“Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense.”– Ralph Waldo Emerson Related Quotes “Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.”– Randolph Bourne “Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.”– Russell Baker “Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain ideas that every man is bound to be a critic for life.”– Henry Van Dyke