Quotes about institution
page 18

“I was also pained to notice an institution which I certainly did not expect to find in this country – I mean caste.”

Keshub Chunder Sen (1838–1884) Indian academic

Your rich people are really Brahmins, and your poor people are Sudras.
Speech at Hannover Square Rooms on the occasion of a Soiree held to bid him farewell on 12th September 1870.

Pain, Country

“Do we refer to the purposes of the Charter? They are expressions of universally shared ideals which cannot fail us, though we, alas, often fail them. Or do we think of the institutions of the United Nations? They are our tools. We fashioned them. We use them. It is our responsibility to remedy any flaws there may be in them…. This is a difficult lesson for both idealists and realists, though for different reasons. I suppose that, just as the first temptation of the realist is the illusion of cynicism, so the first temptation of the idealist is the illusion of Utopia.”

Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961) Swedish diplomat, economist, and author

"An International Administrative Service", From an Address to the International Law Association at McGill University, Montreal, 30 May, 1956. Wilder Foote (Ed.), The Servant of Peace, A Selection of the Speeches and Statements of Dag Hammarskjöld, The Bodley Head, London 1962, p. 116.

Universe, Fashion, Thinking

“Prem Rawat speaks of a peace that is more than the absence of war. A peace that institutions cannot bring. A peace that needs to be established by each individual. To establish peace on the outside, he says, peace needs to be established first on the inside. He brings a remarkable message of hope, and I look forward to hearing him tonight. Please join me in welcoming to the stage a truly wonderful, international, inspirational man, Prem Rawat.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

About, 2000s

War, Peace, Hope

“Many people in this world speak of peace from different angles. Some speak of peace as a result of good socio-economic policies, or as a result of a sound distribution of wealth. Prem speaks of peace from a perspective that is both original and intriguing. Rather than to look only to institutions or to policies for creating peace, he speaks of a peace that, he says, each person is personally responsible for finding. Despite ever-growing audiences, his message remains directed at each individual who comes to hear him and the people who enjoy his message come from all walks of life.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Dr. Pages, Chief Executive Officer Universal Forum of Cultures, Barcelona, Spain. June 14, 2004
About, 2000s

Peace, Personality, Wealth, People

“Very old money was behind the Crow’s Nest. And enough of it that its Owners didn’t mind losing some every month to keep the place going. It was a kind of eleemosynary institution, created to serve not culture and not dukh, but a thing called the Purpose.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

And if Ty kept working there for another few decades, perhaps one of the Owners would sit him down one day in the Bolt Hole and deign to tell him what exactly the Purpose was.
"Five Thousand Years Later"
Seveneves (2015), Part Three

Money

“You made the born noble yours, welcoming him as what he was, the Sent of Heaven: you did not force him either to die or become your enemy; idly neglecting or suppressing him as what he was not, a thing of no worth. You accepted the blessed light; and in the shape of infernal lightning it needed not to visit you. How, like an immense mine-shaft through the dim oppressed strata of society, this Institution of the Priesthood ran; opening, from the lowest depths towards all heights and towards Heaven itself, a free road of egress and emergence towards virtuous nobleness, heroism and well-doing, for every born man.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), The New Downing Street (April 15, 1850)

Light

“In those days I had seen little further than the old school of political economists into the possibilities of fundamental improvement in social arrangements. Private property, as now understood, and inheritance, appeared to me, as to them, the dernier mot of legislation: and I looked no further than to mitigating the inequalities consequent on these institutions, by getting rid of primogeniture and entails. The notion that it was possible to go further than this in removing the injustice -- for injustice it is, whether admitting of a complete remedy or not -- involved in the fact that some are born to riches and the vast majority to poverty, I then reckoned chimerical, and only hoped that by universal education, leading to voluntary restraint on population, the portion of the poor might be made more tolerable. In short, I was a democrat, but not the least of a Socialist. We were now much less democrats than I had been, because so long as education continues to be so wretchedly imperfect, we dreaded the ignorance and especially the selfishness and brutality of the mass: but our ideal of ultimate improvement went far beyond Democracy, and would class us decidedly under the general designation of Socialists. While we repudiated with the greatest energy that tyranny of society over the individual which most Socialistic systems are supposed to involve, we yet looked forward to a time when society will no longer be divided into the idle and the industrious; when the rule that they who do not work shall not eat, will be applied not to paupers only, but impartially to all; when the division of the produce of labour, instead of depending, as in so great a degree it now does, on the accident of birth, will be made by concert on an acknowledged principle of justice; and when it will no longer either be, or be thought to be, impossible for human beings to exert themselves strenuously in procuring benefits which are not to be exclusively their own, but to be shared with the society they belong to. The social problem of the future we considered to be, how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action, with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour. We had not the presumption to suppose that we could already foresee, by what precise form of institutions these objects could most effectually be attained, or at how near or how distant a period they would become practicable. We saw clearly that to render any such social transformation either possible or desirable, an equivalent change of character must take place both in the uncultivated herd who now compose the labouring masses, and in the immense majority of their employers. Both these classes must learn by practice to labour and combine for generous, or at all events for public and social purposes, and not, as hitherto, solely for narrowly interested ones. But the capacity to do this has always existed in mankind, and is not, nor is ever likely to be, extinct. Education, habit, and the cultivation of the sentiments, will make a common man dig or weave for his country, as readily as fight for his country. True enough, it is only by slow degrees, and a system of culture prolonged through successive generations, that men in general can be brought up to this point. But the hindrance is not in the essential constitution of human nature. Interest in the common good is at present so weak a motive in the generality not because it can never be otherwise, but because the mind is not accustomed to dwell on it as it dwells from morning till night on things which tend only to personal advantage. When called into activity, as only self-interest now is, by the daily course of life, and spurred from behind by the love of distinction and the fear of shame, it is capable of producing, even in common men, the most strenuous exertions as well as the most heroic sacrifices. The deep-rooted selfishness which forms the general character of the existing state of society, is so deeply rooted, only because the whole course of existing institutions tends to foster it; modern institutions in some respects more than ancient, since the occasions on which the individual is called on to do anything for the public without receiving its pay, are far less frequent in modern life, than the smaller commonwealths of antiquity.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/230/mode/1up pp. 230-233

Fight, Love, Fear, Problem

“A sane society would be asking questions about the very nature of a society and culture that creates so much trauma for children.... We live in a society that prioritizes profits for large corporations and power for large institutions. We live in a society in which, for example, the cause of depression and suicide has been, for decades, falsely attributed by psychiatry and Big Pharma to a chemical imbalance theory long known to be untrue—an untruth that has made billions of dollars for drug companies and increased power for psychiatry through increased use of antidepressants which are known to actually increase suicide... just one of many examples that we do not live in a sane society.”

Bruce E. Levine American psychologist

The Groundbreaking Public Health Study That Should Change U.S. Society—But Won’t https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/07/19/the-groundbreaking-public-health-study-that-should-change-u-s-society-but-wont/, (19 July 2019)

Question, Children, Nature, Falseness

“The hegemonic powers also used religion and nationalism to preserve their supremacy. In all parts of Kurdistan, Islam is a state religion used as a tool for controlling the population. Even if these regimes embrace secularism, the entanglement of political and religious institutions is obvious.”

Abdullah Öcalan (1949) Founder of the PKK

Source: The Political Thought of Abdullah Ocalan (2017), War and Peace in Kurdistan, p.11

Religion, Parting

“The most important problem for freedom in a social context is thus family and marriage. When the woman marries, she is in fact enslaved. It is impossible to imagine another institution that enslaves like marriage. The most profound slaveries are established by the institution of marriage, slaveries that become more entrenched within the family.”

Abdullah Öcalan (1949) Founder of the PKK

The Political Thought of Abdullah Ocalan (2017), Liberating Life: Women's Revolution

Family, Imagination, Freedom, Marriage

“Family is not a social institution that should be overthrown. But is should be transformed. The claim of ownership over women and children, handed down from the hierarchy, should be abandoned.”

Abdullah Öcalan (1949) Founder of the PKK

Source: The Political Thought of Abdullah Ocalan (2017), Liberating Life: Women's Revolution, pp. 79

Family, Children, Women

“In our society, we don not study history to understand the process of change but just to entertain ourselves with past events. For this reason, history is not regarded as a useful subject. The history that we teach in our educational institutions is political history and, as such, it is used by the ruling classes.”

Mubarak Ali (1941) Historian, activist, scholar

In the Shadow of History, Chapter: Why should we study History? p. 4
History, What History Tells Us, In the Shadow of History

Study, History, Understanding, Past

“These considerations did not make us overlook the folly of premature attempts to dispense with the inducements of private interest in social affairs, while no substitute for them has been or can be provided: but we regarded all existing institutions and social arrangements as being (in a phrase I once heard from Austin) "merely provisional," and we welcomed with the greatest pleasure and interest all socialistic experiments by select individuals (such as the Co-operative Societies), which, whether they succeeded or failed, could not but operate as a most useful education of those who took part in them, by cultivating their capacity of acting upon motives pointing directly to the general good, or making them aware of the defects which render them and others incapable of doing so.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/233/mode/1up pp. 233-234

Making love, Parting, Pleasure, Education

“When you're white you don't know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto, you don’t know what it's like to be poor...You don't know what it’s like to be hassled when you walk down the street, or dragged out of a car. And I believe that as a nation in the year 2016, we must be firm in making it clear, we will end institutional racism and reform a broken criminal justice system”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

2016-03-06
Sanders: If You're White You Don't Know What It's Like To Be Poor
Amanda Terkel
Huffington Post
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-ghetto_n_56dce712e4b03a405679062b
2010s, 2016

Cars, Justice, Making love

“Because we have not understood that wholes are more than the sum of their parts, we have assembled our information into islands, an archipelago of disconnected data. Our great institutions have evolved in virtual isolation from one another.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Six, Liberating Knowledge: News from the Frontiers of Science

Parting

“This will bring about a complete transformation of society: a new livingness will characterize our relationships and institutions; a new freedom and sense of joy will replace the present fear. Above all else, mankind will come to realize that living is an art, based on certain laws, requiring the function of the intuition for correct expression.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

The Art of Living: Living within the Laws of Life (2006)

Law, Freedom, Art, Joy

“The court is the least abstract of institutions. It is nine men, nine very human men, participating in a process that can be impressive or disturbing, grave or funny. And contrary to the general impression, the process is more visible than most of what goes on in government.”

Anthony Lewis (1927–2013) American journalist

Quoted in Congressional Quarterly's Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court (1979), p. viii.

Men

“The hope for real social transformation need not rest on circumstantial evidence. One major arena, health care, has already begun to experience wrenching change. The impending transformation of medicine is a window to the transformation of all our institutions. Here we can see what happens when consumers begin to withdraw legitimacy from an authoritarian institution. We see the rise of the autonomous health seeker, the transformation of a profession by its leadership, the impact of the new models from science, the way decentralized networks are effecting wide geographic change.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eight, Healing Ourselves

Hope, Health, Way, Science

“We can also see the class basis of the emerging concept of child hood in the system of child education that came in along with it. If childhood was only an abstract concept, then the modern school was the institution that built it into reality.”

Shulamith Firestone book The Dialectic of Sex

Source: The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Chapter Four

Childhood, Education, Reality, School

“The Crisis: Our institutions—especially our governing structures—are mechanistic, rigid, fragmented. The world isn't working.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Seven, Right Power

World

“[W]e have all these myths... about a Democratic society... [W]e have been disintegrating our Democratic institutions for over 40 years.”

Ralph Nader (1934) American consumer rights activist and corporate critic

"American Mythology and the Loss of Democracy" (2018)

“For me, as for every leader of the Liberal Party, encouragement for the family, support for small business and respect for values and institutions that have stood the test of time are at the heart of my public life.”

Tony Abbott (1957) Australian politician

Page vii of Tony Abbott's introduction to 2013 edition of his book Battlelines.
Leader of the Opposition (2009-2015), Battlelines book, (2013)

Family, Time, Business, Support

“States are violent institutions. The government of any country, including ours, represents some sort of domestic power structure, and it's usually violent. States are violent to the extent that they're powerful, that's roughly accurate.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Quotes 1990s, 1990–1994, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, 1992

Country

“The health service, they're very worried about a collapse in the number of EU migrants coming here. Social care would be in a terrible position.... finance, education. The reality is that business, the CBI, the Institute of Directors, but also health, education and social care; they say that they need these European migrants and we have to listen to them.”

Diane Abbott (1953) British Labour Party politician

Diane Abbott: Listen to CBI and NHS' on Brexit migration https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-42384346 BBC News (17 December 2017) 2010s

Business, Education, Reality, Health

“I see not then how the children of Adam, or of any man else, can be free from subjection to their parents. And this subjection of children being the fountain of all regal authority, by the ordination of God himself. From whence it follows, that civil power, not only in general is by Divine institution, but even the assigning of it specifically to the eldest parent. Which quite takes away that new and common distinction which refers only power universal and absolute to God, but power respective in regard of the special form of government to the choice of the people. Nor leaves it any place for such imaginary pactions between Kings and their people as many dream of. This lordship which Adam by creation had over the whole world, and by right descending from him the Patriarchs did enjoy, was as large and ample as the absolutest dominion of any monarch which hath been since the creation.”

Robert Filmer book Patriarcha

Source: Patriarcha, pp. 57–58

God, Children, People, Dreams

“It is only through multilateral institutions that States can hold each other to account. And that makes it very important to organize those institutions in a fair and democratic way, giving the poor and the weak some influence over the actions of the rich and the strong.”

Kofi Annan (1938–2018) 7th Secretary-General of the United Nations

Truman Library address (2006)

Way, Strong, Making love

“The very loss of our church establishment, though, as in all human institutions, some defects may be found in it, would in itself be attended with the most fatal consequences. No prudent man dares hastily pronounce how for its destruction might not greatly endanger our civil institutions.”

William Wilberforce (1759–1833) English politician

Source: Real Christianity (1797), pp. 411–12

Loss

“There was no time during the rebellion when I did not think, and often say, that the South was more to be benefited by its defeat than the North. The latter had the people, the institutions, and the territory to make a great and prosperous nation. The former was burdened with an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it, and one which degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class. With the outside world at war with this institution, they could not have extended their territory. The labor of the country was not skilled, nor allowed to become so. The whites could not toil without becoming degraded, and those who did were denominated 'poor white trash.'”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

The system of labor would have soon exhausted the soil and left the people poor. The non-slaveholders would have left the country, and the small slaveholder must have sold out to his more fortunate neighbor. Soon the slaves would have outnumbered the masters, and, not being in sympathy with them, would have risen in their might and exterminated them. The war was expensive to the South as well as to the North, both in blood and treasure, but it was worth all it cost.

Ch. 41
1880s, Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885)

Time, Country, War, People

“We don’t make a distinction between factory slavery and humane slavery or cruel genocide and painless genocide. We, rightly so, condemn the entire institution.”

Jacy Reese (1992) American social scientist

[Why It's Time to End Factory Farming, October 20, 2018, Quillette, https://quillette.com/2018/10/20/why-its-time-to-end-factory-farming/]

Making love

“Hindu [educational] institutions have no fundamental right to compensation in case of compulsory acquisition of their property by the state... a lasting solution to this problem lies only in amending Article 30 of the Constitution...”

K. R. Malkani (1921–2003) Indian politician

K.R. Malkani, quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2001). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. 525 ff.

Education, Problem

“Is an institution the Indian history course of which covers only the period from the raids of Mahmud Ghaznavi to 1947, the geography course of which focuses on the Arabian peninsula, an institution of and for India?”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

The World of Fatwas (Or The Shariah In Action), 1995

History

“Any institution which does not suppose the people good, and the magistrate corruptible, is evil.”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

From article 19 of the Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen http://saintjust.free.fr/DDHC93.htm (21 April 1793) Original: (fr) Tout institution qui ne suppose pas le peuple bon et le magistrat corruptible est vicieuse.

People, Evil

“As people surrender the power to build the institutions they want, which would enable lives that make sense to them, the system as a whole sacrifices the intelligence it needs: it loses its minds.”

David Fleming (1940–2010) British activist

Lean Logic, (2016), p. 413, entry on Scale https://leanlogic.online/scale/

Sense, Intelligence, People, Making love

“IN a free‐enterprise, private‐property system, a corporate executive is an employe of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom. Of course, in some cases his employers may have a different objective. A group of persons might establish a corporation for an eleemosynary purpose—for example, a hospital or school. The manager of such a corporation will not have money profit as his objective but the rendering of certain services. In either case, the key point is that, in his capacity as a corporate executive, the manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation or establish the eleemosynary institution, and his primary responsibility is to them.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

“A Friedman doctrine‐- The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” (Sept. 1970)

School, Money, Law, Business

“Turn where we may,—within,—around,—the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve. Now, therefore, while every thing at home and abroad forebodes ruin to those who persist in a hopeless struggle against the spirit of the age,—now, while the crash of the proudest throne of the continent is still resounding in our ears,—now, while the roof of a British palace affords an ignominious shelter to the exiled heir of forty kings,—now, while we see on every side ancient institutions subverted, and great societies dissolved,—now, while the heart of England is still sound,—now, while the old feelings and the old associations retain a power and a charm which may too soon pass away,—now, in this your accepted time,—now in this your day of salvation,—take counsel, not of prejudice,—not of party spirit,—not of the ignominious pride of a fatal consistency,—but of history,—of reason,—of the ages which are past,—of the signs of this most portentous time. Pronounce in a manner worthy of the expectation with which this great Debate has been anticipated, and of the long remembrance which it will leave behind. Renew the youth of the State. Save property divided against itself. Save the multitude, endangered by their own ungovernable passions. Save the aristocracy, endangered by its own unpopular power. Save the greatest, and fairest, and most highly civilized community that ever existed, from calamities which may in a few days sweep away all the rich heritage of many ages of wisdom and glory. The danger is terrible. The time is short. If this Bill should be rejected, I pray to God that none of those who concur in rejecting it may ever remember their votes with unavailing regret, amidst the wreck of laws, the confusion of ranks, the spoliation of property, and the dissolution of social order.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

Speech in the House of Commons (2 March 1831) https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1831/mar/02/ministerial-plan-of-parliamentary-reform#column_1204 in favour of the Reform Bill 1830s

Home, God, Time, Law

“When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the society. But when in that same city—Birmingham, Alabama—five hundred black babies die each year because of the lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism.”

Stokely Carmichael (1941–1998) American activist

Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, 1967, p. 4, co-authored with Charles V. Hamilton

Communication, Baby, Children, Food

“Present excitement will at all times magnify present dangers, but true philosophy must teach us that none more threatening than the past can remain to be overcome; and we ought (for we have just reason) to entertain an abiding confidence in the stability of our institutions and an entire conviction that if administered in the true form, character, and spirit in which they were established they are abundantly adequate to preserve to us and our children the rich blessings already derived from them, to make our beloved land for a thousand generations that chosen spot where happiness springs from a perfect equality of political rights.”

Martin Van Buren (1782–1862) American politician, 8th President of the United States (in office from 1837 to 1841)

Inaugural address (1837)

Confidence, Time, Past, Happiness

“...what the freedom is that I love, and that to which I think all men intitled. It is not solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish Liberty. As if every Man was to regulate the whole of his Conduct by his own will. The Liberty I mean is social freedom. It is that state of things in which Liberty is secured by the equality of Restraint; A Constitution of things in which the liberty of no one Man, and no body of Men and no Number of men, can find Means to trespass on the liberty of any Person, or any description of Persons in the Society. This kind of liberty is indeed but another name for Justice, as ascertained by wise Laws, and secured by well-constructed institutions.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Letter to Charles-Jean-François Depont (November 1789), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789–December 1791 (1967), p. 42
1780s

Selfishness, Justice, Law, Freedom

“For the unbroken life of the English nation over a thousand years and more is a phenomenon unique in history. ... Institutions which elsewhere are recent and artificial creations, appear in England almost as works of nature, spontaneous and unquestioned. The deepest instinct of the Englishman—how the word “instinct” keeps forcing itself in again and again!—is for continuity; he never acts more freely nor innovates more boldly than when he most is conscious of conserving or even of reacting. From this continuous life of a united people in its island home spring, as from the soil of England, all that is peculiar in the gifts and the achievements of the English nation, its laws, its literature, its freedom, its self-discipline. ... And this continuous and continuing life of England is symbolised and expressed, as by nothing else, by the English kingship. English it is, for all the leeks and thistles and shamrocks, the Stuarts and the Hanoverians, for all the titles grafted upon it here and elsewhere, “her other realms and territories”, Headships of Commonwealths, and what not. The stock that received all these grafts is English, the sap that rises through it to the extremities rises from roots in English earth, the earth of England's history.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech to the Royal Society of St George (22 April 1961), quoted in A Nation Not Afraid. The Thinking of Enoch Powell (1965), pp. 145–146

Home, Law, History, Freedom

“I believe...all the enduring institutions which human societies have attained have been reached, not of the set design and forethought of some group of statesmen, but by that unbidden and unconscious convergence of many thoughts and wills in successive generations to which, as it obeys no single guiding hand, we may give the name of "drifting."”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Source: Minute (20 April 1875), quoted in E. D. Steele, 'Salisbury at the India Office', in Lord Blake and Hugh Cecil (eds.), Salisbury: The Man and his Policies (1987), p. 141

Success

“The institutions of democracy will be gradually and, if possible, imperceptibly withdrawn. The Press will become a better and better directed and drilled servant of the capitalist class. All other methods of disseminating information, notably the cinema and the wireless, will be more and more consciously monopolized. Power may be gradually withdrawn from a democratically elected Chamber (cf . Reform of the House of Lords in Britain) or alternatively the franchise may be gradually curtailed (cf. the proposals of the British Conservative party for withholding the franchise from persons in receipt of poor relief). At the same time, the habitual regime of police violence will be increased (cf. the present heavy sentences on working-class militants in Britain passed almost openly, not for any specific offence but because the accused were working-class militants, as notably in the case of Arthur Homer; the increasing use of terror in all American wage disputes ; the police regime in France, etc., etc.). This method applies the principle of " the inevitability of gradualness " to the introduction of an open capitalist dictatorship.”

John Strachey (1901–1963) British politician and writer (1901-1963)

Source: The Coming Struggle for Power (1932), p. 268

Democracy, Personality, Time, Housing

“‘The people’ have in fact done everything that is done; they built the houses and roads and railroads and telephones and planes, they organized world‐wide cooperative institutions—the oil companies, the banks—and the postal services, and the militia companies, and the schools—what didn’t ‘the people’ do? What happens is that, after they do it, The Government takes it. The Government takes the roads, the postal service, the systems of communication, the banks, the markets, the stock exchanges, the insurance companies, the schools, the militia, the building trades, the telegraph and telephones, the radios, after ‘the people’ have done all these things for themselves.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Source: The Lady and The Tycoon: Letters of Rose Wilder Lane and Jasper Crane (1973), pp. 332-333 (letter July 13, 1963)

School, Housing, People, Communication

“But one no longer wonders when one realizes that in the higher classes there is an unerring instinct of what tends to maintain and of what tends to destroy the organization by virtue of which they enjoy their privileges. The fashionable lady had certainly not reasoned out that if there were no capitalists and no army to defend them, her husband would have no fortune, and she could not have her entertainments and her ball-dresses. And the artist certainly does not argue that he needs the capitalists and the troops to defend them, so that they may buy his pictures. But instinct, replacing reason in this instance, guides them unerringly. And it is precisely this instinct which leads all men, with few exceptions, to support all the religious, political, and economic institutions which are to their advantage.”

Leo Tolstoy The Kingdom of God Is Within You

Source: The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), Chapter XII, Conclusion—Repent Ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand

Support, Fashion, Men

“Trading posts and colonies, gentlemen, have not only strengthened the commercial positions of the peoples concerned; these nations owe their greatness to these institutions.”

Leopold II of Belgium (1835–1909) King of the Belgians

Source: Leopold II, Het hele Verhaal, Johan Op De Beeck Horizon, 2020 https://klara.be/leopold-ii-aflevering-2-0 ISBN 9789463962094 Prince Leopold II in his function of Senator in the Senate of Belgium.

People

“An institution is likely to be more searchingly appraised if attention is focused at the outset upon its faults rather than its virtues.”

Neil H. Jacoby (1909–1979) University professor and public servant

Source: Corporate Power and Social Responsibility: A Blueprint for the Future (1973), p. 3

“We believe there is an opportunity for institutions like the Giants to create a healing function.”

Larry Baer (1957) MLB Executive

Giants' Larry Baer talks about coronavirus impact on baseball season https://www.ktvu.com/news/giants-larry-baer-talks-about-coronavirus-impact-on-baseball-season, KTVU (April 3, 2020)

“I think the rewards for moral courage are promotion. ... Any institution gets the behavior it rewards. Now if the institution gets rotten, you can have a problem with this. It's happened to institutions, it's happened to corporations. It's why you have to be very alert to this to keep your personal and managerial integrity.”

James Mattis (1950) 26th and current United States Secretary of Defense; United States Marine Corps general

Interview with David Brooks on C-SPAN (9 June 2019), time code 48:00 https://www.c-span.org/video/?463748-1/defense-secretary-jim-mattis-discusses-military-career-leadership

Courage, Problem, Thinking, Personality

“There is nothing sacred about the existing system. All economic and political institutions are contrivances that should serve the interests of the people. When they fail to do so, they should be replaced by something more responsive, more just, and more democratic. Marx said this, and so did Jefferson. It is a revolutionary doctrine, and very much an American one.”

Michael Parenti (1933) American academic

Source: Democracy for the Few (2010 [1974]), sixth edition, Chapter 17, p. 335

People

“Where the self is conceived as prior to its ends, independent of the roles it may occupy at any given time, reputation cannot be a matter of honor in the traditional sense. For the unencumbered self, not honor but dignity is the basis of respect―the dignity that consists in the capacity of persons as autonomous agents to choose their ends for themselves. Unlike honor, which ties respect for persons to the roles they inhabit, dignity resides in a self antecedent to social institutions, and so is invulnerable to injury by insult alone. For selves such as these, reputation matters, not intrinsically, as a matter of honor, but only instrumentally, as a business asset for example.”

Michael J. Sandel (1953) American political philosopher

Chap. 3. Religious Liberty and Freedom of Speech
Democracy's Discontent (1996)

Personality, Business, Sense, Time

“The large industrial enterprise is... the representative institution of an industrial society. It determines the individual's view of his society.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Under section header: The Enterprise as Society's Mirror
1930s- 1950s, The New Society (1950)

“The economy as an instituted process of interaction serving the satisfaction of material wants forms a vital part of every human community. Without an economy in this sense, no society could exist for any length of time.”

Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) economist, philosopher and historian

Source: The Livelihood of Man (1977), Ch. 2 : The Two Meanings of Economic

Communication, Time, Parting, Sense

“The so-called global economy was not a permanent institution, […] but a set of transient circumstances peculiar to a certain time: the Indian summer of the fossil fuel era.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 1, p. 12.

Time, Summer

“What we call land is an element of nature inextricably interwoven with man’s institutions. To isolate it and form a market for it was perhaps the weirdest of all the undertakings of our ancestors.”

Karl Polanyi book The Great Transformation

Source: The Great Transformation (1944), Ch. 15 : Market and Nature

Nature

“The past is therefore a permanent dimension of the human consciousness, an inevitable component of the institutions, values and other patterns of human society. The problem for historians is to analyse the nature of this 'sense of the past' in society and to trace its changes and transformations.”

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) British academic historian and Marxist historiographer

Chap. 2 : The Sense of the Past
On History (1997)

Change, Past, Nature, Problem

“Despite the important gains of antiracist social movements over the last half century, racism hides from view within institutional structures, and its most reliable refuge is the prison system.”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Source: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Chapter Five

“The only thing that is certain now is that we must focus all our energies solely on racial survival and allow no peripheral issues like argument over past institutions to divide our energies.”

David Lane (white nationalist) (1938–2007) American white supremacist, convicted felon

An Interview by Focus Fourteen with David lane
Focus Fourteen

Past

“More families should watch the Olympics together. To me, those are core American family values: Cheering on a corrupt institutional body that's super problematic with money and opportunity but we all pretend like it's an equal playing field and celebrate it - what's more American than that?”

Jonathan Van Ness (1987) American hairstylist and television personality

page 17
Over the Top: A Raw Journey to Self-Love (2019)

Money, Family

“We are in a state of bloodless civil war. No common principles, no respect for common institutions or traditions unite the various groups of politicians, who are struggling for power. To loot somebody or something is the common object under a thick varnish of pious phrases.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Letter to W. H. Smith (5 February 1889), quoted in Michael Bentley, Lord Salisbury's World: Conservative Environments in Late-Victorian Britain (2001), p. 65
1880s

War

“No one doubts that biological universals exist. We must sleep, eat, and grow older, and we are not about to give up procreation; almost all our social institutions are influenced by these imperatives.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

Source: An Urchin in the Storm (1987) "Genes on the Brain", p. 113

Sleep, Universe

“The call to abolish the prison as the dominant form of punishment cannot ignore the extent to which the institution of the prison has stockpiled ideas and practices that are hopefully approaching obsolescence in the larger society, but that retain their ghastly vitality behind prison walls.”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Source: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Chapter Four

Idea

“A religion with an ever-growing line of enlightened masters, such as exists in the dharma traditions, is less likely to become fossilized into institutional dogma and therefore more difficult to control.”

Rajiv Malhotra book Being Different

Source: Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism (2011)

Religion

“It is disturbing to read the amount of intellectual investment that has been made by the forces that are inimical to our country. These forces have penetrated into our democratic institutions to hollow them from inside.”

Subramanian Swamy (1939) Indian politician

2015-Present
Source: Foreword by Subramanian Swamy in Atri, N., & Sagar, M. A. (2017). Brainwashed republic.

Reading, Country

“I suppose there were other institutions in Embassytown where the dynamic of the quotidian sustained—some hospitals, perhaps some schools, perhaps houses where shiftparents most deeply loved the children. Whenever any society dies there must be heroes whose fightback is to not change.”

China Miéville Embassytown

Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 15 (p. 213)

Housing, Children, Change, School

“While jails and prisons have been dominant institutions for the control of men, mental institutions have served a similar purpose for women. That is, deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane.”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Source: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Chapter Four

Women, Men

“I respect the institution of marriage as my parents were married until death literally parted them and they had a beautiful relationship. The problem is at some point, it begins to annoy you because of how much importance people have placed on it.”

Rita Dominic (1975) Nigerian actress

Source: https://www.vanguardngr.com/2021/04/i-wont-rush-into-marriage-to-please-the-public-rita-dominic/amp/ Rita Dominic on marriage.

Marriage, People, Beauty, Problem

“I’m pretty pessimistic about the Chinese government because I think there is no balance within it or any institution, country or organization that can hold it accountable. So, I don’t know what the future will be.”

Nanfu Wang (1985) director and filmmaker

Source: "It Didn’t Take Long for Me to Feel Empathy: Nanfu Wang on In the Same Breath" in Roger Ebert https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/it-didnt-take-long-for-me-to-feel-empathy-nanfu-wang-on-in-the-same-breath (17 August 2021)

Country, Future, Thinking

“The pitchforks and torches can tear down and burn up but they can't build up the institutions and communities so necessary to a stable and prosperous country”

Bob Inglis (1959) Former U.S. congressman

Source: "Bob Inglis: How I changed my mind about climate change" https://www.npr.org/2021/12/03/1061214253/bob-inglis-how-i-changed-my-mind-about-climate-change, NPR (December 3, 2021)

Country, Communication, Tear

“We hope and pray so that the political situation becomes clearer, to have better balance on behalf of the institutions on this delicate subject, in matters of faith and freedom of religious minorities.”

Murphy Pakiam (1938) Catholic archbishop

Source: The Archbishop of Kuala Lumpur: "On the word Allah, a politicized case: the term will continue to be used in liturgies" http://www.fides.org/en/news/34489-ASIA_MALAYSIA_The_Archbishop_of_Kuala_Lumpur_On_the_word_Allah_a_politicized_case_the_term_will_continue_to_be_used_in_liturgies (14 October 2013)

Faith, Freedom, Hope

“We've seen a parade of multinational corporations, financial institutions, Hollywood actors, and even American sports superstars joining a shameless stampede to see who can pander most effectively to a regime that is the reigning world champion of predatory economic behavior, human rights abuses, and even genocide.”

Tom Tiffany (1957) American businessman and politician

Exclusive—Rep. Tom Tiffany: Time for U.S. to Recognize Reality by Recognizing Taiwan https://www.breitbart.com/asia/2021/12/02/exclusive-rep-tom-tiffany-time-for-u-s-to-recognize-reality-by-recognizing-taiwan/ (2 December 2021)

Sport, World, Behavior

“I've never known a girl lovelier than you
If I did I would be lying - that I wouldn't do
Come on, have fun, mmm, make my day tonight
Nothing really matters when you are in love
It's the only institution I'm not weary of
Don't be lonely, mmm, make my day tonight”

Gilbert O'Sullivan (1946) Irish singer-songwriter

"Make My Day" (song) Gilbert O'Sullivan, "Make My Day" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTQctCSqNpk (song on YouTube) Song lyrics

Girl, Lying, Love

“The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Skin in the Game

Source: Skin in the Game (2018), p. 7

Time, Business, Error, Knowledge

“It is time that we squarely face the fact that institutional schoolteaching is destructive to children. Nobody survives the seven-lesson curriculum completely unscathed, not even the instructors.”

John Taylor Gatto book Dumbing Us Down

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), p. 17

Children, Time

“Imperialism is an institution under which one nation asserts the right to seize the land or at least to control the government or resources of another people. It is an assertion of stark, bold aggression.”

John Thomas Flynn (1882–1964) American journalist

Source: As We Go Marching (1944), p. 213

People

“Probably one of the most completely misunderstood of all modern institutions is militarism. While military organizations take their origin in man's lust for war, militarism is something more than a mere war machine. By militarism I mean that institution in which the nation maintains large national armies and navies in time of peace, usually raised on the principle of conscription.”

John Thomas Flynn (1882–1964) American journalist

Source: As We Go Marching (1944), p. 98-99

War, Peace, Time

“Spontaneous rallies were used as a pretext for provoking civil unrest. Religious radicals, criminals, outright thugs, looters and petty hooligans filled the streets as if on cue. Socio-economic and socio-political demands were put on the back burner, they were forgotten. Next followed the hot phase, and armed fighters, who were biding their time, took over. The main goal of these events became clear – to undermine the constitutional system, destroy governance institutions and seize power. It is obvious now that these armed activities were coordinated from a single centre, and the carefully planned operation entered its decisive phase.”

Kassym-Jomart Tokayev (1953) Kazakh politician

Source: Kassym-Jomart Tokayev (2022) cited in: " Don’t Ignore All Sides of Russian Messaging https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column_article/dont-ignore-all-sides-of-russian-messaging" in The Cipher Brief, 18 January 2022.

Decision, Time

“The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn, and it isn't supposed to; school was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and a deliberately re-stratified social order. It wasn't made for the benefit of kids and families as those individuals and institutions would define their own needs. School is the first impression children get of organized society; like most first impressions, it is the lasting one. Life according to school is dull and stupid, only consumption promises relief: Coke, Big Macs, fashion jeans, that's where real meaning is found, that is the classroom's lesson, however indirectly delivered.”

John Taylor Gatto book The Underground History of American Education

Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling (2001), pp. 105-106

Fashion, Life, Children, Learning

“The purpose of all the Church's activity is the salvation of souls. The Curia and other institutions are instruments that must be as flexible as possible in the Pope's and Bishops' hands, to take Christ to the ends of the world.”

Francesco Monterisi (1934) Italian cardinal

Cardinal Monterisi: Francis Is Awakening Fervor https://zenit.org/2013/04/24/cardinal-monterisi-francis-is-awakening-fervor/ (24 April 2013)

Soul, World, Christ

“It may possibly be urged the shape of a culture—its mores, evaluations, family organizations, eating habits, living patterns, pedagogical methods, institutions, forms of government, and so forth—arise from the economic necessities of its technology.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Waldo

Waldo (p. 134)
Short fiction, The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein (1999)

Family

“Before a nation can be rebuilt, its citizens need to understand how it was destroyed in the first place: how its institutions were undermined, how its language was twisted, how its people were manipulated”

Anne Applebaum (1964) journalist

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/z4AdQy3VCmgC?hl=en (October 30, 2012).

Understanding, People

“The virus of hate threatens our safety, our institutions, our democracy, our freedoms, and not least, our common humanity. Let us commit ourselves to working together for a more peaceful, just, and loving world.”

Gary Locke (1950) American politician

"Gary Locke keynotes anti-hate summit" in Northwest Asian Weekly https://nwasianweekly.com/2021/10/gary-locke-keynotes-anti-hate-summit/ (29 October 2021)

Democracy, Hate, Freedom, World

“Our country, our nation is built by two institutions, the state and the language. A language whose epicenter today is no longer on these banks of the Seine, but probably much more towards the Congo River basin.”

Emmanuel Macron (1977) 25th President of the French Republic

Macron lashes out at Zemmour: “Our identity is not built on narrow-mindedness" https://palnws.be/2021/09/macron-haalt-uit-naar-zemmour-onze-identiteit-is-niet-gebouwd-op-bekrompenheid/ 2017, 2021

Country

“We, not just Ukraine but everybody, must make an effort to help the Russian population to direct their country back on the road towards democracy, how to develop democratic institutions and how to develop a living, sustainable society.”

Sergiy Kyslytsya (1969) Ukrainian diplomat

Democracy, Country, Help, Effort

“The decline of the churches was a sweeping social revolution, because they had done more than any other institution, public or private, to civilise Australians.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

A Shorter History of Australia (1994)

Quotes about institution page 18

Quotes about institution
page 18