Quotes about group
page 13

Ken Livingstone photo

“You can't expect to work for the Daily Mail group and have the rest of society treat with you respect as a useful member of society, because you are not.”

Ken Livingstone (1945) Mayor of London between 2000 and 2008

Remarks concerning Oliver Finegold, Evening Standard journalist. in Guardian Unlimited (13 December 2005) http://politics.guardian.co.uk/gla/story/0,,1666536,00.html

Norman Angell photo

“For Moses, that God should "visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation" (Exod. 20:5) is an unacceptable form of group punishment akin to the morally indiscriminate punishment of Sodom. Challenging God's pronouncement of the punishment of the sons for the sins of the fathers, Moses argues with God, against God, and in the name of God. Moses engages God with fierce moral logic:
Sovereign of the Universe, consider the righteousness of Abraham and the idol worship of his father Terach. Does it make moral sense to punish the child for the transgressions of the father? Sovereign of the Universe, consider the righteous deeds of King Hezekiah, who sprang from the loins of his evil father King Achaz. Does Hezekiah deserve Achaz's punishment? Consider the nobility of King Josiah, whose father Amnon was wicked. Should Josiah inherit the punishment of Amnon? (Num. Rabbah, Hukkat XIX, 33)
Trained to view God as an unyielding authoritarian proclaiming immutable commands, we might expect that Moses will be severely chastised for his defiance. Who is this finite, errant, fallible, human creature to question the explicit command of the author of the Ten Commandments? The divine response to Moses, according to the rabbinic moral imagination, is arresting:
By your life Moses, you have instructed Me. Therefore I will nullify My words and confirm yours. Thus it is said, "The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers."”

Harold M. Schulweis (1925–2014) American rabbi and theologian

Deut. 24:16
Conscience: The Duty to Obey and the Duty to Disobey (2008)

Hillary Clinton photo
Charles Darwin photo
Alan Hirsch photo

“Building community for its own sake is like attending a cancer support group without having cancer.”

Alan Hirsch (1959) South African missionary

Source: The Faith of Leap (2011), p. 117

Gabriele Münter photo
Ted Nelson photo

“HOW TO LEARN ANYTHINGAs far as I can tell these are the techniques used by bright people who want to learn something other than by taking courses in it. […]1. DECIDE WHAT YOU WANT TO LEARN. But you can't know this exactly, because you don't know exactly how any field is structured until you know all about it.2. READ EVERYTHING YOU CAN ON IT, especially what you enjoy, since that way you can read more of it and faster.3. GRAB FOR INSIGHTS. Regardless of points others are trying to make, when you recognize an insight that has meaning for you, make it your own […] Its importance is not how central it is, but how clear and interesting and memorable to you. REMEMBER IT. Then go for another.4. TIE INSIGHTS TOGETHER. Soon you will have your own string of insights in a field. […]5. CONCENTRATE ON MAGAZINES, NOT BOOKS. Magazines have far more insights per inch of text, and can be read much faster. But when a book really speaks to you, lavish attention on it.6. FIND YOUR OWN SPECIAL TOPICS, AND PURSUE THEM.7. GO TO CONVENTIONS. For some reason, conventions are a splendid concentrated way to learn things; talking to people helps. […]8. "FIND YOUR MAN." Somewhere in the world is someone who will answer your questions extraordinarily well. If you find him, dog him. […]9. KEEP IMPROVING YOUR QUESTIONS. Probably in your head there are questions that don't seem to line up with what your hearing. Don't assume that you don't understand; keep adjusting the questions till you get an answer that relates to what you wanted.10. YOUR FIELD IS BOUNDED WHERE YOU WANT IT TO BE. Just because others group and stereotype things in conventional ways does not mean they are necessarily right. Intellectual subjects are connected every which way; your field is what you think it is. […]”

Ted Nelson (1937) American information technologist, philosopher, and sociologist; coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia"

Dream Machines
Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974, rev. 1987)

Susan Cain photo

“Groups follow the most charismatic person, even though there is no correlation between being a good speaker and having great ideas.”

Susan Cain (1968) self-help writer

"An introverted call to action: Susan Cain at TED2012," TED, February 28, 2012.

R. H. Tawney photo
Jiddu Krishnamurti photo

“When you identify yourself with a group of people or a set of ideas, aren't you separating yourself?”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

1st Discussion with Young People, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (26 May 1971)
1970s

Michael Franti photo
Gabriele Münter photo
Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo
Kurt Lewin photo
Wilfred Thesiger photo
Ronald David Laing photo

“It is of fundamental importance not to make the positivist mistake of assuming that because a group’s members are in formation this means that they’re necessarily on course.”

Source: The Politics of Experience (1967), p.82 (of original version see Google Books link here https://books.google.com/books?id=ZGTUlU5E5rAC&dq=politics+of+experience&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22positivist+mistake%22)

Jean-François Revel photo
Robert LeFevre photo

“Government, when it is examined, turns out to be nothing more nor less than a group of fallible men with the political force to act as though they were infallible.”

Robert LeFevre (1911–1986) American libertarian businessman

"Aggression is Wrong" essay (1963) published by Rampart College.

Christine O'Donnell photo

“The U. S. Supreme Court does not recognize the homosexual community as a minority group. We believe homosexuality is a chosen lifestyle, and it is reversible.”

Christine O'Donnell (1969) American Tea Party politician and former Republican Party candidate

1995
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
2010-09-15
Christine O'Donnell Does Not Like Gays.
Instaputz
http://instaputz.blogspot.com/2010/09/christine-odonnell-does-not-like-gays.html
2010-10-20
as press secretary of Concerned Women for America, on Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual History Month

Amir Taheri photo
Andrew Sullivan photo
Alexander Grothendieck photo

“The introduction of the digit 0 or the group concept was general nonsense too, and mathematics was more or less stagnating for thousands of years because nobody was around to take such childish steps…”

Alexander Grothendieck (1928–2014) French mathematician

R. Brown and T. Porter,Analogy, concepts and methodology, in mathematics, UWB Math Preprint, May 26,2006 Link http://math.stanford.edu/~vakil/216blog/FOAGjun1113public.pdf

Michael Shermer photo
Paul Klee photo
Merlin Mann photo

“Joining a Facebook group about creative productivity is like buying a chair about jogging.”

Merlin Mann (1966) American blogger

Twitter http://twitter.com/#!/hotdogsladies/status/1371419261
Tweeting as @hotdogsladies

Angela Davis photo
J. Gordon Melton photo
Robert K. Merton photo
L. Ron Hubbard photo
Deane Montgomery photo

“THEOREM: if G is a locally euclidean, connected, simply connected topological group of dimension n greater than one, then G contains a closed proper subgroup of positive dimension.”

Deane Montgomery (1909–1992) American mathematician

[A theorem on locally euclidean groups, Annals of Mathematics, 1947, 650–658, 10.2307/1969132]

William Foote Whyte photo

“The observation of reduction in complexity in many groups or organisms after a structure has emerged in a full-blown state makes sense in terms of homeobox genes.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

p, 125
Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species (1999)

Rob Pike photo
Maajid Nawaz photo

“For if liberalism is to mean anything at all, it is duty bound to support without hesitation the dissenting individual over the group, the heretic over the orthodox, innovation over stagnation and free speech over offense.”

Maajid Nawaz (1977) British activist

Stop the Jihadi Onslaught Against Atheists and Freethinkers http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/13/stop-the-muslim-onslaught-against-atheists-and-free-thinkers.html?via=desktop&source=facebook (13 October 2015)
Daily Beast Column

Hilaire Belloc photo
Erich Ludendorff photo

“There is but one hope, and this hope is embodied in the national groups which desire our recovery.”

Erich Ludendorff (1865–1937) German Army officer and later Nazi leader in Adolf Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch

"The Black Book: The Nazi Crime Against the Jewish People" - Page 18 - World War, 1939-1945 - 1981

Francis Escudero photo

“Indeed, the "whole bourgeoisie" on whose behalf the government was acting as its "committee" was a composite of a vast multitude of businessmen appearing as a conglomeration of many different and divergent groups and interests.”

Paul A. Baran (1909–1964) American Marxist economist

Source: The Political Economy Of Growth (1957), Chapter Four, Standstill and Movement Under Monopoly Capitalism, II, p. 93

Larry Wall photo

“tt>echo 'Hmmm…you don't have Berkeley networking in libc. a…'echo 'but the Wollongong group seems to have hacked it in.</tt”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

Source code, <code>Configure</code>

Phil Brown (footballer) photo
Tom Wolfe photo

“Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: "You're either on the bus … or off the bus."”

On Kesey's coining of the phrase "on the bus", in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Ch. VI : The Bus; as Paul Grushkin reports, in Dead Letters: The Very Best Grateful Dead Fan Mail (2011), p. 120, the statement became a famous evocation of an attitude:
The phrase became a metaphor for 1960s culture rethinking — if you were "on the bus" you were "with it."
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)

Abd al-Karim Qasim photo

“The balance of our population, our human stock is threatened. A recent article in Poverty, published by the Child Poverty Action Group, showed that a high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and to bring them up. They are born to mothers who were first pregnant in adolescence in socio-economic classes IV and V.”

Keith Joseph (1918–1994) British barrister and politician

Speech in Birmingham (19 October 1974), quoted in "Speech seen as attempt to swing party to right", The Times, 21 October 1974, p. 1. The speech called for a "remoralization" of Britain but ended Joseph's chance of winning the Conservative leadership owing to criticism of Joseph's link between births to working-class mothers and promoting birth control.
1970s

Gabriele Münter photo
Rensis Likert photo

“The superior in one group is a subordinate in the next group, and so on through the organization.”

Rensis Likert (1903–1981) American statistician

Source: New patterns of management, (1961), p. 105.

Will Eisner photo
Milton Friedman photo
Khushwant Singh photo
Jacques Bertin photo
Ron Paul photo

“Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Government and Racism http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3EADdr-5AY (16 April 2007).
2000s, 2006-2009
Context: I’m not a racist. As a matter of fact, Rosa Parks is one of my heroes, Martin Luther King is a hero — because they practiced the libertarian principle of civil disobedience, nonviolence.
Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals. Racists believe that all individuals who share superficial physical characteristics are alike: as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called "diversity" actually perpetuate racism. Their obsession with racial group identity is inherently racist. The true antidote to racism is liberty. Liberty means having a limited, constitutional government devoted to the protection of individual rights rather than group claims. Liberty means free-market capitalism, which rewards individual achievement and competence, not skin color, gender, or ethnicity.

Abbie Hoffman photo

“A modern revolutionary group heads for the television station, not the factory. It concentrates its energy on infiltrating and changing the image system.”

Abbie Hoffman (1936–1989) American political and social activist

Source: Soon to be a Major Motion Picture (1980), p. 86

Henri Poincaré photo
George Dantzig photo
Miguna Miguna photo
Hermann Rauschning photo
Mark Satin photo
Denise Scott Brown photo
Juan Cole photo
Abdullah of Saudi Arabia photo
Elizabeth Hand photo
Frank Chodorov photo

“The State is that group of people who having got hold of the machinery of compulsion, legally or otherwise, use it to better their circumstances; that is, by use of the political means.”

Frank Chodorov (1887–1966) American libertarian thinker

Source: Out of Step: The Autobiography of an Individualist (1962), p. 147

Laisenia Qarase photo

“We have to ensure that development is inclusive; that no particular group is disadvantaged or discriminated against.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

Excerpts from an address to the Commonwealth Workshop in Nadi, 29 August 2005

Clay Shirky photo
Eugène Edine Pottier photo

“This is the final struggle
Let us group together, and tomorrow
The Internationale
Will be the human race”

Eugène Edine Pottier (1816–1887) French politician

C'est la lutte finale
Groupons-nous, et demain
L'Internationale
Sera le genre humain
The Internationale (1864)

Smedley D. Butler photo
Jean Piaget photo
Piet Mondrian photo

“It is of small importance whether De Stijl still exists as a 'group'; a new style was born, a new aesthetic created; it needs only to be understood – and cultivated.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote in: 'L'expression plastique nouvelle dans la peinture', Piet Mondriaan, 'Cahiers d'Art', 1, Paris, 1926, pp. 181-183
1920's

C. Wright Mills photo

“Competition has been curtailed by larger corporations; it has been sabotaged by groups of smaller entrepreneurs acting collectively. Both groups have made clear the locus of liberalism's rhetoric of small business and family farm.The character and ideology of the small entrepreneur and the facts of the market are selling the idea of competition short. These liberal heroes, the small businessmen and the farmer, do not want to develop their characters by free and open competition; they do not believe in competition, and they have been doing their best to get away from it.When the small businessmen are asked whether they think free competition is…a good thing, they answer…, 'Yes, of course—what do you mean?' … Finally: 'How about here in this town in furniture?'—or groceries, or whatever the man's line is. Their answers are of two sorts: 'Yes, if it's fair competition,' which turns out to mean: 'if it doesn't make me compete.' … The small businessman, as well as the farmer, wants to become big, not directly by eating up others like himself in competition, but by the indirect ways means practiced by his own particular heroes—those already big. In the dream life of the small entrepreneur, the sure fix is replacing the open market.But if small men wish to close their ranks, why do they continue to talk…about free competition? The answer is that the political function of free competition is what really matters now…[f]or, if there is free competition and a constant coming and going of enterprises, the one who remains established is 'the better man' and 'deserves to be where he is.' But if instead of such competition, there is a rigid line between successful entrepreneurs and the employee community, the man on top may be 'coasting on what his father did,' and not really be worthy of his hard-won position. Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and of the best man winning than the man who inherited his father's store or farm. …… In Congress small-business committees clamored for legislation to save the weak backbone of the national economy. Their legislative efforts have been directed against their more efficient competitors. First they tried to kill off the low-priced chain stores by taxation; then they tried to eliminate the alleged buying advantages of mass distributor; finally they tried to freeze the profits of all distributors in order to protect their own profits from those who could and were selling goods cheaper to the consumer.The independent retailer…has been pushing to maintain a given margin under the guise of 'fair competition' and 'fair-trade' laws. He now regularly demands that the number of outlets controlled by chain stores be drastically limited and that production be divorced from distribution. This would, of course, kill the low prices charged consumers by the A&P;, which makes very small retail profits, selling almost at cost, and whose real profits come from the manufacturing and packaging.…Under the threat of 'ruinous competition,' laws are on the books of many states and cities legalizing the ruin of competition.”

Section One: The Competitive Way of Life.
White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951)

Howard S. Becker photo
Anthony Burgess photo
Jerry Coyne photo

“To Parker Bright, Hannah Black, and other critics of this painting, I say this:
I completely reject your criticism. If only artists of the proper ethnicity can depict violence inflicted on their group, then only writers of the proper ethnicity can write about the same issues, and so on with all the arts. And what goes for ethnicity or race goes for gender: men cannot write about suffering inflicted on women, nor women about suffering inflicted on men. Gays cannot write about straight people and vice versa.
The fact is that we are all human, and we are all capable of sharing, as well as depicting, the pain and suffering of others. I will not allow you to fracture art and literature the way you have fractured politics. Yes, horrible injustices have been visited on minority groups, on women, on gays, and on other marginalized people, but to allow that injustice to be conveyed only by “properly ethnic or gendered artists” is to deny us our common humanity and deprive us of emotional solidarity. No group, whatever its pigmentation or chromosomal constitution, has the exclusive right to create art or literature about their own subgroup. To deny others that right is to censor them.
To those who say this painting has caused them “unnecessary hurt” because it is by a white artist about black pain, I say, “Your own pain about this artwork is gratuitous; I do not take it seriously. It’s the cry of a coddled child who simply wants attention.””

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" Insane political correctness: snowflakes urge destruction of Emmett Till painting https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/04/04/insane-political-correctness-snowflakes-urge-destruction-of-emmett-till-painting/" April 4, 2017

“Leadership, pure and simple, is the assumption of responsibility for the pursuit of excellence in group life.”

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) American sociologist

Attributed to Selznick in: Kobi Yamada, ‎Dan Zadra, ‎Steve Potter (2003), Everyone Leads,

Ayn Rand photo
Margaret Mead photo
Everett Dean Martin photo
Robert S. Kaplan photo

“Industrial age companies created sharp distinctions between two groups of employees. The intellectual elite—managers and engineers—used their analytical skills to design products and processes, select and manage customers, and supervise day-to-day operations. The second group was composed of the people who actually produced the products and delivered the services. This direct labor work force was a principal factor of production for industrial age companies, but used only their physical capabilities, not their minds. They performed tasks and processes under direct supervision of white-collar engineers and managers. At the end of the twentieth century, automation and productivity have reduced the percentage of people in the organization who perform traditional work functions, while competitive demands have increased the number of people performing analytic functions: engineering, marketing, management, and administration. Even individuals still involved in direct production and service delivery are valued for their suggestions on how to improve quality, reduce costs, and decrease cycle times…
Now all employees must contribute value by what they know and by the information they can provide. Investing in, managing, and exploiting the knowledge of every employee have become critical to the success of information age companies”

Robert S. Kaplan (1940) American accounting academic

Source: The Balanced Scorecard, 1996, p. 5-6

Georges Sorel photo
Upton Sinclair photo