If swindling pays, then it will not stop. The definition of the good society is one in which virtue pays. I can now add a slight variation on this; you cannot have a good society unless virtue pays. But here we get very close to the whole subject of metaneeds, and also of the ideal conditions where dichotomies are resolved and transcended.

This is the essence of a good society: that people are able to feel goodness in themselves and each other as much as possible; that even when things are difficult or life is painful, people have the support of others; that the ways we get things done are also the ways we carve out spaces to fully see and appreciate each other. And have fun.

The good or healthy society would then be defined as one that permitted people's highest purposes to emerge by satisfying all their basic needs.

Every society is built upon competition and cooperation.

A good society maximizes positive-sum competition and voluntary cooperation.

In a perfect society, each citizen would understand the universality of truth and honor the rights and needs of others. A good society must be based on democratic principles, and yet when a democracy loses sight of the rights of its minority members and allows the wishes of the majority to control everything, there will always be problems. The rights of those who voted for the losing side of an election are fully as important as those who voted on the winning side. Objective standards of law and behavior must be respected at all times, and all members of any given society must be equal within those standards. When one group seizes power from another and flouts the basic rule of law, chaos inevitably follows. A good thing cannot come from a bad intention.

The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death.

We want to achieve a new and better order of society: in this new and better society there must be neither rich nor poor; all will have to work. Not a handful of rich people, but all the working people must enjoy the fruits of their common labour. Machines and other improvements must serve to ease the work of all and not to enable a few to grow rich at the expense of millions and tens of millions of people. This new and better society is called socialist society. The teachings about this society are called socialism.

Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.

The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods. But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.

The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being--which cannot be proved existentially to the sense organs--where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.

A good civilization, it seems to me, is one which continues to work energetically to create more wealth, but directs this wealth toward the fulfillment of deeper values. Once certain basic needs are satisfied and certain basic comforts are available to all, it turns its attention to the attainment of more meaningful and lasting satisfactions than the mere possession and consumption of merchandise.

To enumerate the particular details—the sufficient conditions—of a good society is effectively to prohibit individuality and social change. A planned society, a society in which sufficient conditions are politically determined and coercively imposed, is ‘closed’ to the spontaneous innovations of free association. We see this in the utopian writings of Plato and his many admirers. A utopian society is a perfect society, one that has been carefully designed by a wise and beneficent lawgiver. Any deviation from perfection must necessarily be for the worse, so social change—which in this scheme is but another name for social degeneration—must be arrested at all costs. And this, in turn, requires the suppression of individuality. The individual’s pursuit of happiness—that powerful and unpredictable agent of social change—must be subordinated for the sake of a good society, as specified in the utopian blueprint of sufficient conditions.

Every society is a moral society. In certain respects, this character is even more pronounced in organised societies. Because the individual is not sufficient unto himself, it is from society that he receives everything necessary to him, as it is for society that he works.

We're not putting off the good society until some distant future but attempting to carve out room for it in the here and now, however tentative and contorted under the given social order. In turn, this consistency of means and ends implies an ethical approach to politics. How we act now is how we want others to begin to act, too. We try to model a notion of goodness even as we fight for it.