Quotes about socialism
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“The core of common culture is religion. Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

"Culture and Cult" (p. 5)
Modern Culture (2000)

Life, God, Religion, Dependency

“The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented. It's that socialism has been faithfully implemented.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

In his first address to the United Nations https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/09/19/trumps-menacing-united-nations-speech-annotated/. (19 September 2017) 2010s, 2017, September

Problem

“My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially the Anarchists; for Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War (1937) edited by Nancy Cunard and publisehd by the Left Review

Communication, Change

“The long history of mankind is studded with convergences, perhaps most notably in social systems and the use of artefacts and technology. But for human history, set in the arrow of time, there appears to be one intolerable stumbling-block. This is the catastrophic failure in human values and decency.”

Simon Conway Morris (1951) British palaeontologist

Source: The Crucible of Creation (1998), p. 205.

History, Failure, Appearance, Time

“Functionalist systems theories. The theorists in this tradition explain the emergence and/or maintenance of parts, structures, institutions, norms or cultural patterns of a social system in terms of their consequences, that is, the particular functions each realizes or satisfies. This includes, for instance, their contribution to the maintenance and reproduction over time of the larger system. The major functionalist in sociology is arguably Talcott Parsons.”

Tom R. Burns (1937) American sociologist

Source: Systems theories (2006), p. 1.

Time, Parting

“In so far as men have attempted to use the Old Testament as a code of model laws and institutions and have applied these to modern conditions, regardless of the historical connections, these attempts have left a trail of blunder and disaster. In so far as they have caught the spirit that burned in the hearts of the prophets and breathed in gentle humanity through the Mosaic Law, the influence of the Old Testament has been one of the great permanent forces making for democracy and social justice.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Ch.1 The Historical Roots of Christianity the Hebrew Prophets, p. 2

Men, Justice, Law, Democracy

“This is not a Budget, but a revolution; a social and political revolution of the first magnitude.”

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1847–1929) British politician

Letter to the The Times attacking the "People's Budget" (22 June 1909), p. 8.

“For many years he has not breathed the air,
The wholesome open air; the sun, the moon,
The stars, the clouds, the fair blue heaven, the spring,
The flowers, the trees, and the sweet face of man,
Song, or words yet more musical than song,
Affections, feelings, social intercourse
(Unless remembered in his fairy dreams)
Have all been strangers to his solitude! —
A curse is set on him, like poverty,
Or leprosy, or the red plague, but worse, —
The heart has sent its fire up to the brain,
And he is mad.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(5th April 1823) Poetical Catalogue of Pictures. A Maniac visited by his Family in confinement : by Davis.
5th April 1823) April see The Vow of the Peacock (1835
The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Dreams, Music, Feeling, Star

“Two main alternative views of the regulation of industry are widely held. The first is that regulation is instituted primarily for the protection and benefit of the public at large or some large subclass of the public. In this view, the regulations which injure the public -as when the oil import quotas increase the cost of petroleum products to America by $5 billion or more a year- are costs of some social goal (here, national defense) or, occasionally, perversions of the regulatory philosophy. the second view is essentially that the political process defies rational explanation: "politics" is an imponderable, a constantly and unpredictably shifting mixture of forces of the most diverse nature, comprehending acts of great moral virtue (the emancipation of slaves) and of the most vulgar venality”

George Stigler (1911–1991) American economist

the congressman feathering his own nest
Source: "The theory of economic regulation," 1971, p. 3

Nature

“Food redistribution is economically sensible, ecologically pressing, and socially responsible; it is high time food corporations woke up to it and governments started funding the organisations that facilitate it.”

Tristram Stuart (1977) British historian

"The scandal of Britain's free food" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/jan/06/waste.pollution1, The Guardian (6 January 2007).

Food, Time

“To sum up [Trotsky wrote], "the road to Socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the Slate … The State, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i. e. the most ruthless form of State, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction" ([The Defence of Terrorism] p. 157). It would be difficult indeed to put the matter more plainly. The state of the proletarian dictatorship is depicted by Trotsky as a huge permanent concentration camp in which the government exercises absolute power over every aspect of the citizens’ lives and in particular decides how much work they shall do, of what kind and in what places. Individuals are nothing but labour units. Compulsion is universal, and any organization that is not part of the state must be its enemy, thus the enemy of the proletariat. All this, of course, is in the name of an ideal realm of freedom, the advent of which is expected after an indefinite lapse of historical time.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

pg. 512
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume II, The Golden Age

Life, Exercises, Freedom, Universe

“In New Directions for Organization Theory, Jeffrey Pfeffer offers a comprehensive analysis and overview of the field of organization theory and its research literature. This work traces the evolution of organization studies, particularly its more recent history, and highlights the principle concepts and controversies characterizing the study of organizations. Pfeffer argues that the world of organizations has changed in several important ways, including the increasing externalization of employment and the growing use of contingent workers; the changing size distribution of organizations, with a larger proportion of smaller organizations; the increasing influence of external capital markets on organizational decision-making and a concomitant decrease in managerial autonomy; and increasing salary inequality within organizations in the US compared both to the past and to other industrialized nations. These changes and their public policy implications make it especially important to understand organizations as social entities. But Pfeffer questions whether the research literature of organization studies has either addressed these changes and their causes or made much of a contribution to the discussion of public policy…”

Jeffrey Pfeffer (1946) American academic

Book abstract.
New Directions for Organization Theory, 1997

World, Way, History, Literature

“The claims of the most backward sections like the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, who have suffered neglect and have hard to endure disabilities for many centuries. It would be my proud privilege to work for the establishment of a more just social order.”

Lal Bahadur Shastri (1904–1966) The second Prime Minister of the Republic of India and a leader of the Indian National Congress party

Untouchability

Suffering

“The temptation before 1933 was to believe in Hitler as a savior, to believe in a national rebirth. The path to National Socialism led through a wasteland of personal fears, collective anxiety, and resentments. The temptation was to surrender oneself to a dictator, to believe in a miracle. Hitler evoked human will and divine providence. The religious-mystical element in National Socialism was uncannily appealing to unpolitical people, to unrealistic people at odds with their world and accustomed perhaps to the dream of heroic irrationalism. The temptation was to abandon oneself to national delirium— despite (or even because of) the threat of violence.”

Theodore Zeldin (1933) English academic

An Intimate History of Humanity (1994)

People, World, Fear, Dreams

“No association, no efficient combination of labor can be effected till men give up their liberty of action and subject themselves to a common despotic head or ruler. This is slavery, and towards this socialism is moving.”

George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) American activist

Source: Sociology For The South: Or The Failure Of A Free Society (1854), p. 61

Men

“The government needs to start asking searching questions about social housing, to promote integration, to avoid segregated social housing estates where people living there are from the same single minority ethnic background. Similarly in education, while overall segregation in schooling is declining, in our most divided communities, the education that our young people receive is actually even more segregated than the neighbourhoods they live in.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

2010s, 2015, Speech on (20 July 2015)

People, Education, School, Search

“As part of that march, and in accordance with my instructions, all previous governments have made praiseworthy efforts to give substance to my vision concerning reform and development. As a result, the current government has found not only a positive and healthy legacy, but also concrete achievements in the economic and social spheres.”

Mohammed VI of Morocco (1963) King of Morocco

Original French: Au cours de cette marche, tous les gouvernements précédents ont déployé, sous Notre impulsion, des efforts méritoires pour donner corps à Notre vision en matière de développement et de réforme. Tant et si bien que Notre gouvernement actuel a trouvé entre ses mains, dans le domaine économique et social, un héritage sain et positif, constitué d'actions constructives et de réalisations tangibles. Televised speech–30 July 2013 http://www.maroc.ma/en/royal-speeches/full-text-royal-speech-delivered-tuesday-occasion-throne-day

Effort, Parting

“When the classical worldview was applied to social science, the dominant notions turned out to be struggle for survival, the profit of the individual, with at best an assumed automatic coincidence of individual and societal good (through Adam Smith's "invisible hand"). When the systemic vision inspires the theories of social science, the values of competition are mitigated by those of cooperation, and the emphasis on individualistic work ethos is tempered with a tolerance of diversity and of experimentation with institutions and practices that foster man-man and man- nature adaptation and harmony.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: The systems view of the world (1996), p. 12.

Nature, Science

“When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.”

Paul Graham (1964) English programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist

"Why Nerds are Unpopular," February 2003

Hostility, People, Thinking, Water

“The chief rival to monotheism, I shall contend, is henotheism or that social faith which makes a finite society, whether cultural or religious, the object of trust as well as of loyalty and which tends to subvert even officially monotheistic institutions, such as the churches.”

H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962) American theologian

Source: Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (1960), p. 11

Faith, Loyalty

“Several features or attributes of organizations can therefore be recognized
# Organizations are social institutions (entities) composed of sets of persons with established patterns of interaction.
# Organizations develop to achieve specific goals. Therefore, organizations are social creations that require order and cooperation.
# Organizations are social instruments possessing relatively identifiable boundaries and existing on a relatively permanent basis. While this final point is perhaps less clear than were those that precede it, the identification of fixed boundaries (for instance, the distinction between members and nonmembers) and continuity (that is, existence and identity over time) provide a conceptual framework for the study of organizational activity.”

Arthur G. Bedeian (1946) American business theorist

Source: Organizations: Theory and Analysis, 1984, p. 3-4 (1984: 2-3)

Study, Time, Personality

“Advanced technology is great at tasks such as keeping an airliner flying several thousand feet in the air, but is easily crippled by social complications.”

David Orrell (1962) Canadian mathematician

Introduction, p. 13
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)

Flying

“In America, black is beautiful. To be black is to be more righteous, nobler; carry the heaviest historic baggage — heavier than the Holocaust — and be encouraged to perpetually and publicly pick at those suppurating sores. To be black is to have an unwritten, implicit social contract with wider, whiter society. To be black it to be born with an IOY (I Own You); it is to be owed apologies, obsequiousness, education, and auto-exculpation for any wrongdoing.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Rachel Dolezal: A Racially Abused Girl—Really," http://thelibertarianalliance.com/2015/07/19/rachel-dolezal-a-racially-abused-girl-really/ The Libertarian Alliance, July 19, 2015. 2010s, 2015

Education, Beauty

“Within sociology there have been several system theories, differing from one another in the extent to which, for example, human agency, creativity, and entrepreneurship are assumed to play a role in system formation and reformation; conflict and struggle are taken into account; power and stratification are part and parcel of the theory; structural change and transformation – and more generally, historically developments – are taken into account and explained. What the various system theories have in common is a systematic concern with complex and varied interconnections and interdependencies of social life. Complexity has been a central concept for many working in the systems perspective. The tradition is characterized to a great extent by a burning ambition and hope to provide a unifying language and conceptual framework for all the social sciences.”

Tom R. Burns (1937) American sociologist

Source: Systems theories (2006), p. 1.

Life, Hope, Science, Change

“Socialism as a thoroughgoing system had failed. But the central emotion behind it had not. And that emotion has only deepened…”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2018, Socialism is So Hot Right Now (2018)

“Frances Egan, the school nurse, left her nutrition charts long enough to tell me there was nothing that could have been done. "Evelyn had a rough time with her father," she said. "Once she came in beaten black and blue."
"What did you do for her?"
"I gave her a cup of tea."
"Tea? Why tea, for heaven's sake?"
"Why? Because I know all about it," she said, shaking with anger. "I know more than anyone here what goes on outside — poverty, disease, dope, degeneracy — yet I'm not supposed to give them even a band-aid. I used to plead, bang on my desk, talk myself hoarse arguing with kids, parents, welfare, administration, social agencies. Nobody really heard me. Now I give them tea. At least, that's something."
"But you're a nurse," I said helplessly.
She showed me the Directive from the Board posted on her wall: THE SCHOOL NURSE MAY NOT TOUCH WOUNDS, GIVE MEDICATION, REMOVE FOREIGN PARTICLES FROM THE EYE…
Are we, none of us, then, allowed to touch wounds? What is the teacher's responsibility? And if it begins at all, where does it end?”

Bel Kaufmanová book Up the Down Staircase

Part V, ch. 26 (Sylvia Barrett)
Up the Down Staircase (1965)

Disease, School, Parent, Teachers

“In the natural sciences, language (mathematics) is a useful tool: like the microscope or telescope, it enables us to see what is otherwise invisible. In the social sciences, language (literalized metaphor) is an impediment: like a distorting mirror, it prevents us from seeing the obvious.
That is why in the natural sciences, knowledge can be gained only with the mastery of their special languages; whereas in human affairs, knowledge can be gained only by rejecting the pretentious jargons of the social sciences.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary (1990)

Mathematics, Nature, Knowledge, Science

“A threshold competency is a person's generic knowledge, motive, trait, self image, social role, or skill which is essential to performing a job, but is not causally related to superior job performance.”

Richard Boyatzis (1946) American business theorist

Source: Competent manager (1982), p. 23.

Motivation, Knowledge, Personality

“There is no social life outside of Christendom.”

William H. Seward (1801–1872) American lawyer and politician

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 142.

Life

“I am half-surprised to find that as I go on I get more and more confirmed in the old advanced Liberal principles, economic, social, & political, with which I entered Parliament 30 years ago.”

Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836–1908) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to John Spencer (19 February 1900), quoted in John Wilson, C.B.: A Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (London: Constable, 1973), p. 326
Leader of the Opposition

“I object very much when my work is said to not be political, because my feelings about the social system are in there somewhere. The idea is to have it all in there together—you can’t pull it out.”

Donald Judd (1928–1994) artist

1980 Source: Flash Art, Nr. 132-134, (1987), p. 36: Cited in: " ‘Donald Judd: Stacks’ at Mnuchin Gallery http://galleristny.com/2013/10/donald-judd-stacks-at-mnuchin-gallery/" by Andrew Russeth at galleristny.com, 10/01/13.

Feeling, Idea

“As with physical gravity, an understanding of the forces of social attraction support predictions, or at least the broad outlines of futuristic anticipation, since these forces of agglomeration and intensification manifestly shape the future.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Event Horizon" https://web.archive.org/web/20110718030432/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/index.php/article/detail/304/event-horizon (2011)

Understanding, Support, Future

“They call, in fact, for the forfeiture, to a greater or less degree, of human liberty, to the point where, were I to attempt to sum up what socialism is, I would say that it was simply a new system of serfdom.”

Alexis De Tocqueville (1805–1859) French political thinker and historian

Notes for a Speech on Socialism (1848). http://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/tocqueville-s-critique-of-socialism-1848
1840s

“To understand this relationship we may start with what has become an accepted observation: Stalinized Bolshevism and National Socialism constitute the two examples of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes. Not only were they comparable, but they form a political category of their own, which has become established since Hannah Arendt.”

François Furet (1927–1997) French historian

Source: The Passing of an Illusion, The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1999), p. 180

Understanding

“Industry shares a need common to every social enterprise from church to guild, municipality to empire, war to university.”

Oliver Sheldon (1894–1951) British businessman

Oliver Sheldon. Philosophy of Management. London: Isaac Pitman and Sons; 1930, p. 33. As cited in Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 8

War, Universe

“Under communism (socialism), there is no incentive to supply people with anything they need or want, including safety.”

George Reisman (1937) American economist

Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (1996)

People, Communication

“Well alright, anyone who has dreams of world empire, look what it did to Britain (chuckles heartily). There's a reason that whole country is one big Smith song. That's actually one exciting thing about studying history, there did come a point towards the end of the 19th century where the British were just like, "this ain't worth it mate". There's a reason why in 1945 they gave us the keys to the world. They were like, "here, it's yours, take it, go, we're fine, no? India, go. Africa, go." Because they'd had enough. Because it's really hard, we can't even run ourselves. We literally have people storming our capital with signs saying, "government, keep your hands off my social security". If we can't handle that, do we really want to try and run, Africa? I think what we need is not so much world empire, I think we need closer cooperation, closer alliances.”

Max Brooks (1972) American author

Lecture of Opportunity | Max Brooks: World War Z https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nGG5E04cog

People, World, Dreams, History

“My deranged mother has written another book. This one is called The Bough and is even worse that the others. I refer not to its quality—it exhibits the usual “coruscating wit” and “penetrating social observation”—but to the extent to which it utilizes, as a kind of mulch pile, the lives of her children.”

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

“The Author”, opening; p. 45.
The Teachings of Don. B: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992)

Children, Books

“I regard every Social Democrat as an enemy of the Empire and Fatherland.”

Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) German Emperor and King of Prussia

Speech (14 May 1889), quoted in Michael Balfour, The Kaiser and His Times (London: Penguin, 1975), p. 159
1880s

“But there was in my father's mind another sentiment, less creditable to him, than the wish to give me the best education to be had. I mean those social aspirations which he continued to nourish, though by his removal to the remote situation of Hauxwell, and consequent detachment from the Castle, he was no longer able to gratify them. He had the instinct of good society, and liked to live with gentlemen, and to know what was going on in the upper world. His acquaintance with the peerage was accurate; he must have read Debrett at that time more than the Bible. Hence, in estimating colleges he was led to take the footman's view, and to prefer one which was frequented by the sons of gentlemen.”

Mark Pattison (1813–1884) English author and Church of England priest

Source: Memoirs (1885), Chapter I, pp. 22–24

World, Education, Time, Reading

“What a strange page in human history is that of social distinction; no people so savage but they have a sort of fashion. Even among the wild people in whose country I am now writing, there are all the small distinctions of small gentility — for example, it is not "comme il faut to wear silk."”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

No.18. The Monastery — MYSIE HAPPER.
Literary Remains

People, History, Fashion, Country

“Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U. S. economy. [Senate Minority Leader] Harry Reid was talking about soup lines. And [Senator] Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet in the same breath they say that Social Security is rock solid and there's no crisis there. How are you going to work – you've said you are going to reach out to these people – how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?”

Jeff Gannon (1957) American journalist

January 26, 2005
Questions asked at Press Conferences

People, Reality, Painting

“Every one of the six hundred and thirteen precepts serves to inculcate some truth, to remove some erroneous opinion, to establish proper relations in society, to diminish evil, to train in good manners, or to warn against bad habits. All this depends on three things: opinions, morals, and social conduct. …these three principles suffice for assigning a reason for every one of the Divine commandments.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.31

Truth, Evil, Dependency, Training

“Socialism for me was never about nationalization or the power of the state, not just about economics or even politics. It is a moral purpose to life, a set of values, a belief in society, in co-operation, in achieving together what we cannot achieve alone. It is how I try to live my life, how you try to live yours—the simple truths—I am worth no more than anyone else, I am my brother’s keeper, I will not walk by on the other side. We are not simply people set in isolation from one another, face to face with eternity, but members of the same family, same community, same human race. This is my socialism and the irony of all our long years in opposition is that those values are shared by the vast majority of the British people.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

As quoted in "Socialism is So Hot Right Now" https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/socialism-hot-right-now/ (17 September 2018), by Jonah Goldberg, Commentary 1990s

Life, People, Truth, Family

“Structure joins the evocative concept of paradigm, a disarmingly simple dialectic of scientific change (long periods of paradigmatic "normal science" punctuated by short "revolutions"), and the apparent authority of historical example to show that major conceptual shifts in the natural sciences are effected not by logical argument alone but also by appeals to worldviews, religion, metaphysical commitments, notions of simplicity and order, and so on. The view that science, like other thought systems, advances or retreats through rhetoric and persuasion, not by logical necessity, was a revelation to people who had never practiced it or studied its history. The book comforted social scientists who wanted to assimilate their discipline to physics, Luddites who blamed social problems on scientists and engineers, and everyone who rejected authority. It repelled the philosophers of science at which it was aimed for the good reason that it undercut their belief that scientific knowledge advances by the application of rational criteria to the products of observation and experiment.”

John L. Heilbron (1934) American historian

Thomas Samuel Kuhn: 18 July 1922-17 June 1996 (1998)

People, Books, Religion, History

“In the same directive he raised the question – this was in the middle of 1934 – that now that Hitler had come to power it was quite clear that his, Trotsky’s line on the impossibility of building up socialism in one country alone had been completely justified, that war was inevitable, and that if we Trotskyites wished to preserve ourselves as a political force of some sort, we must in advance, having adopted a defeatist position, not merely passively observe and contemplate, but actively prepare the way for this defeat. But in order to do so, cadres must be formed, and cadres could not be formed by talk alone. Therefore the necessary wrecking activities must be carried on now. I recall that Trotsky said in this directive that without the necessary support from foreign states, a government of the bloc could neither come to power nor hold power. It was therefore a question of arriving at the necessary preliminary agreement with the most aggressive foreign states, like Germany and Japan, and the he, Trotsky, on his part had already taken the necessary steps in establishing contacts both with the Japanese and the German governments.”

Georgy Pyatakov (1890–1937) Bolshevik revolutionary leader

Georgy Pyatakov at the Moscow trial. As quoted in Mario Sousas Klasskampen under 1930-talet i Sovjetunionen, pg 28.

War, Way, Question, Support

“Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group… We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.”

Steven Pinker (1954) psychologist, linguist, author

" Rules of Language http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/papers/Pinker%20Rules%20of%20Language.pdf," Science (August 2, 1991)

World, Imagination, Communication, Problem

“Whereas reasons may, and usually do, figure among the proximate causes of belief, and thus play a part in both kinds of series (cognitive and causal), it is always possible to trace back the causal series to a point where every trace of rationality vanishes; where we are left face to face with conditions of beliefs social, physiological, and physical— which, considered in themselves, are quite a-logical in their character. /…/ on any merely naturalistic hypothesis, the rational elements in the causal series lie always on the surface. Penetrate but a short way down, and they are found no more.”

Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930) British Conservative politician and statesman

Theism and humanism

Lie, Way, Parting

“We may predict that the science of which we try to be the humble and devoted servants will in the future life of the nations be an important factor in eliminating maladjustments between fundamental economic sectors and assure a smooth and progressive utilization of resources… One wants men with a knowledge of the characteristic features of the economic and social structure of their country and with a fundamental theoretical knowledge along modern lines.”

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

Frisch, (1946, p. 1), as quoted in: " Ragnar Frisch 1895-1995 https://www.ssb.no/a/histstat/doc/doc_199403.pdf." O. Bjerkholt, 1994. 1940-60s

Life, Men, Knowledge, Science

“What will be the consequences of the ultimate disappearance of private property? Society will take all forces of production and means of commerce, as well as the exchange and distribution of products, out of the hands of private capitalists and will manage them in accordance with a plan based on the availability of resources and the needs of the whole society. In this way, most important of all, the evil consequences which are now associated with the conduct of big industry will be abolished. There will be no more crises; the expanded production, which for the present order of society is overproduction and hence a prevailing cause of misery, will then be insufficient and in need of being expanded much further. Instead of generating misery, overproduction will reach beyond the elementary requirements of society to assure the satisfaction of the needs of all; it will create new needs and, at the same time, the means of satisfying them. It will become the condition of, and the stimulus to, new progress, which will no longer throw the whole social order into confusion, as progress has always done in the past.”

Friedrich Engels book Principles of Communism

Principles of Communism (1847)

Way, Evil, Time, Past

“With highly civilised nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes. Nevertheless the more intelligent members within the same community will succeed better in the long run than the inferior, and leave a more numerous progeny, and this is a form of natural selection. The more efficient causes of progress seem to consist of a good education during youth whilst the brain is impressible, and of a high standard of excellence, inculcated by the ablest and best men, embodied in the laws, customs and traditions of the nation, and enforced by public opinion. It should, however, be borne in mind, that the enforcement of public opinion depends on our appreciation of the approbation and disapprobation of others; and this appreciation is founded on our sympathy, which it can hardly be doubted was originally developed through natural selection as one of the most important elements of the social instincts.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume I, chapter V: "On the Development of the Intellectual and Moral Faculties during Primeval and Civilised Times" (second edition, 1874) page 143 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=166&itemID=F944&viewtype=image The Descent of Man (1871)

Men, Youth, Education, Law

“The universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture-garden…Passions, greed, hatred, and lies; social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering.”

Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) French journalist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright

Garden of Tortures

Love, Religion, Justice, Flowers

“Emergent structuring, whereby participants discover or adopt certain similar strategies within bounded rationality and situations with certain opportunity structures and incentive structures. Social network and ecological properties result in relatively well-defined aggregate performance characteristics…”

Tom R. Burns (1937) American sociologist

Source: The shaping of social organization (1987), p. 127; As cited in C.J. McNair et al. (2006) " The fall of management accounting http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1026&context=accfinwp".

“The laws of social development are not identical with the laws in the natural sciences. The content of the social laws is not nature but second nature: coagulated history. They are manmade, but they also make men; they are dialectical, at once subject and object.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 65

Men, Law, History, Nature

“After two decades of building socialism in the USSR there is no reason for anybody to be a homosexual.”

Nikolai Krylenko (1885–1938) Russian revolutionary, politician and chess organiser

Krylenko on the law re-criminalizing homosexuality in 1936. Quoted in David Tuller, Cracks in the Iron Closet: Travels in Gay and Lesbian Russia, University of Chicago Press, 1996

“Our party, the oldest in Iraq, was established in 1934. It stands for the rights of working people; for the country's independence; for its development; and of course, in the current situation, we are calling for a change to the s to achieve social justice and real socioeconomic development.”

Raid Jahid Fahmi (1950) Iraqi politician

Interview with Al Jazeera (25 May 2018)

People, Justice, Change, Country

“Usually, terrorists film their attacks for future information operations and social media use. They may have had terrorist videographers in specific locations for that purpose during this attack as well. Those videos may appear in the future, but until then French citizens posting YouTube videos contribute to the terrorists' information campaign.”

Mark Hertling (1953) United States Army general

As quoted in "What videos reveal about Paris killers" http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/07/opinion/hertling-paris-attack/index.html, CNN, 7 January 2015

Appearance, Future

“The reality of the 'Maunder Minimum' and its implications of basic solar change may be but one more defeat in our long and losing battle to keep the sun perfect, or, if not perfect, constant, and if inconstant, regular. Why we think that sun should be any of these when other stars are not is more a question for social than for physical science.”

John A. Eddy (1931–2009) American astronomer

Star, Question, Thinking, Reality

“Either the USSR was not the country of socialism, in which case socialism didn’t exist anywhere and doubtless, wasn’t possible: or else, socialism was that, this abominable monster, this police state, the power of beasts of prey.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

Source: Les Temps modernes (1961), p. 184

Country

“The Roman historian Tacitus once said, that the health and the disease of a state can be measured in the number of its laws. If we Germans nowadays look at the huge number of laws, we have to say, that it's not health, but death that we're approaching. … It is strange that it is Social Democracy of all movements, which in the old state complained about exceptions, that now issues exception laws itself. These exception-laws are means of force and are created in the parliaments with the help of supranational financial powers. …
In the old state an interest rate of more than 6 percent was deemed usury. Today this usury is legalized. It was YOU, the men of the left -- who always pretend to fight against capitalism and exploitation -- who accomplished this. It will be your downfall!”

Julius Streicher (1885–1946) German politician

Der römische Geschichtsschreiber Tacitus hat einmal gesagt, dass man die Gesundheit und die Krankheit eines Staates nach der Zahl seiner Gesetze ermessen könne. Wenn wir Deutsche heute die große Zahl unserer Gesetze betrachten, dann müssen wir sagen, dass wir nicht der Gesundheit, sondern dem Tode entgegengehen. … Es ist sonderbar, dass ausgerechnet die Sozialdemokratie, die sich im alten Staat immer über Ausnahmen aufgeregt hat, jetzt selbst Ausnahmegesetze erläßt! Diese Ausnahmegesetze sind Zwangsmittel und werden in den Parlamenten mit Hilfe überstaatlicher Finanzmächte geschaffen. …
Im alten Staate galt ein Zinsfuß von mehr als 6 Prozent als Wucher. Heute ist dieser Wucher gesetzlich genehmigt. Das haben SIE, meine Herren von der Linken, die Sie immer vorgeben, Kapitalismus und Ausbeutung zu bekämpfen, fertiggebracht! Daran werden Sie zugrunde gehen!
04/20/1926, speech in the Bavarian regional parliament ("Kampf dem Weltfeind", Stürmer publishing house, Nuremberg, 1938)

Death, Men, Health, Disease

“We're always told that we need to amnesty illegals to shore up Social Security. How, exactly, are people who make so little money that they don't pay income taxes going to save Social Security?”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

2015, Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole (2015)

Money, People

“We must not be enticed by mathematically attractive assumptions into pretending that the contingencies of men's social positions and the asymmetries of their situations somehow even out in the end. Rather we must choose our conception of justice fully recognizing that this is not and cannot be the case.”

John Rawls book A Theory of Justice

Source: A Theory of Justice (1971; 1975; 1999), Chapter III, Section 28, pg. 171

Men, Justice, Mathematics

“An artist is a socially unattractive person whom socially attractive people make money out of.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Money, People, Personality

“Liberal Arts may ultimately prove to be the most relevant learning model. People trained in the Liberal Arts learn to tolerate ambiguity and to bring order out of apparent confusion. They have the kind of sideways thinking and cross-classifying habit of mind that comes from learning, among other things, the many different ways of looking at literary works, social systems, chemical processes or languages.”

Roger Smith (executive) (1925–2007) CEO

Cited in: " Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies: What is Liberal Studies? http://scs.georgetown.edu/departments/4/bachelor-of-arts-in-liberal-studies/department-details.cfm#f2" on georgetown.edu about bachelor of arts in liberal studies, 2013. The liberal arts and the art of management (1987)

People, Art, Way, Thinking

“(Prince Duan and others) with the support of Empress Dowager took control of the Manchu Imperial Court. Using the most ignorant mind, by the most despicable means, with the most selfish goal, using Yihetuan, which was the most prone to rioting social underclass, to "support the Qing, eliminate the foreigners", and to takeover the regime. This coup d'etat was repeated 66 years later, by those aggressive Red Guards (China). History repeated itself, in minute details.”

Tong Tekong (1920–2009) historian

http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/ics/21c/supplem/essay/0007038.htm

History, Support, Selfishness

“Whenever social costs are shifted onto economically and politically weaker sections of society without compensation, a redistribution of the costs of production, hence real income is involved.”

Karl William Kapp (1910–1976) American economist

Knapp, 1972 cited in: Sebastian Berger and Mathew Forstater (2007) "Toward a Political Institutionalist Economics: Kapp’s Social Costs, Lowe’s Instrumental Analysis, and the European Institutionalist Approach to Environmental Policy". In: Journal of Economic Issues. Vol.XLI, No.2, June 2007. p. 539

“A common argument from the mouths of capitalist spokespeople, in the ideological struggle against socialism, is that socialism, or the period of building socialism into which we have entered, is characterized by the abolition of the individual for the sake of the state.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

“The formation of such feelings of obligation and loyalty to any group with which one is identified is of the highest significance to good morale. It is the essence of the powerful patriotic feelings which are stimulated in times of war, but which have their origins in earliest childhood. …Not all Americans have been able to develop a range of identification large enough to include the nation and thus to develop strong feelings of loyalty and obligation. To some extent this ability seems to be a measure of social maturity.”

Roy R. Grinker, Sr. (1900–1993) American psychiatrist and neurologist

Source: Men Under Stress, 1945, p. 40 cited in: The Clare Spark Blog (2009) Strategic Regression in “the greatest generation” http://clarespark.com/2009/12/09/strategic-regression-in-the-greatest-generation/ December 9, 2009

War, Feeling, Strong, Time

“Once upon a time, I was a ‘socially disadvantaged’ child. An enchantedly happy child. Mine was a childhood of intense family closeness. And extreme public alienation.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Happiness, Family, Time, Childhood

“The great goal of the backlash is to nurture a cultural class war, and the first step in doing so, as we have seen, is to deny the economic basis of social class. After all, you can hardly deride liberals as society’s "elite" or present the GOP as the party of the common man if you acknowledge the existence of the corporate world — the power that creates the nation’s real elite, that dominates its real class system, and that wields the Republican Party as its personal political system.”

Thomas Frank book What's the Matter with Kansas?

Ibid. (p. 128).
What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004)

War, World, Personality

“An iniquitous social structure has produced an iniquitous power structure. Individuals and parties are not at fault. Political, social and economic monopolies exclude a large section of the masses from decision-making. To that extent they are undemocratic. So far teams of the ruling elite played and the rest were called to applaud. Now the onlookers are saying we also want to kick and net a goal, and we have our own team.”

V. P. Singh (1931–2008) Indian politician

On the changes occurring in the political structure of the country
We are ruled by an upper caste Hindu raj

Decision

“Today, the growers are like a punch-drunk old boxer who doesn't know he's past his prime. The times are changing. The political and social environment has changed. The chickens are coming home to roost — and the time to account for past sins is approaching.”

Cesar Chavez (1927–1993) American farm worker, labor leader, and civil rights activist

What the Future Holds (1984)

Home, Change, Time, Past

“Tribal behavior is more deeply ingrained than are mere cultural prescriptions. Its longevity and stability point strongly to a genetic basis. This is hardly surprising, given that tribes are the default human social institution. The inbuilt nature of tribalism explains why it took so many thousands of years for East Asians and later Europeans to break free of its deadening embrace.”

Nicholas Wade (1942) British writer

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (2014)

Behavior, Nature

“The enterprise engineer must be a leader, a designer, and a synthesizer. He is a doer. He understands theory as a guide to practice. He must concern himself with human organization because the pace and success of technology are becoming more dependent on interaction with the social system and less on scientific discovery. In private as well as public research and development, such men must find ways to reverse the deterioration of ethics and efficiency. They will strengthen the information links between physical design and the public so that technology can better serve society. In the public sector they must show the level of wisdom and leadership that can co-ordinate great engineering projects with politics. They will recognise that informing the public and becoming a nucleus for crystallising public opinion is even more important in many programmes than is the underlying science.”

Jay Wright Forrester (1918–2016) American operations researcher

Source: Engineering Education and Engineering Practice in the Year 2000 (1967), p. 137

Wisdom, Men, Way, Understanding

“Of course, we need not be surprised if artistic excellence goes unrecognized on account of being unknown; but there should be the greatest indignation when, as often, good judges are flattered by the charm of social entertainments into an approbation which is a mere a pretence.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Introduction, Sec. 3
De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book III

“Libertarian philosophy lowers the logical and evidentiary standards for libertarian social science: if one believes that redistribution and regulation are immoral anyway because they violate self-ownership rights, then it is understandable that one would have a cavalier attitude about proving that redistribution and regulation cause unhappiness or “disorder,” or that they always serve the venal interests of politicians and bureaucrats. The orthodox libertarian schema implies that these consequentialist arguments are superfluous.”

Jeffrey Friedman (political scientist) (1959) American political scientist

Source: “What’s wrong with Libertarianism”, p. 445

Understanding, Science

“It saddens me to see the entrepreneurial world in Brazil, because it's a misfortune to be a boss in our country, with so many labor laws. […] Between a man and a young woman, what will the entrepreneur think? 'Damn, this woman's got a ring on her finger, she'll be pregnant soon, she'll be on maternity leave for six months…' […] Who's going to pay the bill? The employer. In the end it's deducted from social security but he says "the work rhythm is broken. And when she returns, she'll take a month-long vacation. In the end, she works five months in one year." […] I'm a liberal. If I want to hire you at my company paying you R$ 2,000.00 a month and Ms. Mary paying her R$ 1,500.00, and if Ms. Mary doesn't want to earn that amount, she must look for another job! If you think you also are not earning so much, look for another job. It is I who am paying you; I am the boss.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

In an interview with Zero Hora newspaper https://gauchazh.clicrbs.com.br/politica/noticia/2014/12/bolsonaro-diz-que-nao-teme-processos-e-faz-nova-ofensa-nao-merece-ser-estuprada-porque-e-muito-feia-cjkf8rj3x00cc01pi3kz6nu2e.html on 10 December 2014. Brazil presidential candidate Bolsonaro's most controversial quotes https://www.yahoo.com/news/brazil-presidential-candidate-bolsonaros-most-controversial-quotes-012652084.html. Yahoo!, 29 September 2018.

World, Law, Thinking, Maternity

“Politicians picking and choosing recipients of corporate welfare is railed against by fiscal conservatives, for it’s a hallmark of corruption. And socialism.”

Sarah Palin (1964) American politician

2016, But… Wait… The Good Guys Won’t Win With More Crony Capitalism (December 2, 2016)

“…the most influential journeys I have had have been with Ayahuasca, the vine from the Amazon, the combination of that and mushrooms. They give me the trots and such! It's very much a medicine woman, medicine man's journey drug, where you go inside. It's not a social thing. It's an internal experience. I experiment with things that are usually an internal experience, because that's just what excites me. And yes, it does sometimes give me visions. But my intention when I am doing it is very different than recreational. I don't do it recreationally. I do it to go do inner work, and I'm very clear before I do it what I'm searching for. That way, there's no abuse suffered and I don't rely on it. It's just one more tool that I use sometimes.”

Tori Amos (1963) American singer

Interview, 9/11/94, for Internet by Michael Pearce

Way, Search, Suffering

“But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing toward a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it particularly nasty.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

Alarms and Discursions (1910), 'The New House,' pp. 161-162

People

“The Settlement … is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other …”

Jane Addams (1860–1935) pioneer settlement social worker

Source: Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Ch. 6

Life, Problem, Effort, Time

“Herbert Spencer is little read now. Philosophers do not regard him as a major thinker. Social Darwinism has long been in disrepute.”

Peter Singer (1946) Australian philosopher

Source: The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981), Chapter 3, From Evolution To Ethics?, p. 61

Reading

“I'ma take you out ya misery, and after this they gonna put you in the Social Study book, 'cause you History”

Big L (rapper) (1974–1999) American rapper

"98 Freestyle Full", (1998)

Books, History, Study

“This Caesarean madness stops at no barrier. Without compunction it rides roughshod over those achievements of the past which have all too often had to be purchased with the heart's blood of the people. It is always ready to smother with brutal violence the last rights and the last liberties which might interfere with its plans for holding all social activities within the rigid forms set by its will. This is the great danger which threatens us today and which immediately confronts us. The success or failure of monopolistic capitalistic power plans will determine the structure of the social life of the near future.”

Rudolf Rocker book Nationalism and Culture

Source: Nationalism and Culture (1937), Ch. 1 "The Insufficiency of Economic Materialism"

Life, People, Failure, Success

“Scientists are trained to be rational and we are not trained to interact with people and develop social skills. Politics is about being able to convince people. Scientists could do with learning how to do that.”

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (1952) Nobel prize winning American and British structural biologist

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan interview: 'It takes courage to tackle very hard problems in science

People, Learning, Training

“The dinosaur world I grew up in was classical. They were universally seen as scaley herps that inhabited the immobile continents. There was no hint that birds were their direct descendents. Being reptiles, dinosaurs were cold-blooded and rather sluggish except perhaps for the smaller more bird-like examples. They all dragged their tails. Forelimbs were often sprawling. Leg muscles were slender in the reptilian manner. Intellectual capacity was minimal, as were social activity and parenting; the Knight painting of a Triceratops pair watching over a baby threatened by the Tyrant King was a notable exception. Hadrosaurs and especially sauropods were dinosaurian hippos, the latter perhaps too titanic to even emerge on land, and if they did so were limited by their bulk to lifting one foot of the ground at a time. Suitable only for the lush, warm and sunny tropical climate that enveloped the world from pole to pole before the Cenozoic, a cooling climate and new mountain chains did the obsolete archosaurs in, leaving only the crocodilians. Dinosaurs and the bat-winged pterosaurs were merely an evolutionary interlude, a period of geo-biological stasis before things got really interesting with the rise of the energetic and quick witted birds and especially mammals, leading with inexorable progress to the apex of natural selection: Man. It was pretty much all wrong. Deep down I sensed something was not quite right. Illustrating dinosaurs I found them to be much more reminiscent of birds and mammals than of the reptiles they were supposed to be. I was primed for a new view.”

Gregory Scott Paul (1954) U.S. researcher, author, paleontologist, and illustrator

Autobiography, part I http://gspauldino.com/part1.html, gspauldino.com

World, Mountain, Nature, Bird

“To consider the city as the projection of society on space is both an indispensible starting point and too elementary an approach. For, although one must go beyond the empiricism of geographical description, one runs the very great risk of imagining space as a white page on which the actions of groups and institutions are inscribed, without encountering any other obstacle than the trace of past generations. This is tantamount to conceiving of nature as entirely fashioned by culture, whereas the whole social problematic is born by the indissoluble union of these two terms, through the dialectical process by which a particular biological species (particularly because divided into classes) "man", transforms himself and transforms his struggle for life and for the appropriation of the product of his labour.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach, 1977, p. 115

Life, Imagination, Fashion, Nature

“Socialism fails when it run out of money of others.”

Esperanza Aguirre (1952) Spanish politician

Source: NoticiasEsperanzaAguirre.es http://www.noticiasesperanzaaguirre.es/aguirre-el-socialismo-fracasa-cuando-se-le-acaba-el-dinero-de-diario-siglo-xxi/. April 2011.

Money

“As the dominant social ethic changed from a religious to a secular one, the problem of heresy disappeared, and the problem of madness arose and became of great social significance. In the next chapter I shall examine the creation of social deviants, and shall show that as formerly priests had manufactured heretics, so physicians, as the new guardians of social conduct and morality, began to manufacture madmen.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 160.

Problem, Change, Madness

“The Nazi party had been too hasty in incorporating the word ‘Socialist’ in its title, Hitler indeed wished it to be ‘Social Revolutionary.”

Konrad Heiden (1901–1966) German journalist and historian

Source: A History of National Socialism (1934), p. 85

“Up to 1931 there was no reason to suppose that social changes would not, or could not, follow the same evolutionary pattern which had resulted from the increased creation and distribution of wealth during the nineteenth century. Now, after 1931, many of us felt that the disease was more deep-rooted. It had become evident that the structure of capitalist society in its old form had broken down, not only in Britain but all over Europe and even in the United States. The whole system had to be reassessed. Perhaps it could not survive at all; it certainly could not survive without radical change. Something like a revolutionary situation had developed, not only at home but overseas.”

Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) British politician

Harold Macmillan (1966) Winds of change, 1914-1939. p. 266 as cited in Brian Vickery (2005) "Coming of age in the 1930s" ( online http://web.archive.org/web/20080531130709/http://www.lucis.me.uk/thirties.htm at archive.org) 1960s

Disease, Home, Change, Wealth

“Throughout life, all people are engaged in activities – practical or mental – trying to solve problems, activities that themselves give rise to problems. To solve these problems, people need knowledge. They can acquire this personal knowledge in two main ways. First, they can interrogate the world – natural and social – by means of closer observation, deeper analysis, controlled experiment, all forms of cognitive interaction. Second, they can enrich their personal knowledge by communicative interaction with the stock of public knowledge that mankind has built up over the millenia, thus acquiring what we may call information. The activities in which people engage also produce two other kinds of knowledge: that embodied in people (skills) and that embodied in their artefacts.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Brian Vickery (2005) " Information science, in 3 parts http://web.archive.org/web/20100201154159/http://www.lucis.me.uk/infosci1.htm" on lucis.me.uk, 2005.

Life, People, World, Way