George Eliot Quotes

How we behave in our public lives inevitably reflects values, attitudes and experiences embedded in our private lives and vice versa.

Public opinion is the atmosphere of society, without which the forces of the individual would collapse, and all the institutions of society fly into atoms.

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.

It's inevitable your environment will influence what you do.

In civilized life, where the happiness and indeed almost the existence of man, depends on the opinion of his fellow men. He is constantly acting a studied part.

Actual human discourse happens within a number of contexts, not in some sort of unified public forum.

In America there is not one single element of civilization that is not made to depend, in the end, upon public opinion.

I'm more into human nature than politics. But they're intertwined. Obviously, I live in civilization, so politics are part of my life.

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

The Public is merely a multiplied 'me.'

You can't really divorce yourself and your life from the world you live in.

To have a public life, you still have the right to a private life.

It's a very performative thing, grief. As with so much in modern life, I think there's a whole performative layer to what we do because we feel like there's a private TV show viewing our lives.

I'm not being secretive about anything. I just actually don't have opinions about society.

Most social acts have to be understood in their setting and lose meaning if isolated... No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function.

Situational variables can exert powerful influences over human behavior, more so that we recognize or acknowledge.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

We have hardly an adequate idea how all-powerful law is in forming public opinion, in giving tone and character to the mass of society.

The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.

Publicity, publicity, publicity is the greatest moral factor and force in our public life.

The whole system of society tells you what to do.

If the ideas of any particular man are determined by his environment, then the ideas of humanity, in their historical development, are determined by the development of the social environment, by the history of social relationships.

Politics is something similar to the lower physiological functions, with the unpleasant difference that political functions are unavoidably carried out in public.

I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I'm interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak.