100 Social Contract Quotes
Following is our list of social contract quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about social contract theory.
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Famous Social Contract Quotes
The "social contract," in the only sense in which it is not completely mythical, is a contract among conquerors, which loses its raison d'être if they are deprived of the benefits of conquest. — Bertrand Russell
Justice is a contract of expediency, entered upon to prevent men harming or being harmed. — Epicurus
It should be remembered that the foundation of the social contract is property; and its first condition, that every one should be maintained in the peaceful possession of what belongs to him. — Jean-Baptiste Rousseau
This new social contract proposes a different country, in which the state does not direct our lives. He who cuts the streets, does not get paid. — Javier Milei
The origin of society, then, is to be sought, not in any natural right which one man has to exercise authority over another, but in the united consent of those who associate. — Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed — Walter E. Williams
In other words, are humans fundamentally social animals who strive hard to carve out room for their individuality, or are they individuals who form social contracts? — John Mearsheimer
In the state of nature... all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of the law. — Baron de Montesquieu
There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men — Epicurus
The basis of social relationships is reciprocity: if you cooperate with others, others will cooperate with you. — Carroll Quigley
The foundation of authority is based upon the consent of the people. — Thomas Hooker
In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions and interests dictate. — Ayn Rand
All legislation is founded upon the principle of mutual concession. — Henry Clay
You sign an agreement; you make a contract, you live up to it. You never get what you deserve. You get what you negotiate. You got a right to say yay or nay. — Don King
Governments rest on the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish them at will whenever they become destructive of the ends for which they were established. — Jefferson Davis
I Am Not Social Quotes
I'm not afraid of death but I am afraid of dying. Pain can be alleviated by morphine but the pain of social ostracism cannot be taken away. — Derek Jarman
I am not smart. I am not good-looking. I don't have — Changpeng Zhao
I write from my knowledge not my lack, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired. — Lucille Clifton
I am America. I am the part you won't recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me. — Muhammad Ali
I do not feel inhibited or bound by what I am. That does not mean that I have never had bad scenes relating to being Black and/or a woman, it means that other people’s craziness has not managed to make me crazy. — Lucille Clifton
I am not in favor of caste, nor separation of the brotherhood of mankind, and would as willingly live among white men as Black, if I had equal possession and enjoyment of privileges, but I shall never be reconciled living among them subservient to their will. — Martin Delany
I am convinced that the path to a new, better and possible world is not capitalism, the path is socialism. — Hugo Chavez
Good words will not give my people good health and stop them from dying. Good words will not get my people a home where they can live in peace and take care of themselves. I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and broken promises. — Chief Joseph
Democracy means not "I am as good as you are" but "You are as good as I am.". — Theodore Parker
Black! Black! Black! I am proud of being a Negro. Nor have I ever tried to beg tolerance from anyone. Superiority is not proved by color, but by the brain, by education, by willpower, by moral courage. — Jose Celso Barbosa
Socialization Quotes
... no man or woman should depend upon another for maintenance and necessaries. Family discord and social degradation will never end till each depends upon herself. — Anandi Gopal Joshi
Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery. — Winston Churchill
Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism - by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide. — Ayn Rand
Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time and always start with the person nearest you. — Mother Teresa
There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery — Karl Marx
A society with too few independent thinkers is vulnerable to control by disturbed and opportunistic leaders. A society which wants to create and maintain a free and democratic social system must create responsible independence of thought among its young. — John Dewey
Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself. — John Dewey
When the church hears the cry of the oppressed it cannot but denounce the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises. — Oscar Romero
Education means to bring out wisdom. Indoctrination means to push in knowledge. — Dick Gregory
Socialism Quotes
In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity. — Erik Erikson
Guess what this liberal would be all about? This liberal will be about socializing...uh, um...Would be about, basically, taking over, and the government running all of your companies. — Maxine Waters
I don't like a girl on social media, when you have an open inbox, answering questions from dudes left and right, every day. What's the point? It's like having your number all out. — Meek Mill
The oil is a gift bestowed by God on the Arab nation, to use after centuries of poverty, backwardness and servitude - in raising its living standards, developing its economic, social and cultural conditions, and building up its own power to meet the challenges and conspiracies besetting it. — Saddam Hussein
Human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them — Lev S. Vygotsky
I can prophecy that your grandchildren in America will live under socialism -- Our firm conviction is that sooner or later Capitalism will give way to Socialism. Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you. — Nikita Khrushchev
No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. — Aneurin Bevan
True religion is a revolutionary force: it is an inveterate enemy of oppression, privilege, and injustice. — Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
We have to free half of the human race, the women, so that they can help free the other half. — Emmeline Pankhurst
Encourage everyone you meet with a smile or compliment. Make them feel better when you leave their presence and they will always be glad to see you coming. — Joyce Meyer
Social Being Quotes
Hate speech it seems to be is been defined by the political left as anything we don't like, anything that violates social justice doctrines, feminism, Black Lives Matter kind of ideology. It is not something that I have ever heard particularly effectively defined. — Milo Yiannopoulos
Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights. Social distinctions can be based only on the common utility. — Olympe de Gouges
I even accept for the sake of argument that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged. — Antonin Scalia
The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society. — Recep Tayyip Erdogan
I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs. I knew at that point I had to have a camera. — Gordon Parks
I remained a socialist for several years, even after my rejection of Marxism; and if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society. — Karl Popper
I think very fundamentally to being Libertarian is not having a social agenda. I accept who you are and the life that you live as long as your life does not adversely affect mine. — Gary Johnson
Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds. — Emile Durkheim
We, in Africa, have no more need of being 'converted' to socialism than we have of being 'taught' democracy. Both are rooted in our past -- in the traditional society which produced us. — Julius Nyerere
Social justice cannot be attained by violence. Violence kills what it intends to create. — Pope John Paul II
People Writing About Social Contract
More Social Contract Quotes
The social pact, far from destroying natural equality, substitutes, on the contrary, a moral and lawful equality for whatever physical inequality that nature may have imposed on mankind; so that however unequal in strength and intelligence, men become equal by covenant and by right. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything he tries to get and succeeds in getting; what he gains is civil liberty and the proprietorship of all he possesses. — Jean-Baptiste Rousseau
A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition. — Balaji Srinivasan
Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea, God Bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and paid forward for the next kid who comes along. — Elizabeth Warren
To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For he who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man's nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
...in respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
In a well governed state, there are few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare; it is when a state is in decay that the multitude of crimes is a gaurantee of impunity. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Wall Street sees a social fabric or social contract as inefficiencies, which need to be removed. — David Korten
We've got Chinese, white, black and mixed; but remember that our colors are cheap, for after many years of contracts and tricks nobody's purity runs very deep. — Nicolas Guillen
In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never existed, and never will exist. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent. To assert that the son of a slave is born a slave is to assert that he is not born a man. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
As soon as any man says of the affairs of the State "What does it matter to me?" the State may be given up for lost. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
We are approaching a time when Christians, especially, may have to declare the social contract between Enlightenment rationalists and Biblical believers - which formed the basis of the constitution written at our nation's founding - null and void. — Cal Thomas
Does it seem to you impossible to imagine anything more inextricable than the social contract, when you think of the frightful number of relations that it must regulate -- something like squaring the circle, or finding perpetual motion? That is the reason why, wearied of the struggle, you fall back on absolutism and force. — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
In America, one of our two major parties is dominated by extremists dedicated to destroying the social contract, and the other party has been so enfeebled by two decades of collaboration with the donor class it can offer only feeble resistance to the forces that are devastating everyday people. — Bill Moyers
One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Tariffs, government contracts, naval and military spending, nationalized industries, tax policy, social welfare, the legal privileging of labor unions were among the means at the disposal of the governing class to exploit the public at large for the benefits of its various clienteles. — Ralph Raico
The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Mobile communications and pervasive computing technologies, together with social contracts that were never possible before, are already beginning to change the way people meet, mate, work, war, buy, sell, govern and create. — Howard Rheingold
In Europe there's an dangerous growth of ultra xenophobia which is pretty threatening to any one who remembers the history of Europe... and an attack on the remnants of the welfare state. It's hard to interpret the austerity-in-the-midst-of-recession policy as anything other than attack on the social contract. — Noam Chomsky
The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest. — Jean-Baptiste Rousseau
In the technical realm, we repeatedly enter into a series of social contracts, the terms of which are revealed only after the signing. — Langdon Winner
It is easier to conquer than to administer. With enough leverage, a finger could overturn the world; but to support the world, one must have the shoulders of Hercules. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Saudi Arabia has stability. The social contract and the political contract between the king and the rulers and the royal family and the ruled people in Saudi Arabia is very strong and the bondage is so solid. — Al-Waleed bin Talal
We witness a strange inversion: on the one hand, the endeavor to turn the social contract into a less calculating and more feeling connection among its members; on the other hand, the endeavor to turn the erotic relationship into a contractual one. — Allan Bloom
The word liberal has been employed as the political equivalent of an untreatable but potentially containable social disease -- the kind that could be contracted merely by going to a foreign movie or ordering a decaf latte, or worse, a glass of French wine. — Eric Alterman
The social contract is starting to unravel in many countries. — Jose Angel Gurria
Nothing is worse, or more of a breach of the social contract between citizen and state, than for government officials, bureaucrats and agencies to waste the money entrusted to them by the people they serve. — Bob Riley
When the courts decide that murderers, rapists, and others who maliciously break our social contract deserve health care that most working Americans can't afford, they are condemning good people to death. — Tammy Bruce
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. — Elizabeth Warren
Reading is at the beginning of the social contract. — Alberto Manguel
War then, is a relation - not between man and man but between state and state and individuals are enemies only accidentally not as men, nor even as citizens but as soldiers not as members of their country, but as its defenders — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Well, let's go back to the original intent of Social Security. It is an insurance contract. — Chuck Hagel
The real violence is committed in the writing of history, the records of the legal system, the reporting of news, through the manipulation of social contracts, and the control of information. — Bryant H. McGill
All in all, I am not surprised that the people who want to unravel the social contract start with young adults. Those who are urged to feel afraid, very afraid, have both the greatest sense of independence and the most finely honed skepticism about government. — Ellen Goodman
The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds? — Robert Hughes
Morality is either a social contract or you have to pay cash. — Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
There is peace in dungeons, but is that enough to make dungeons desirable? — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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