Great Society Quotes

This administration here and now declares unconditional war on poverty. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ's Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population. ~ Mark Steyn

Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society. ~ John Adams

There is One great society alone on earth: The noble living and the noble dead. ~ William Wordsworth

We have bred multiple generations of people who have not experienced knowing where you are the moment a news story broke, with that news story being great and grand and something that elevates society instead of diminishes it. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I'm sure mothers are important across every culture, but particularly in Korean society, the role of the mother is of great importance. ~ Bong Joon-ho

One of the great political and economic challenges of our time is figuring out the balance between wealth that benefits society and wealth that distorts. ~ Adam Davidson

Our society has changed in unforeseeable ways since Social Security was created. For example, we are living longer, healthier, and more productive lives and while this is all great news, this has also placed added pressure on America's retirement system. ~ Norm Coleman

It will be said that great societies cannot exist without government. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Society during the last hundred years has been alternately perplexed and encouraged respecting the two great questions: how shall the criminal and pauper be disposed of in order to reduce crime and reform the criminal on the one hand and, on the other, to diminish pauperism and restore the pauper to useful citizenship? ~ Dorothea Dix

A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

The Great Society went wrong for three major reasons. First, the self-organization the Johnson administration promoted turned out to be not the pooling of family and community resources into shops and businesses, but political pressure for government handouts. Second, the Great Society failed to anticipate the perverse side-effects of handing money out to people who have done nothing to earn it. Third, while the Great Society was showering money on the poor, the Supreme Court was with childlike glee smashing to bits traditional methods of maintaining law and order. ~ David Frum

After Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the belief in decent housing as a political right or social obligation was supplanted in the U.S. by the notion that suitable shelter should be an act of charity. ~ Martin Filler

The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery. ~ William Kingdon Clifford

'Big Time Rush' was a great show, and I had some great experiences. It allowed me to become more of a comedic actress, which is also a great skill to have. But there wasn't a whole lot of tragedy in there. Not quite as dark as 'Red Band Society.' So I've been very lucky to have been able to grow in that sense, just through moving to FOX. ~ Ciara Bravo

The argument that there are just wars often rests on the social system of the nation engaging in war. It is supposed that if a 'liberal' state is at war with a 'totalitarian' state, then the war is justified. The beneficent nature of a government was assumed to give rightness to the wars it wages.

...Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were liberals, which gave credence to their words exalting the two world wars, just as the liberalism of Truman made going into Korea more acceptable and the idealism of Kennedy's New Frontier and Johnson's Great Society gave an early glow of righteousness to the war in Vietnam.

What the experience of Athens suggests is that a nation may be relatively liberal at home and yet totally ruthless abroad. Indeed, it may more easily enlist its population in cruelty to others by pointing to the advantages at home. An entire nation is made into mercenaries, being paid with a bit of democracy at home for participating in the destruction of life abroad. ~ Howard Zinn

Moreover, there is an unearned increment on capital and on labor, due to the presence, around the capitalist and the laborer, of a great, industrious, and prosperous society. ~ William Graham Sumner

To those who charge that liberalism has been tried and found wanting, I answer that the failure is not in the idea, but in the course of recent history. The New Deal was ended by World War II. The New Frontier was closed by Berlin and Cuba almost before it was opened. And the Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina. ~ George McGovern

One of the great responsibilities we have as a society is to educate ourselves, along with the next generation, about which substances are worth ingesting, and for what purpose, and which are not. ~ Sam Harris

I am glad that I am not raising kids today. And I'm rather pessimistic that my grandchildren will enjoy the great society that I've enjoyed in my lifetime. I really think it's coarsened. It's coarsened in so many ways. One of the things that upsets me about modern society is the coarseness of manners. You can't go to a movie - or watch a television show for that matter - without hearing the constant use of the F-word - including, you know, ladies using it. People that I know don't talk like that! ~ Antonin Scalia

We are a global society, and one does not have to be from Germany to give a great performance of Beethoven. ~ Leonard Slatkin

If you read Herodotus, the first Greek historian 2,500 years ago, he was talking about that - about people mixing with other people. Sometimes it produces great societies. Sometimes it triggers war. But, we're not going to change that. I don't think so. We're living in nations that are state nations and countries. ~ Philippe Falardeau

Here's Kanye, the great musical genius of his generation in hip hop, but, like, society really can't even deal with him because he's always saying something that people go, 'Oh, I can't believe Kanye said that. I can't believe he did that.' ~ Ben Horowitz

It continues to startle me, the range of political ideologies that are compatible with enthusiasm for spaceflight. Tax-and-spend liberals of the Great Society stripe, obviously - but also spending-slashing Tea Partiers, hippie peaceniks, fierce libertarians, military loyalists, and apathetics of every shade. So very many of us seem to feel that a love of human spaceflight is reconcilable with our beliefs, and we can all explain why. ~ Margaret Lazarus Dean

Simple old-fashioned values that come from a sense of community are the key to a great society. I believe we all have that sense from childhood memories, when life was simple. It's those memories that should drive us to reflect on our values. ~ Lindsay Fox

Sweden is a great country. What is not so great is that we have a society that, in a way, says it's great if you don't look right, if you don't look left, if you just look straight forward. ~ Michael Nyqvist

Throughout history, clothes represented who you were; they are a great vehicle for explaining who you are. During the Ching dynasty, for example, what you wore and how it was made reflected your status in society. People could literally read your clothes like a book, just by its color and how it was embroidered. ~ Iris Apfel

The press is dying to paint me as now trying to undo the New Deal. I remind them I voted for F.D.R. 4 times. I'm trying to undo the "Great Society." It was L.B.J.'s war on poverty that led to our present mess. ~ Ronald Reagan

We had a great dramatic society in school, and that's where I first got exposure both as an actor and director. ~ Randeep Hooda

America somehow thinks that leadership relates to governance, and it certainly does. But society is much bigger than governance, and some of the truly great leadership of our society is outside the governance arena. ~ Jim Leach

On the other side of that coin, and far outweighing it, is the fact that I've been able to use genre of Fantasy/Horror and express my opinion, talk a little about society, do a little bit of satire and that's been great, man. A lot of people don't have that platform. ~ George A. Romero

'Great Expectations' has been described as 'Dickens's harshest indictment of society.' Which it is. After all, it's about money. About not having enough money; about the fever of the getting of money; about having too much money; about the taint of money. ~ Felix Dennis

'Star Trek' fans totally accepted my sexual orientation. There are a great number of LGBT people across 'Star Trek' fandom. The show always appealed to people that were different - the geeks and the nerds, and the people who felt they were not quite a part of society, sometimes because they may have been gay or lesbian. ~ George Takei

In the terms of our Great Society the Hell's Angels and their ilk are losers
dropouts, failures and malcontents. They are rejects looking for a way to get even with a world in which they are only a problem.
The Hell's Angels are not visionaries, but diehards, and if they are the forerunners or the vanguard of anything it is not the "moral revolution" in vogue on college campuses, but a fast-growing legion of young unemployables whose untapped energy will inevitably find the same kind of destructive outlet that "outlaws" like the Hell's Angels have been finding for years. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

We tend to admire the people in our society who have accumulated such wealth as to seem somehow great. But we shouldn't forget that it was the everyday working class man who made this country great. ~ Armstrong Williams

The great hope of society is in individual character. ~ William Ellery Channing

Poverty is less a matter of income than of prospects. While the incomes of the poor have steadily risen through Great Society largesse, their prospects have plummeted as families have broken into dependent fragments. ~ George Gilder

If our society continues to support basic research on how living organisms function, it is likely that my great grandchildren will be spared the agony of losing family members to most types of cancer. ~ Paul D. Boyer

The gap in education in this country, the unfairness of the schools, is one of the great unfairness in this society. ~ Gaston Caperton

All great cathedrals began their building by the placement of a single stone. The building unit of a great society is the individual. ~ L. Ron Hubbard

In this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Socialism is simply a re-assertion of that tribal ethics whose gradual weakening had made an approach to the Great Society possible. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

Between 1965 (the beginning of LBJ's "Great Society") and 1994, welfare spending has cost the taxpayers $5.4 trillion in constant 1993 dollars. The War on Poverty has cost us 70 % more than the total price tag for defeating both Germany and Japan in World War II, after adjusting for inflation. Many believe that Welfare has destroyed millions of families and cost a huge portion of our national wealth in the process. ~ Rush Limbaugh

The great changes in civilisation and society have been wrought by deeply held beliefs and passion rather than by a process of rational deduction. ~ Paul Keating

In the Great Society, work shall be an outlet for mans interests and desires. Each individual shall have full opportunity to use his capacities in employment which satisfies personally and contributes generally to the quality of the Nations life. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

The great society is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goods than with the quantity of their goods. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

In Europe the various ranks of society are, like the strata of the earth, fixed and fossilized. There can be no great change without a terrible upheaval, a social earthquake. ~ Josiah Strong

LBJ held up Detroit as a model of what the Great Society could accomplish. He was right. ~ Mark Steyn

Well of course there's been a great deal of progress over the last 40 years. We don't have laws that segregate black people within the society any longer. ~ Angela Davis

The Humane Society is so great to work with. Because everyone there is so nice and supportive, and they're all animal lovers like me. ~ Bella Thorne

The great majority of Americans do not know much about Islam but nonetheless fear it as violent, expansionist and alien to their society. The problem to overcome is not hatred, but ignorance. ~ Tariq Ramadan

It is incumbent upon each of us to improve spending and savings practices to ensure our own individual financial security and preserve the collective economic well-being of our great society. ~ Ron Lewis

It came as a surprise to find that a professional society and journal (Econometrica) were flourishing, and I entered this area of study with great enthusiasm. ~ Lawrence R. Klein

Many economists are great believers in the idea that everything in nature is competitive and that we should set up a society which is competitive to reflect that. Anyone who cannot keep up, well, too bad. ~ Frans De Waal

'Winnie The Witch' transgresses all cultural boundaries. Amusingly, there have been attempts to deconstruct the meaning of the books - that Winnie represents society and Wilbur the disabled - but I think it's just a great story. ~ Korky Paul

We're a diverse society, and I think the TV is doing a great job in showing that we're all human beings, that we can all get along, that we can all be together, and I think that's a marvelous thing. ~ Billy Graham

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed
beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to
establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which
may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the
hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other
principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every
single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress
upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and
harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably,
and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder. ~ Friedrich A. Hayek

If I had been elected president in 1948, history would be vastly different. I believe we would have stemmed the growth of Big Government, which had begun with the New Deal and culminated with the Great Society. ~ Strom Thurmond

The great principle of Western society is that competition rules here as it rules in everything else. The best man - that is to say, the strongest and cleverest - is likely to get the best woman, in the sense of the most beautiful person. ~ Lafcadio Hearn

Public schools were designed as the great equalizers of our society - the place where all children could have access to educational opportunities to make something of themselves in adulthood. ~ Janet Napolitano

So here is the Great Society. It's the time - and it's going to be soon - when nobody in this country is poor. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

But, most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

If we are to fulfill the promise of this great Nation that everybody in our society has equal access to the law, obviously having the resources to have access to the law is extremely important. ~ Alan Mollohan

The poverty one still sees in America today is more shocking to me than anything I have seen in Ethiopia or Calcutta or Manila, and has made me, as someone living in a society of great wealth and someone who's never had to worry about the next meal, think seriously about what universal responsibility really means. ~ Pico Iyer

We grow up being told about great figures in our society, and as you get older you have to question the stories you've been told and decide if these great figures are indeed as great as you've been told. ~ Jonathan Stroud

I think it's great that we have organisations like Greenpeace. In a pluralistic society, we want to have people who point out all the problems that the Earth could encounter. But we need to understand that they are not presenting a full and rounded view. ~ Bjorn Lomborg

Chesterton made a marvelously insightful comment concerning Christ's selection of Peter as the "rock": When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society, he chose for its cornerstone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward - in a word, a man. And upon this rock he has built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it. All the empires and the kingdoms have failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.252 ~ Dave Armstrong

I believe we can continue the Great Society while we fight in Vietnam. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

If liberalism discredited itself, Obama woulda never gotten elected, and the New Deal woulda gone by the wayside, and LBJ woulda never gotten the Great Society. Liberalism does not discredit itself. It has to be explained and beaten back. ~ Rush Limbaugh

I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

It's great that Time is moving in the direction of validating those who, by choice or circumstance, will never be parents. But the point is not simply that society should stop judging those of us who don't have children. It's that society actually needs us. Children need us. ~ Meghan Daum

But I think the possibility of a black and white society feeding each other's expertises, living harmoniously, will probably go along in fits and starts now but at least it has a great constitution now to back it up. ~ Janet Suzman

One of the main lessons I have learned during my five years as Secretary-General is that broad partnerships are the key to solving broad challenges. When governments, the United Nations, businesses, philanthropies and civil society work hand-in-hand, we can achieve great things. ~ Ban Ki-moon

Having soon discovered to be great, I must appear so, and therefore studiously avoided mixing in society, and wrapped myself in mystery, devoting my time to fasting and prayer. ~ Nat Turner

In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society. ~ Noam Chomsky

I think it's great now that we seem to be in an era where it's OK to be gay and I think that the society in North America has had more of a problem with it than any other society. ~ Jason Priestley

You will be a great queen when you come back, you know. And someday you'll love me the way you love your wolf. ~ Carrie Jones

Like all great theologies, Bill [O'Reilly]'s can be boiled down to one sentence: There must be a god, because I don't know how things work. ~ Stephen Colbert

In a free society, every opportunity comes with three obligations. First, you must seize it. You must mold it into a work that brings value to others. Second, you must live it. Opportunity is nurtured only by action. Third, you must defend the freedom to pursue opportunities. You must embrace these three obligations as if the future of the United States depended on it. In fact, it does. ~ Roberto Goizueta

I think all great innovations are built on rejections. ~ Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness. ~ Napoleon Hill

People can be great, but they can also be lousy. I am often lousy. But not completely lousy. You, Libby Strout, are great. ~ Jennifer Niven

In this day and age, there is a limitless plethora of readily available distractions just waiting to take your mind off what you were supposed to be doing, and instead keep you unproductive and unmotivated. With distractions so easy to come by, and society so geared towards instant gratification as opposed to "Hard graft" for results, it is little wonder that many people suffer from a condition most commonly referred to as laziness. ~ James Frankton

A multitude of laws in a country is like a great number of physicians, a sign of weakness and malady. ~ Voltaire

She's fine. She has a gun."
"She has a gun."
"On her purse."
"You two, bring gun, to a dinner date?"
"Society is dangerously wild."
"Again, disturbingly romantic in so many different level. ~ Rea Lidde

Thanks to many great K-pop singers, the groundwork has been laid for more Korean songs to be readily accessible to an overseas audience via channels like YouTube. ~ Psy

Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of "human material," the claims to which society has denied its natural material. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way. ~ Walter Benjamin

I'll save me money, thanks. Already diagnosed meself, anyway. I'm a cactus.'
'Cactus? Right. Great work, there, Doc. I'm glad you're not my bloody doctor. ~ Bill Condon

Journalism justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarist. ~ Oscar Wilde

Turned and ran down another. They remembered the corridors that held no cheese and quickly went into new areas. Sniff would smell out the general direction of the cheese, using his great nose, and Scurry would race ahead. They got lost, as you might expect, went off in the wrong direction and often bumped into walls. But after a while, they found their way. Like the mice, the two Littlepeople, Hem and Haw, also used their ability to think and learn from their past experiences. However, they relied on their complex brains to develop more sophisticated methods of finding Cheese. Sometimes they did well, but at other times their powerful human beliefs and emotions took over and clouded the way they looked at things. It made life in the Maze more complicated and challenging. Nonetheless, Sniff, Scurry, Hem and Haw all discovered, in their own way, what they were looking for. They each found their own kind of cheese one day at the end of one of the corridors in Cheese Station ~ Spencer Johnson

The avoidance of explicit ethical judgments leads political scientists to one overriding implicit value judgment - that in favor of the political status quo as it happens to prevail in any given society. ~ Murray Rothbard

The greatest mission of woman is to give life, earth-life, through honorable marriage, to the waiting spirits, our Father's spirit children who anxiously desire to come to dwell here in this mortal state. All the honor and glory that can come to men and women is but a dim thing whose luster shall fade in comparison to the high honor, the eternal glory, the ever-enduring happiness that shall come to the woman who fulfils the first great duty and mission that devolves upon her to become the mother of the sons and daughters of God ~ Melvin J. Ballard

When you're looking for a house, you're not looking for a house that's perfect. You're looking for that house to have character. And I think it's those little bits of humanity they come from the music. That's what the music brings out when you have that, it brings out the character of a song. You go back and listen to 30, 40 years of music, and all the great, great songs that we've had in our lives, they all have that character. They have that human nudge, they all have that human relation. You can relate to it. ~ Corey Taylor

I agree with Pierre Bayle and with Unamuno that when cold reason contemplates the world it finds not only an absence of God, but good reasons for supposing that there is no God at all. From this perspective, from what Unamuno called the 'tragic sense of life', from this despair, faith comes to the rescue, not only as something nonrational but in a sense irrational. For Unamuno the great symbol of a person of faith was his Spanish hero Don Quixote. Faith is indeed quixotic. It is absurd. Let us admit it. Let us concede to everything! To a rational mind the world looks like a world without God. It looks like a world with no hope for another life. To think otherwise, to believe in spite of appearances, is surely a kind of madness. The atheist sees clearly that windmills are in fact only windmills, that Dulcinea is just a poor country bumpkin with a homely face and an unpleasant smell. The atheist is a Sarah, justifiably laughing in her old age at Abraham's belief that God will give them a son.

What can be said in reply? How can a fideist admit that faith is a kind of madness, a dream fed by passionate desire, and yet maintain that one is not mad to make the leap? ~ Martin Gardner

Women find that as they vanquish the predator, taking from it what is useful and leaving the rest, they are filled with intensity, vitality, and drive.
The predator's rage can be rendered into a soul-fire for accomplishing a great task in the world. The predator's craftiness can be used to inspect and understand things from a distance. The predator's killing nature can be used to kill off that must properly die in a woman's life,or what she must die to in her outer life, these being different things at different times. Usually, she knows exactly what they are. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

When we find a fossil, we mark it. Today, we've got great technology: we have GPS. We mark it with a GPS fix, and we also take a digital photograph of the specimen, so we could essentially put it back on the surface, exactly where we found it. ~ Louise Leakey

Old friend, I am writing to you again
The infamous tale of squandered love

To have my denial broken by myself
To have accepted past for my behove

To have grown into a man of honor
To have embraced the code of chivalry

To have been reborn as a bird of myth
To have caught lies in nightly reverie

Lost myself in this chronic transition
I regret the love wasted, in-between

Who knew life can just be happy or full
If only the great men ere had foreseen

As humbled as I have become due this
I'm failing to see the point of these rhymes

So old friend, do tell me what is better
Death, endured once or a zillion times? ~ Zubair Ahsan

Sometimes you see auteur TV shows and movies, and those are great. ~ Akiva Goldsman

The biggest abuses in society happen when people are not able to communicate and not able to connect. ~ Heather Brooke

Was that - did she just grin at me? To me? A moment of stillness in this moment of pause. Without speaking, we let our gazes wander slow, groping to confirm relief in the other. There's a subdued excitement for the oncoming sharing of whatever's waiting for us behind that heavy iron door, exclusive - two solitary embers, isolated in their separate pits, far away but fanned by the same wind, the same night, alone with the night, their respective camps all gone to sleep, flaring softly cradled calling, out against the great dark backdrop of the great unknown. ~ Patrick Bryant