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 association, 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.

A society, however, may 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.

Sourced

• "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, in a conference at Harvard University reported by Anne Stewart (AP: Cambridge, Mass.), "Not everyone enthusiastic about the future of TV", Bangor Daily News, 18 February 1993

• 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

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Thu Feb 18 08:44:15 2010