Society or human society is the manner or condition in which the members of a community live together for their mutual benefit. By extension, society denotes the people of a region or country, sometimes even the world, taken as a whole.

Used in the sense of an associaton, a society is a body of individuals outlined by the bounds of functional interdependence, possibly comprising characteristics such as national or cultural identity, social solidarity, language or hierarchical organization. Human societies are characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals sharing a distinctive culture and institutions. Like other communities or groups, a society allows its members to achieve needs or wishes they could not fulfill alone.

Society, however, can be ontologically independent of, and utterly irreducible to, the qualities of constituent individuals; it may act to oppress. The urbanization and rationalization inherent in some, particularly Western capitalist, societies, has been associated with feelings of isolation and social "anomie".

More broadly, a society is an economic, social or industrial infrastructure, made up of a varied collection of individuals. Members of a society may be from different ethnic groups. A society may be a particular ethnic group, such as the Saxons; a nation state, such as Bhutan; a broader cultural group, such as a Western society. The word society may also refer to an organized voluntary association of people for religious, benevolent, cultural, scientific, political, patriotic, or other purposes. A "society" may even, though more by means of metaphor, refer to a social organism such as an ant colony.

Quotes about society.

• "A person who cannot live in society, or does not need to because he is self-sufficient, is either a beast or a god."
  • Aristotle, Politics

• "What is not good for the beehive, cannot be good for the bees."
  • Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

• "Man seeketh in society comfort, use, and protection."
  • Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605)

• "The history of society is the history of the inventive labors that man alter man, alter his desires, habits, outlook, relationships both to other men and to physical nature, with which man is in perpetual physical and technological metabolism."
  • Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx (1978)

• I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.
  • Rubén Blades

• Has anyone been out in society recently? Cause its shit!
  • Russel Brand

• "What times! What manners!."
  • Cicero, in Catilinam

• "The only living socities are those which are animated by inequality and injustice."
  • Paul Claudel, Conversations dans le Loir-et-Cher

• It is the retention by twentieth-century, Atom-Age men of the Neolithic point of view that says: You stay in your village and I will stay in mine. If your sheep eat our grass we will kill you, or we may kill you anyhow to get all the grass for our own sheep. Anyone who tries to make us change our ways is a witch and we will kill him. Keep out of our village.
  • Carleton S. Coon, The Story of Man

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Tue Nov 17 12:40:09 2009