Quotes about socialism (5354 quotes, page 14)

“The more our commercial system gains in complication, the more does the common prosperity of us all come to depend upon the due performance of all contracts. Commercial development is broadly illustrating one profound truth: that the real basis of social morality is self-interest. If the subject of rivalry between nations is business, the code which has come to dominate business must necessarily come to dominate the conduct of governments.”

Norman Angell book The Great Illusion

The Great Illusion (1910)

Truth , Business , Dependency

“[T]he mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose that in the public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or problem presents itself, the mass-man will tend to demand that the State intervene immediately and undertake a solution directly with its immense and unassailable resources. This is the gravest danger that to-day threatens civilisation: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State.”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XIII: The Greatest Danger, The State

Life , Feeling , Problem , Effort

“We call ourselves ‘the Fight Club.’ You don’t come to us for warm and fuzzy. We think of ourselves as virulently anti-establishment, particularly ‘anti-’ the permanent political class. We say Paul Ryan was grown in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation. We hire people who are freaks. They don’t have social lives. They’re junkies about news and information.”

Steve Bannon (1953) American media executive and former White House Chief Strategist for Donald Trump

How Breitbart has become a dominant voice in conservative media by Paul Farhi. The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-breitbart-has-become-a-dominant-voice-in-conservative-media/2016/01/27/a705cb88-befe-11e5-9443-7074c3645405_story.html?utm_term=.8b7cb6a8a84c (January 27, 2017)

People , Thinking , Fight

“Wearing a cape doesn't do much for your social life.”

Austin Grossman book Soon I Will Be Invincible

Source: Soon I Will Be Invincible (2007), Ch. 1: Foiled Again

Life

“In reference to the Prussian three-class, many had forgotten that the Prussian three-class system made the publicity of the ballot obligatory, and thereby in advance practically disfranchised all who were dependent, either economically, socially or politically, that is, the great majority of the population, and by this means alone rendered it impossible for the masses to take part in the election or get up any general enthusiasm.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

Parting , Dependency

“In his discussions of spontaneous orders, sometimes Hayek was simply trying to make the point that they exist; that is, he was trying to counter the claim that any beneficent social order needed to be constructed. This view was widespread when he first was writing; the mania for planning was then ubiquitous, so it was a point worth making. In later writings, Hayek sometimes did say, let’s trust to evolved orders rather than constructed ones, but then allowed that sometimes we needed to make piece-meal changes, and he gave no criteria for deciding.”

Bruce Caldwell (economist) (1952) economic historian

" Making Sense of Hayek on Spontaneous Order http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/12/14/bruce-caldwell/making-sense-hayek-spontaneous-order" (December 2009)

Change

“There are no globalized, youth-led, grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across Muslim-majority societies. There is no equivalent of Al-Qaeda without the terrorism.”

Maajid Nawaz (1977) British activist

A global culture to fight extremism - Maajid Nawaz | TED-Ed https://www.ted.com/talks/maajid_nawaz_a_global_culture_to_fight_extremism (July 2011)

Youth

“Until quite recently poetry was taught badly—at least according to current academic standards. Poetry was used to teach grammar, elocution, and rhetoric. It was employed to convey history, both secular and sacred, often to instill patriotic sentiment and religious morality. Poetry was chanted in chorus at female academies. It was copied to teach cursive handwriting and calligraphy. It was memorized by wayward schoolboys as punishment. It was recited by children at public events and family gatherings. Being able to write verse was considered a social grace in both domestic and public life. Going to school meant becoming well versed.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

24
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

Life , Children , School , Family

“After childhood, the senses specialize via the channels of dominant technologies and social weaponries.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Letter to The Listener October 1971, Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 443
1970s

Sense , Childhood

“It seemed as impossible to conceive of Auschwitz with God as to conceive of Auschwitz without God. Therefore, everything had to be reassessed because everything had changed. With one stroke, mankind's achievements seemed to have been erased. Was Auschwitz a consequence or an aberration of "civilization"? All we know is that Auschwitz called that civilization into question as it called into question everything that had preceded Auschwitz. Scientific abstraction, social and economic contention, nationalism, xenophobia, religious fanaticism, racism, mass hysteria. All found their ultimate expression in Auschwitz.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

God , Question , Change

“The Abolitionists and Socialists, who, alone have explored the recesses of social science, well understand that they can never establish their Utopia until private property is abolished or equalized. The man without property is theoretically, and, too often, practically, without a single right.”

George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) American activist

Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters (1857)

Understanding , Science

“Under Socialism, you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live, you would have to live well.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

The Intelligent Woman's Guide: To Socialism and Capitalism, New York: NY, Brentano (1928) p. 670.
1920s

Clothes

“We are quickly approaching the end of the millennium and the 'magical' year 2000. Many futurologists in the sixties thought science and technology would offer man unprecedented possibilities for solving his problems. The fall of the Iron Curtain and the implosion of the Eastern Block also created, just a, few years ago, grand expectations. The dream did not come true, however. Rather than ending up in a technological paradise and a peace-loving world, we woke up in a torn world with virtually unsolvable environmental problems and agonising social conditions.”

Diederik Aerts (1953) Belgian theoretical physicist

Source: Perspectives on the World: an interdisciplinary reflection. (1995), p. i : Introduction

Love , World , Peace , Dreams

“"Psychiatry" and "psychiatrist" are easily redefined to mean "an anti-social enemy of the people". This takes the kill crazy psychiatrist off the preferred list of professions … The redefinition of words is done by associating different emotions and symbols with the word than were intended… Scientologists are redefining "doctor", "Psychiatry" and "psychology" to mean "undesirable antisocial elements"… The way to redefine a word is to get the new definition repeated as often as possible. Thus it is necessary to redefine medicine, psychiatry and psychology downward and define Dianetics and Scientology upwards. This, so far as words are concerned, is the public opinion battle for belief in your definitions, and not those of the opposition. A consistent, repeated effort is the key to any success with this technique of propaganda.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

"Propaganda by Redefinition of Words" (5 October 1971).
Scientology Policy Letters

People , Way , Effort , Success

“In this business one becomes a connoisseur. I can now see that [Jim] Carrey is a virtuoso, [Chris] Farley is at least hard-working, [Adam] Sandler is hopeless and Pauly Shore bypasses all categories to achieve a kind of transcendent fingernails-on-the-blackboard effect. His appeal must be limited to people whose self-esteem and social skills are so damaged that they find humor, or at least relief, in at last encountering a movie character less successful than themselves.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/jury-duty-1995 of Jury Duty (12 April 1995)
Reviews, One-star reviews

People , Business , Success

“In principle, every social situation involves strategic interaction among the participants. Thus, one might argue that proper understanding of any social situation would require game-theoretic analysis. But in actual fact, classical economic theory did manage to sidestep the game-theoretic aspects of economic behavior by postulating perfect competition, i. e., by assuming that every buyer and every seller is very small as compared with the size of the relevant markets, so that nobody can significantly affect the existing market prices by his actions.”

John Harsanyi (1920–2000) hungarian economist

Source: "Games with Incomplete Information," 1997, p. 136

Behavior , Game , Understanding , Perfection

“Thus finally we must abandon even the title. It is not the proletariat that is being formed into a class: it is a variety of persons some of whom are separated from the system of production. Processes of forming workers into a class do not take place in a vacuum; rather, they are inextricably tied to the totality of processes through which collectivities appear in struggle at particular moments of history. And the outcomes of these processes, while not arbitrary, are not determined uniquely by the structure of social relations. More than one outcome lies within the limits set by those relations.”

Adam Przeworski (1940) Polish-American academic

"Proletariat into a Class: The Process of Class Formation from Karl Kautsky’s The Class Struggle to Recent Controversies", Politics & Society (1977)

History , Appearance , Personality

“I maintain that learned orienting interactions, coupled with some mode of behavior that allowed for an independent recursive expansion of the domain of interactions of the organism, such as social life… and/or tool making and use, must have offered a selective basis for the evolution of the orienting behavior that in hominids led to our present-day languages.”

Humberto Maturana (1928) Chilean biologist and philosopher

Source: Biology of Cognition (1970), p. 31.

Life , Behavior , Learning

“It is in dealing with administration, as I apprehend, that civilizations have usually, though not always, broken down, for it has been on administrative difficulties that revolutions have for the most part supervened. Advances in administration seem to presuppose the evolution of new governing classes, since apparently, no established type of mind can adapt itself to changes in environment even in slow-moving civilizations, as fast as environments change. Administration is the capacity of coordinating many, and often conflicting, social energies in a single organism, so adroitly that they shall operate as a unity. This presupposes the power of recognizing a series of relations between numerous special social interests, with all of which no single man can be intimately acquainted. Probably no very highly specialized class can be strong in this intellectual quality because of the intellectual isolation incident to specialization; and yet administration or generalization is not only the faculty upon which social stability rests, but is possibly the highest faculty of the human mind.”

Brooks Adams (1848–1927) American political writer

207-8 , as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 10
The Theory of Social Revolutions,

Strong , Change , Parting

“…compare mankind with other animals that share our highly social habits: with colonial birds, monkeys and dolphins. As we shall see, the lesson they teach is that we are designed for a system of monogamy plagued by adultery.”

Matt Ridley (1958) economist

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 5

Bird , Animals

“Yes, it is absurd [to say that without God, murder is permissible], because even according to your sacred fables Moses murdered an Egyptian and then looked around to make sure no one saw him before trying to conceal the body, and the same goes for the myth of Cain and Abel, where Cain lied about killing his brother. Both of these characters obviously already knew that murder was wrong a long time before the story of the Ten Commandments, and this might be because Hammurabi had already established the code of law many centuries earlier than these myths found their way into the Bible, or it might be that, like most social animals, even superstitious savages understood that you shouldn't kill or maim other members of your own society (unless your religion commands it). One minute, God supposedly says "thou shalt not kill", and the next minute He orders His own people to kill every man and his brother, except of course for Moses's brother who really should have been the only one who was killed in that story. But somehow he was spared and promoted to priest instead; saved by nepotism. Then God told them all to kill all their neighbors, every man, woman and child, including the infants and the unborn. But the fact is that murder is still wrong, regardless of what God has to say about it, and there is still no justification when God allegedly commands His prophets to plunder communities and commit genocide.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, The Damn Commandments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u3z69YpLx0 (January 7, 2015)

God , People , Religion , Law

“The crowd is a social phenomenon only in the sense that it affects a number of persons at the same time.”

Everett Dean Martin (1880–1941)

Source: The Behavior of Crowds (1920), p. 7

Sense , Time , Personality

“A significant minority of people fully reject human evolution, opting instead for the belief that humans were specially created with no prior evolutionary ancestry less than ten thousand years ago. Such beliefs are often infused with a non-scientific perception of different races and how the supposedly originated. And, in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence and changing social norms, a relatively large proportion of people still cling to past traditions of white supremacy and racism.”

Daniel J. Fairbanks (1956) American artist

Source: Everyone is African: How Science Explodes the Myth of Race (2015), p. 155.

People , Change , Past

“Andrew Jackson then is a sturdy obstacle to the Democrats' ongoing and increasingly frenzied campaign to erase from America's history all the unsavory things their party has championed for most of its existence, namely, slavery, secession, civil war, segregation, socialism, and, most recently the slaughter of infants. And so their longtime hero Andrew Jackson has been, as Sam Spade once said, chosen to take the fall alongside the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia to help erase the Democrats' consistently reprehensible behavior and policies from the history books. But there is a rub. None of the women the Democrats have so far raised as General Jackson's replacement in any way merit representation in the pantheon of patriots, nation-builders, and military leaders that grace the few denominations of our paper currency.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

As quoted in Michael Scheuer's Non-Intervention http://non-intervention.com/1689/democrats-scourge-the-south-after-the-battle-flag-it%e2%80%99s-on-to-old-hickory/ (9 July 2015), by M. Scheuer.
2010s

Women , War , Books , Way

“There are other examples of this passive tolerance of practices running totally contrary to our values. The failure of social services, the police and local authorities, to deal with child sex abuse in places like Rotherham was frankly unforgiveable.”

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

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

Sex , Failure

“One of the major problems of our society is that so many people are too intelligent to accept religion, but not intelligent or strong-minded enough to look for acceptable alternatives; in the same way, many people are strong-minded enough not to want to be 'organization men', but incapable of seeing beyond an act of protest. These situations produce a sense of being 'between two stools', lacking real motive; a sense of mental strain is produced that may find its outlet in violence, or in organised anti-social behaviour.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: The Bicameral Critic (1985), p. 224, Crimes of Freedom -- and their cure (1964)

Men , People , Religion , Way

“If modern pedagogy means an effort towards the realisation of a new and more just form of society; if it means that we propose to instruct the rising generation in the causes which have brought about and maintain the lack of social equilibrium; if it means that we are anxious to prepare the race for better days, freeing it from religious fiction and from all idea of submission to an inevitable socio-economic inequality; we cannot entrust it to the State or to other official organisms which necessarily maintain existing privileges and support the laws which at present consecrate the exploitation of one man by another, the pernicious source of the worst abuses.”

Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia (1859–1909) Spanish anarchist

The Origin and Ideals of the Modern School (1908)

Law , Idea , Support , Effort

“We shall have to share out the fruits of technology among the whole of mankind. The notion that the direct and immediate producers of the fruits of technology have a proprietary right to these fruits will have to be forgotten. After all, who is the producer? Man is a social animal, and the immediate producer has been helped to produce by the whole structure of society, beginning with his own education.”

Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) British historian, author of A Study of History

Surviving the Future (1971), Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 95.

Education , Help , Animals

“Whereas an Otaku is a true connoisseur of the culture, showing the same reverence and respectful distance which any true expert shows to their chosen field of expertise, the Weeaboo is like a socially awkward adolescent, ineptly trying to gain the social acceptance of Japanese people — because their unfortunate mental disorder has caused them to believe they are, in fact, Japanese.”

Alexei Maxim Russell (1976) Canadian writer

from The Japanophile's Handbook.

People

“These are the sensations and feelings that are gradually blunted by education, staled by custom, rejected in favor of social conformity.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

Referring to the curiosity and sense of wonder of the child, p. 17
Collected Poems (1966)

Education , Feeling

“Thus, as [Karl] Kautsky wrote in 1919, there was growing up amid despotic conditions a new class of bureaucratic German exploiters, no better than the Tsarist chinovniks; and the workers’ future struggle against tyranny would be even more desperate than under traditional capitalism, when they could exploit divergences of interest between capital and the state bureaucracy, whereas in Bolshevik Russia these two had coalesced into one. This kind of regimented socialism could only maintain itself by denying its own principles, which it was most likely to do, given the Bolsheviks’ notorious opportunism and the ease with which they changed their tune from one day to the next. The most probable result would be a kind of Thermidor reaction which the Russian workers would welcome as a liberation, like the French in 1794. The original sin of Bolshevism lay in the suppression of democracy, abolition of elections, and denial of the freedom of speech and assembly, and in the belief that socialism could be based on a minority despotism imposed by force, which by its own logic was bound to intensify the rule of terror. If the Leninists were able to keep their "Tartar socialism" going long enough, it would infallibly result in the bureaucratization and militarization of society and finally in the autocratic rule of a single individual.”

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

pg. 51
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume II, The Golden Age

Democracy , Freedom , Change , Future

“The word qur’an means “recitation.” It was not designed for private perusal, but like most scriptures, it was meant to be read aloud, and the sound was an essential part of the sense. Poetry was important in Arabia. The poet was the spokesman, social historian, and cultural authority of his tribe, and over the years the Arabs had learned how to listen to a recitation and had developed a highly sophisticated critical ear.”

Karen Armstrong (1944) author and comparative religion scholar from Great Britain

Muhammad: A Prophet of Our Times
Muhammad: A Biography of The Prophet (2001)

Sense , Learning , Reading , Parting

“At the same time, as Hayek maintained elsewhere, the facts of the social sciences do not lend themselves to the same degree of prediction, or explanation, as the facts of the natural sciences—it is for this reason that there are degrees of prediction or explanation. Prediction may be expressed numerically, moreover, “not as a unique value or magnitude but as a range,” narrow in the natural sciences and potentially very broad in the social sciences. In the social sciences, Hayek modified the conception of a numerical range to a “range of phenomena to expect.””

Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author

This was his concept of pattern prediction, or explanation of the principle, broad, general predictions.
Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

Nature , Science , Time

“Some years ago I met a gentleman who was introduced to me as Mr. McKelway, editor of the Brooklyn Eagle … At the time the compliments that he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for Socialism he reminds me and the public that I am deaf and blind and especially liable to error.… The Eagle and I are at war. When it fights back, let it fight fair.… It is not fair fighting or good argument to remind me and others that I cannot see or hear.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

"How I Became a Socialist", New York Call (3 November 1912)

War , Error , Time , Fight

“Individuals bearing witness do not change history; only movements that understand their social world can do that.”

Ellen Willis (1941–2006) writer, activist

"Three Elegies for Susan Sontag", New Politics (Summer 2005), Vol. X, No. 3 http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/issue39/Willis39.htm
Context: Individuals bearing witness do not change history; only movements that understand their social world can do that. Movements encourage solidarity; the moral individual is likely, all unwittingly, to do the opposite, for bearing witness is lonely: it breeds feelings of superiority and moralistic anger against those who are not doing the same.

World , History , Understanding , Change

“This new theory of Dravidian superiority is as unscientific as the theory of Aryan superiority. For, it goes against all the accepted conclusions of historical research, which have conclusively proved the indivisible links between social and family institutions on the one hand and the stage of civilization on the other.”

E. M. S. Namboodiripad (1909–1998) Indian politician

On the issue of pre-Aryan inferiority or Aryan superiority
EMS as a historian

Family

“Institutions consist of cognitive, normative and regulative structures and activities that provide stability and meaning to social behaviour. Institutions are transported by various carriers – cultures, structures, and routines – and they operate at multiple levels of jurisdiction.”

W. Richard Scott (1932) American sociologist

Source: Institutions and Organizations., 1995, p. 33

“Socialism believes in the elimination of the individual and in the destruction of competition. The people who wish to destroy the idea that the Government exists for each one of us, and not each one of us for the Government, are all in favor of these monopolies. For while they consider them present evils, they consider them working to the good of an established government in which the individual is lost, and every man belongs to the State, and has lost his individual manhood and freedom.”

George Howard Earle, Jr. (1856–1928) American lawyer

Earle, on John Stuart Mill, speaking of the socialistic doctrines. From Hearing Before the Committee on Interstate Commerce: United States Senate Sixty-second Congress pursuant to S. Res. 98 &c. (6 December 1911:793)

People , Idea , Freedom , Evil

“By default, we have created a "system" of nursing-home care for the aged in which middle-class people pay exorbitant rates to for-profit nursing-home entrepreneurs - and then when private resources are consumed and the patient qualifies as a pauper, the nursing home begins billing Medicaid. This is precisely the antithesis of social citizenship; instead of the poor being accorded the dignity associated with the middle class, equality of treatment is achieved by making the middle class undergo pauperization.”

Robert Kuttner (1943) American journalist

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 6, Welfare, p. 239

People , Age , Home

“And above all, we shall then maintain our passionate desire to revolutionize the world to an extent unparalleled in history… Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: The Voice of Destruction (1940), pp. 192-193

World , History , Passion

“These two opposed forms of social organization, the modern state and the market, have evolved together through recent centuries, and their mutual interactions have become increasingly crucial to the character and dynamics of international relations in our world.”

Robert Gilpin (1930–2018) Political scientist

Introduction, p. 4
The Political Economy of International Relations (1987)

World

“All white men are responsible for white oppression. It is much too easy to say, "Racism is not my fault," or "I am not responsible for the country's inhumanity to the black man. … But insofar as white do-gooders tolerate and sponsor racism in their educational institutions, their political, economic and social structures, their churches, and in every other aspect of American life, they are directly responsible for racism. … Racism is possible because whites are indifferent to suffering and patient with cruelty. Karl Jaspers' description of metaphysical guilt is pertinent here. "There exists among men, because they are men, a solidarity through which each shares responsibility for every injustice and every wrong committed in the world, and especially for crimes that are committed in his presence or of which he cannot be ignorant."”

James H. Cone (1938–2018) American theologian

Source: Black Theology and Black Power (1969), p. 24

Life , Men , World , Education

“My self-image was not unstable. I saw myself, quite correctly, as unfit for the educational and social systems.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Girl, Interrupted (1994)

Education

“The moment with Hawkeye is all about mutual attraction, expressed without filter from him, and a surrendering of social guardedness from Cora. She accepts his directness as her own.”

Madeleine Stowe (1958) American actress

Mohican Press interview (2005)

“The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 412

War , Failure

“How strange to have failed as a social creature — even criminals do not fail that way — they are the law's "Loyal Opposition," so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Letter to his daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald (December 1940)
Quoted, Letters

Law , Way , Reading

“Courage will be forthcoming if tile leaders of opinion in all parties will summon out of tile fatigue and confusion of war enough lucidity of mind to understand for themselves and to explain to tile public what is required; and then propose a plan conceived in a spirit of social justice, a plan which uses a time of general sacrifice, not as an excuse for postponing desirable reforms, but as an opportunity for moving further than we have moved hitherto towards reducing in equalities.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Source: How to Pay for the War (1940), Ch. 1 : The Character of the Problem

War , Justice , Courage , Understanding

“Of these denials of European tradition one is especially important: that is the refutation of the demand that the political and social order and the authority set up under it have to justify themselves as benefiting their subjects. Hardly any other concept or idea of our past is held up to so much ridicule by fascism as that of the justification of power. ‘Power is its own justification’ is regarded as self-evident. Nothing shows better how far the totalitarian revolution has already gone than the general acceptance of this new maxim throughout Europe as a matter of course… Not even the most fanatical advocates of absolute monarchy would have dared to justify the sovereign otherwise.”

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

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), pp. 14-15

Idea , Past

“The social sciences are in a special difficulty because they cover the same field of human behavior as literature. As science, they must claim to improve upon the prejudice and superstition of common sense, and are therefore compelled to restate the language of common sense, full of implication and innuendo, in irreproachable, blameless, scientific prose innocent of bias or any other subtlety.”

Harvey Mansfield (1932) Author, professor

How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

Behavior , Literature , Sense , Science

“Comrade Stalin showed us how to build socialism in a backward country: it's painful to begin with, but afterwards everything turns out just fine.”

Hafizullah Amin (1929–1979) politician, former Afghan head of state (1979)

As quoted in Rodric Braithwaite (2010) Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89, page 76

Pain , Country

“The concept of a system is not a simple or unique one. There are many different kinds of systems, and different systems may be organized and operated in different ways. As individuals we all belong to some social system, we participate in an economic system, we are the product of several educational systems, and we are members of one or more family systems. In a similar fashion, the equipment of which physical systems are made may be members of many other systems, such as electrical, mechanical, sensing, actuating, energy, materials, and/or information systems. One of the challenges to the person who engineers a system is to find the many alternative ways in which the function, the operation, and/or the equipment of concern and interest may be considered, understood, and made to perform most effectively.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), Systems Engineering Methods (1967), p. 1: First paragraph of Ch. 1. The Environment for System Engineering Methods

Education , Family , Way , Fashion

“The Declaration of Independence was a source of inspiration to believe in ideals that transformed us from Jews to Israelis. … I am asking today with deep sorrow: Can we, despite all our achievements, ignore the intolerable gap between what the Declaration of Independence promised and what was fulfilled, the gap between the idea and the realities of Israel? Does the condition of occupation and domination over another people fit the Declaration of Independence? Is there any sense in the independence of one at the expense of the fundamental rights of the other? Can the Jewish people whose history is a record of continued suffering and relentless persecution, allow themselves to be indifferent to the rights and suffering of a neighboring people? Can the State of Israel allow itself an unrealistic dream of an ideological end to the conflict instead of pursuing a pragmatic, humanitarian one based on social justice. I believe that despite all the objective and subjective difficulties, the future of Israel and its position in the family of enlightened nations will depend on our ability to realize the promise of the founding fathers as they canonized it in the Declaration of Independence. I have always believed that there is no military solution to the Jewish Arab conflict, neither from a moral nor a strategic one and since a solution is therefore inevitable I ask myself, why wait?”

Daniel Barenboim (1942) Israeli Argentine-born pianist and conductor

Statement at the Knesset upon receiving the Wolf Prize, May 9, 2004, transcript online https://electronicintifada.net/content/daniel-barenboims-statement-knesset-upon-receiving-wolf-prize-may-9-2004/5080 (16 May 2004) at The Electronic Intifada.

People , Family , Justice , Dreams

“Women and men are divided by gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the social requirements of heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon (1946) American feminist and legal activist

Source: Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory (1982) Signs Vol. 7, No.3, p. 533

Women , Men , Sex

“What nationalist educators often fail to recognize is that merely being taught by teachers who are black has not and will not solve the problem if the teachers have been socialized to internalize racist thinking.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Rock My Soul (2003)

Education , Problem , Thinking , Teachers

“Good morning. I’m honored but I’m also pressed for time. If you have something to discuss please get to the point. I’m an hour behind schedule and didn’t budget time for socializing.”

Glen Cook Dreams of Steel

Source: Dreams of Steel (1990), Chapter 27 (p. 323)

Time

“I think that we could agree on what kind of a world we would all want to build. it would be a world of independent nations, moving toward international community, each of which protected and respected the basic human freedoms. It would be a world which demanded of each government that it accept its responsibility to insure social justice. It would be a world of constantly accelerating economic progress — not material welfare as an end in itself, but as a means to liberate the capacity of every human being to pursue his talents and to pursue his hopes. It would, in short, be a world that we would be proud to have built.”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

Day of Affirmation Address (1966)

World , Justice , Hope , Communication

“In the Mahabharata, the ceremony for the oath of a new king includes the admonition: 'Be like a garland-maker, O king, and not like a charcoal burner.' The garland symbolizes social coherence; it is a metaphor for dharmic diversity in which flowers of many colors and forms are strung harmoniously for the most pleasing effect. In contrast, the charcoal burner is a metaphor for the brute-force reduction of diversity into homogeneity, where diverse living substances are transformed into uniformly lifeless ashes.”

Rajiv Malhotra book Indra's Net

Indra's Net (2014)

Color , Flowers

“We do not inhabit a perfected world where natural selection ruthlessly scrutinizes all organic structures and then molds them for optimal utility. Organisms inherit a body form and a style of embryonic development; these impose constraints upon future change and adaptation. In many cases, evolutionary pathways reflect inherited patterns more than current environmental demands. These inheritances constrain, but they also provide opportunity. A potentially minor genetic change […] entails a host of complex, nonadaptive consequences. […] What “play” would evolution have if each structure were built for a restricted purpose and could be used for nothing else? How could humans learn to write if our brain had not evolved for hunting, social cohesion, or whatever, and could not transcend the adaptive boundaries of its original purpose?”

Stephen Jay Gould book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

"Hyena Myths and Realities", p. 156
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

World , Optimism , Nature , Learning

“For a successful revolution, it is not enough that there is enough discontent. What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Political Science for Civil Services Main Examination (2010)

Justice , Success

“As far as the government is concerned, the first challenge is to form a government which is based not on an ethnic and sectarian affiliation. We should have a government committed to oversee the reform and social development programmes.”

Raid Jahid Fahmi (1950) Iraqi politician

Interview with Al Jazeera (25 May 2018)

“I think the subject of race has been so difficult and so polluted by malign ideas that most people have just left it alone, including geneticists. … Most genetic variation is neutral – it doesn't do anything for or against the phenotype, and evolution ignores it – so most previous attempts to look at race have concluded that there's little difference between races. I think this position is the one on which the social scientists are basing their position. … If you look at the genes that do make a difference, selected genes, which are a tiny handful of the whole, you do find a number of differences, not very many, but a number of interesting differences between races as to which genes have been selected. This, of course, makes a lot of sense, because once the human family dispersed from its homeland in Africa, people faced different environments on each continent, different climates, different evolutionary challenges, and each group adapted to its environment in its own way.”

Nicholas Wade (1942) British writer

"An interview with Nicholas Wade" http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/nicholas-wade, American Scientist (April 2006).

People , Family , Way , Idea

“The God idea is growing more impersonal and nebulous in proportion as the human mind is learning to understand natural phenomena and in the degree that science progressively correlates human and social events.”

Emma Goldman (1868–1940) anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches

The Philosophy of Atheism (1916)

God , Idea , Understanding , Nature

“It was impossible however not to like Turner, there was something so social and cordial in his nature and I believe him to have had a excellent heart.”

Charles Robert Leslie (1794–1859) British painter (1794-1859)

Autobiographical Recollections of C. R. Leslie with Selections from his correspondence

Nature , Heart

“Christianity has found its triumphs and shown its fruits in every nation and tribe upon the globe; and its results have been in every case the same. Virtue, social order, prosperity, blessedness, the elevation and improvement, in all respects, of the human life, are the uniform and exclusive inheritance of those who receive the gospel.”

Julius Hawley Seelye (1824–1895) American politician

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 136.

Life

“Socialism is a return to primitive conditions.”

Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904) Welsh journalist and explorer

Source: Quotes:, Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley (1909), p. 530

“The President must be greater than anyone else, but not better than anyone else. We subject him and his family to close and constant scrutiny and denounce them for things that we ourselves do every day. A Presidential slip of the tongue, a slight error in judgment — social, political, or ethical — can raise a storm of protest. We give the President more work than a man can do, more responsibility than a man should take, more pressure than a man can bear. We abuse him often and rarely praise him. We wear him out, use him up, eat him up. And with all this, Americans have a love for the President that goes beyond loyalty or party nationality; he is ours, and we exercise the right to destroy him.”

John Steinbeck book America and Americans

America and Americans (1966)

Love , Family , Error , Exercises

“[if the automobile is replaced by public trans port] the social structure of cities will revert to the ecological pattern of 1880.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1970s, Toward a General Social Science, 1974, p. 257 as cited in D.S. Houghton, B.J. Shaw (1982) "The city in an era of restricted car usage: Some further observations and policy responses". In: Geoforum. Vol 13, Issue 1, p. 19–25,

“From the point of view of seeking a consensus of the moral imperative of individuals, such consensus being assumed to exist, the problem of choosing an electoral or other choice mechanism, or, more broadly, of choosing a social structure, assumes an entirely different form from that discussed in the greater part of this study.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Source: 1950s-1960s, Social Choice and Individual Values (1951), p. 85

Problem , Study , Parting

“Although we can discuss the question of what socialism is, what is its program and what are its tactics, one thing is obvious: the official Italian Socialist Party has been reactionary and absolutely conservative.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

Mussolini's March 23, 1919 speech to announce the first Fasci di Combattimento (League of Combat). Published in Fascism, Anti-Fascism and the Resistance in Italy: 1919 to the Present, Stanislao G. Pugliese, Lanham: Maryland, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (2004) p. 43
1910s

Question

“I want to cover all areas that can be depicted visually. This ranges from fairytales to attempts to enter the abstract and view oneself as a social outcast or someone struggling to stay alive.”

Günter Brus (1938) Austrian artist

Source: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon (2006), P. 218 (1987)

Fairytale

“The great attraction of cultural anthropology in the past was precisely that it seemed to offer such a richness of independent natural experiments; but unfortunately it is now clear that there has been a great deal of historical continuity and exchange among those "independent" experiments, most of which have felt the strong effect of contact with societies organized as modern states. More important, there has never been a human society with unlimited resources, of three sexes, or the power to read other people's minds, or to be transported great distances at the speed of light. How then are we to know the effect on human social organization and history of the need to scrabble for a living, or of the existence of males and females, or of the power to make our tongues drop manna and so to make the worse appear the better reason? A solution to the epistemological impotence of social theory has been to create a literature of imagination and logic in which the consequences of radical alterations in the conditions of human existence are deduced. It is the literature of science fiction. … [S]cience fiction is the laboratory in which extraordinary social conditions, never possible in actuality, are used to illumine the social and historical norm. … Science fiction stories are the Gedanken experiments of social science.”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

" The Last of the Nasties? http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1996/feb/29/the-last-of-the-nasties," The New York Review of Books, 29 February 1996;
Review of The Lost World by Michael Crichton

People , Sex , Imagination , History

“The solution of the most important problems of the theoretical social sciences in general and of theoretical economics in particular is thus, closely connected with the question of theoretically understanding the origin and change of 'organically' created social structures.”

Carl Menger (1840–1921) founder of the Austrian School of economics

Source: Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences, 1883, p. 147

Understanding , Question , Problem , Science

“What then is the essence of the group process by which are evolved the collective thought and the collective will? It is an acting and reacting, a single and identical process which brings out differences and integrates them into a unity. The complex reciprocal action, the intricate interweavings of the members of the group, is the social process.”

Mary Parker Follett The New State

Source: The New State, 1918, p. 33

“Krupp cannon have thundered over the battlefields where German unity was fought for and won, and Krupp cannon are the energy of the German army and navy today. The ships constructed in the Krupp yards carry the German flag into every sea. Krupp steel protects our vessels and our forts…But the Krupp works has not only been an exploiter in this sense. It has also been the first in Germany to recognize the new social problems and to seek to solve them, thus leading to social legislation.”

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

Speech at the Krupp Centenary in Essen (8 August 1912), quoted in William Manchester, The Arms of Krupp 1587-1968 (London: Michael Joseph, 1968), p. 303
1910s

Problem , Sense , Sea

“…human beings need community. If there are no communities available for constructive ends, there will be destructive, murderous communities… Only the social sector, that is, the nongovernmental, nonprofit organization, can create what we now need, communities for citizens… What the dawning 21st century needs above all is equally explosive growth of the nonprofit social sector in building communities in the newly dominant social environment, the city.”

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

Civilizing the City, Leader to Leader, No. 7 (Winter 1998)
1990s and later

Communication

“One great thing about getting old is that you can get out of all sorts of social obligations just by saying you're tired.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

"Getting old"
It's Bad for Ya (2008)

“SPAN ID=Indeed> Indeed, most of the time when we are listening to the noises people make or looking at the black marks on paper that stand for such noises, we are drawing upon the experiences of others in order to make up for what we ourselves have missed. Obviously the more an individual can make use of the nervous systems of others to supplement his own, the easier it is for him to survive. And, of course, the more individuals there are in a group cooperating by making helpful noises at each other, the better it is for all -- within the limits, naturally, of the group's talents for social organization. […] Societies, both animal and human, might almost be regarded as huge cooperative nervous system. </SPAN”

S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action

Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), Cooperation, p. 11

People , Nature , Time , Help

“Listening continuously and taking notes for an hour is an unusual cognitive experience for most young people. Professors should embrace — and even advertise — lecture courses as an exercise in mindfulness and attention building, a mental workout that counteracts the junk food of nonstop social media.”

Molly Worthen (1981) American writer

"Lecture me. Really." The New York Times October 17, 2015 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/opinion/sunday/lecture-me-really.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share

People , Food , Exercises

“Here, then, is another way to understand the intentions of the social theoretical project that this critical analysis of the contemporary situation of social thought prepares and suggests. Philosophical disputes about the social ideal have increasingly come to turn on an unresolved ambivalence toward the naturalistic premise, an incomplete rebellion against it. The visionary imagination of our age has been both liberated and disoriented. It has been liberated by its discovery that social worlds are contingent in a more radical sense than people had supposed; liberated to disengage the ideas of community and objectivity from any fixed structure of dependence and dominion or even from any determinate shape of social life. It has also, however, been disoriented by a demoralizing oscillation between a trumped-up sanctification of existing society and would-be utopian flight that finds in the land of its fantasies the inverted image of the circumstance it had wanted to escape; disoriented by the failure to spell out what the rejection of the naturalistic view means for the vision of a regenerate society. The social theory we need must vindicate a modernist—that is to say, a nonnaturalistic—view of community and objectivity, and it must do so by connecting the imagination of the ideal with the insight into transformation.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Social Theoryː Its Situation and Its Task (1987), p. 47

Life , People , Age , World

“In many of his biographical writings Tolstoy makes clear that, in pursuit of a virtuous life, he had to struggle hard with his own nature, habits, and animal passions, and had to overcome early training and education; but in this drama he shows that, in attempting to be a Christian, he had to battle constantly, often bitterly, with his own family, with the Church, and with all the social, economic, and political conditions and institutions that surrounded him.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 42

Life , Education , Family , Nature

“…the concentration of human beings in towns…is contrary to nature, and…this abnormal existence is bound to issue in suffering, deterioration, and gradual destruction to the mass of the population…countless thousands of our fellow-men, and still a larger number of children…are starved of air and space and sunshine. …This view of city life, which is gradually coming home to the heart and understanding and the conscience of our people, is so terrible that it cannot be put away. What is all our wealth and learning and the fine flower of our civilisation and our Constitution and our political theories – what are all these but dust and ashes, if the men and women, on whose labour the whole social fabric is maintained, are doomed to live and die in darkness and misery in the recesses of our great cities? We may undertake expeditions on behalf of oppressed tribes and races, we may conduct foreign missions, we may sympathise with the cause of unfortunate nationalities; but it is our own people, surely, who have the first claim upon us…the air must be purified…the sunshine must be allowed to stream in, the water and the food must be kept pure and unadulterated, the streets light and clean…the measure of your success in bringing these things to pass will be the measure of the arresting of the terrible powers of race degeneration which is going on in the countless sunless streets.”

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

Speech in Belmont (25 January 1907), quoted in John Wilson, C.B.: A Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (London: Constable, 1973), p. 588
Prime Minister

Life , Women , Men , Children