A group is a psychologically significant association of interdependent individuals. One relates objectively to a group for the acquisition of group roles, while one relates subjectively to a group for the acquisition of group norms and values. The groups with which we interact greatly influence our behaviors and sense of self. Considered the primary phenomena of human existence and reflecting our state of nature – coordination, collaboration, and cooperation with our fellow man – the freedom to create a group should always be a liberty protected by the sovereign to which we yield.

Now, let’s consider the words of history’s great thinkers on the topic of groups!

The Big List Of Quotes On Groups

The Big List Of Quotes on Groups is organized by the thinker’s year of birth.

1. Sun Tzu – born 6th century BCE

“A victorious army opposed to a routed one, is as a pound’s weight placed in the scale against a single grain.”
“… an army without its baggage-train is lost…”
“… thus forming a single united body, is it impossible either for the brave to advance alone, or for the cowardly to retreat alone.”
“When you surround an army, leave an outlet free.”
“When the soldiers stand leaning on their spears, they are faint from want of food. If those who are sent to draw water begin by drinking themselves, the army is suffering from thirst.”
“The sight of men whispering together in small knots or speaking in subdued tones points to disaffection amongst the rank and file.”
“Bestow rewards without regard to rule, issue orders without regard to previous arrangements; and you will be able to handle a whole army as though you had to do with but a single man.”

2. Plato – born 428 BCE

“The barest notion of a State must include four or five men.”

3. Cicero – born 106 BCE

“… the first bond of union is that between husband and wife; the next, that between parents and children; then we find one home, with everything in common. And this is the foundation of civil government, the nursery, as it were, of the state.”
“… without the association of men, cities could not have been built or peopled.”

4. Niccolo Machiavelli – born 1469

“… if a ruler can’t avoid hatred altogether, he must first try to avoid the hatred of the country as a whole, and when that proves impossible he must do everything he can to escape the hatred of the classes that wield the most power.”
“… a ruler should offer incentives… to whoever plans to bring prosperity to his city or state. Then at the right times of the year he should entertain people with shows and festivals. And since every city is divided into guilds and districts, he should respect these groups and go to their meetings from time to time, showing what a humane and generous person he is, though without ever forgetting the authority of his position, something he must always keep to the fore.”

5. Jean Bodin – born 1530

“A COMMONWEALTH may be defined as the rightly ordered government of a number of families, and of those things which are their common concern, by a sovereign power.”
“A FAMILY may be defined as the right ordering of a group of persons owing obedience to a head of a household, and of those interests which are his proper concern… the family… is not only the true source and origin of the commonwealth, but also its principal constituent… Thus the well-ordered family is a true image of the commonwealth… a minimum of five persons is required to constitute a family… fifteen persons could become a political community, meaning by that three complete households.”

6. John Locke – born 1632

“… as we are not by ourselves sufficient to furnish ourselves with competent store of things, needful for such a life as our nature doth desire, a life fit for the dignity of man; therefore to supply those defects and imperfections which are in us, as living single and solely by ourselves, we are naturally induced to seek communion and fellowship with others: this was the cause of men’s uniting themselves at first in politic societies.”
“GOD having made man such a creature, that in his own judgment, it was not good for him to be alone, put him under strong obligations of necessity, convenience, and inclination to drive him into society, as well as fitted him with understanding and language to continue and enjoy it. The first society was between man and wife, which gave beginning to that between parents and children…”
“The only way whereby any one divests himself of his natural liberty, and puts on the bonds of civil society, is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against any, that are not of it.”

7. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – born 1712

“… more often produced by chance than by wisdom, which are called either weakness or power, or wealth or poverty, human institutions appear at first glance to be founded on shifting sands; it is only by examining them closely, only after having cleared away the dust and sand surrounding the edifice, that we perceive the unshakable base on which it has been raised, and that we learn to respect its foundations.”
“The oldest of all societies and the only natural one is that of the family… The family, therefore, is, if you will, the first model for political societies…”
“… since men cannot engender new forces but merely unite and direct the existing ones, they have no other means of preserving themselves than to form by aggregation a sum of forces… by means of a single motive power and make them act in concert. This sum of forces can arise only from the cooperation of several men…”

8. Adam Smith – born 1723

“The whole consumption of the inferior rank of people, or of those below the middling rank, it must be observed, is in every country much greater, not only in quantity, but in value, than that of the middling and of those above the middling rank.”

9. Alexis de Tocqueville – born 1805

“The federal government confers power and glory on those who direct it; but the number of men who are able to influence its destiny is very small… It is in the town, at the center of the ordinary relations of life, that the desire for esteem, the need for real interests, the taste for power and notice are focused. These passions, which so often trouble society, change character when they can operate thus near the domestic hearth and, in a way, within the family.”
“Apart from permanent associations created by law, known as towns, cities and counties, a multitude of others owe their birth and development only to individual wills… they unite to resist entirely intellectual enemies: together they fight intemperance… they associate for purposes of public security, commerce and industry, pleasure, morality and religion. There is nothing that human will despairs of achieving by the free action of the collective power of individuals.”
“The association gathers the efforts of divergent minds into a network and vigorously pushes them towards a single, clearly indicated goal.”
“In our time, freedom of association has become a necessary guarantee against the tyranny of the majority.”
“An association is an army; they talk in order to take stock and to come to life; and then they march on the enemy.”
“The morals and intelligence of a democratic people would run no lesser dangers than their trade and industry, if the government came to take the place of associations everywhere… Associations, among democratic people, must take the place of the powerful individuals that equality of conditions has made disappear… In democratic countries, the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of the former.”
“… politics generalizes the taste and habit of association; it brings about the desire to unite and teaches the art of association to a host of men who would have always lived alone. Politics not only gives birth to many associations, it creates very vast associations.”

10. Karl Marx – born 1818

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
“The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.”
“The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”
“…the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population… The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.”
“All previous historical movements were movements of minorities or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.”
“… by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.”
“In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.“

11. Emile Durkheim – born 1858

“Within the same group of workers a public opinion exists, diffused throughout this limited body, which, despite the lack of any legal sanctions, is nevertheless obeyed. There are customs and usages common to the same group of functionaries which none can infringe without incurring the reprimand of the corporation.”
“… higher societies are the result of the coming together of lower societies of the same type… human societies consist increasingly of groups cooperating together…”
“… for social control to be rigorous and for the common consciousness to be maintained, society must be split up into moderately small compartments that completely enclose the individual.”
“Man is a moral being only because he lives in society, since morality consists in solidarity with the group, and varies according to that solidarity.”

12. Friedrich A. Hayek – born 1899

“Just as a group may owe its rise to the morals which its members obey, and their values in consequence be ultimately imitated by the whole nation which the successful group has come to lead, so may a group or nation destroy itself by the moral beliefs to which it adheres.”
“Groups do not always act in accordance with their best knowledge or obey moral rules that they recognize in the abstract any more than individuals do.”
“The freedom of the employed… depends on the existence of a group of persons whose position is different from theirs. Yet in a democracy in which they form the majority, it is their conception of life that can determine whether or not such a group can exist and fulfill its functions.”
“The existence of a multiplicity of opportunities for employment ultimately depends on the existence of independent individuals who can take the initiative in the continuous process of re-forming and redirecting organizations.”

13. Bertrand de Jouvenel – born 1903

“Who has ever come across the completely solitary man? All that explorers (or anyone else) have ever found has been man in society.”
“In every highly developed society a man forms part of several aggregates… every aggregate, whatever it is, is kept alive by the loyalty of its members, without which it dies…”
“Every man is born helpless and wild. He wins control of himself through the education given by the group – by, first and foremost, the narrow group called the family.”
“[Man] wins control over his environment through the collective organisation: this control, which he can never call his own right, comes to him from membership of a whole, and grows from age to age with the enlargement and improvement of the co-operative whole.”
“At length the association comes into being not by a mere coincidence of wishes, but as the fruit of one man working on another. The mistake of the classical theory is to overlook the role of the founder – the auctor – in the formation of the group.”
“The ‘isolated’ man is not a natural phenomenon but a product of intellectual abstraction. That which is natural (in the sense of both primary and necessary) is the group. Without the group man is an impossibility.”
“… to consider groups as secondary phenomena resulting from a synthesis of individuals is a wrong approach; they should be regarded as primary phenomena of human existence.”
“If it is neither natural nor possible for man to live in isolation, neither is it necessary for him to be embodied in groups of the size and complexity that we now see.”
“A progressive society is characterized by a great proliferation of action groups of all sizes and natures.”
“… a circle of men will have more things in common the narrower and homogeneous it is, and fewer things in common the more numerous and variegated it is.”
“But almost everyone subconsciously wishes to recover the warmth of the primitive group… it is certain that he longs unconsciously for the social breast at which he was formed, for the small, closely-knit society which was the school of the species.”
“The newer an action group, the less linked by habitual co-operation its members and the more exceptional its fruits, so much the readier are those engaged in it to agree on the justice of a share-out of these fruits by reference to the individual contribution. Contrariwise, the more that members of the team see each other as ‘neighbors’ and the more that the team gains in social coherence, the more the idea of ‘all alike’ gains at the expense of that of superior and inferior performance.”
“The essential freedom, as I see it, is the freedom to create a gathering, to generate a group, and thereby introduce in society a new power, a source of movement and change.”

14. Robert Putnam – born 1941

“Many groups simultaneously bond along some social dimensions and bridge across others.”
“If the linkage of small groups to public life is sometimes tenuous and hard to detect, the comparable connection for social movements is omnipresent.”

15. Francis Fukuyama – born 1952

“… durable social institutions cannot be legislated into existence…”
“… to create a variety of new, voluntary social groups that [are] not based on kinship… [requires] a high degree of trust between individuals… and hence a solid basis for social capital.”
“… lack of trust outside the family makes it hard for unrelated people to form groups or organizations, including economic enterprises.”
“There is… no single bridge to sociability beyond the family that spans all cultures exhibiting a high degree of trust and spontaneous sociability.”

Final Thoughts

As we traverse through over two millennia of human thought on groups—from Sun Tzu’s military formations to Fukuyama’s reflections on trust—a striking pattern emerges: the persistent tension between our individual nature and our collective destiny. These thinkers, separated by centuries and continents, converge on a fundamental truth: we are irreducibly social beings whose very humanity is realized through association with others.

The evolution of thought presented here mirrors humanity’s own journey. Early thinkers like Plato and Cicero saw groups primarily through the lens of the state and family—the bedrock institutions of civilization. By the Enlightenment, Locke and Rousseau were grappling with the voluntary nature of association and the social contract that binds us. The industrial age brought Marx’s class consciousness and Durkheim’s insights into how modernity fragments yet reconnects us in new ways. And our contemporary thinkers like Putnam and Fukuyama wrestle with how trust and social capital function in an increasingly complex, interconnected world.

What’s particularly revealing is how each era’s concerns about groups reflect its anxieties. Machiavelli worried about managing factional hatred; Tocqueville feared the tyranny of the majority; Marx saw class struggle as history’s engine; Hayek warned of groups destroying themselves through misguided morals. Yet through all these warnings runs a golden thread of hope: the belief that human association, properly ordered, remains our greatest strength.

Perhaps de Jouvenel captured it best when he wrote that groups are “primary phenomena of human existence.” We don’t choose to be social; we simply are. The family that nurtures us, the communities that shape us, the associations we freely form—these aren’t mere conveniences but the very medium through which we become fully human. In our age of digital connection and physical isolation, of global networks and local alienation, these insights feel more urgent than ever.

The freedom to associate—to gather, to generate groups, to introduce new sources of movement and change into society—emerges from these quotes not just as a political right but as a fundamental human need. As we face the challenges of the 21st century, from political polarization to technological disruption, the wisdom collected here reminds us that our solutions, like our problems, will be fundamentally collective in nature.

In the end, this collection serves as both mirror and map: reflecting back to us our deeply social nature while charting the various ways human beings have understood and organized their inevitable interdependence. The conversation these thinkers began continues in every group we form, every association we join, every moment we choose cooperation over isolation. Their words remind us that in studying groups, we study ourselves—not as isolated individuals, but as we truly are: beings who find meaning, purpose, and identity in the company of others.

Thanks for reading!