying - If you talk a lot, you talk of yourself (Az me redt a sach, redt men fun zikh).

Yiddish saying - What use is wisdom when folly reigns?