top of page
"A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Society quotes

"Teaching the myth of creation to the students instead of teaching them the fact of evolution is nothing but an act of ultimate ignorance!"

"We must stop expecting the government to play the role of national transformation why we sit down and watch."

"This was my first time in Govan. You could smell and taste the thick smog in the air. The Blue Triangle was a new high-tech building, and it didn't look right standing there in front of older and more historical buildings. The Blue Triangle may have looked great from the outside, but once inside, to my horror, it was full of young teenage boys and girls full of deep and dark depression."

"If you think of your own mother to be the only true mother in the world and thereby start belittling people from other mothers as bastards, that makes you a bigot and a germ on the face of earth. This is an unhealthy bias, even though in your personal mental universe it may provide you extreme comfort. This is exactly what we see in the religious fundamentalists."

"Genius tries to conquer the world with art, with songs, with words; stupid tries to conquer it with sword, with guns, with arrows!"

"To create an enlightened society, be a beacon of light"

"In a patriarchal society, one of the most important functions of the institution of the family is to make feel like a somebody whenever he is in his own yard a man who is a nobody whenever he is in his employer's yard."

"As a legacy, most world leaders leave huge amounts of money to their children and only few leave an honourable surname!"
Explore more quotes by Alain de Botton

"In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well."

"I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it."

"We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us."

"It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided."

"We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane."

"Loneliness makes us more capable of true intimacy if ever better opportunities do come along. We might be isolated for now, but we'll be capable of far closer, more interesting bonds with anyone we do eventually locate."

"There is something improbably about the silence in the [subway] carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder it is for the commuters to pretend to be absorbed in other things, rather than revealing the extent to which they are covertly evaluating, judging, condemning and desiring each other. A few venture a glance here and there, as furtively as birds pecking grain. But only if the train crashed would anyone know for sure who else had been in the carriage, what small parts of the nation's economy had been innocuously seated across the aisle just before the impact: employees of hotels, government ministries, plastic-surgery clinics, fruit nurseries and greetings-card companies."

"Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities."
bottom of page