Quotes about socialism (5354 quotes, page 17)

“The social dynamics of human history, even more than that of biological evolution, illustrate the fundamental principle of ecological evolution - that everything depends on everything else. The nine elements that we have described in societal evolution of the three families of phenotypes - the phyla of things, organizations and people, the genetic bases in knowledge operating through energy and materials to produce phenotypes, and the three bonding relations of threat, integration and exchange - all interact on each other.”

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

Source: 1970s, Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution, 1978, p. 224

People , Family , History , Knowledge

“I was born in Iowa. My mom was a social worker and my dad had an education degree but they decided to teach my siblings and me at home. However, Iowa was one of the last three states in the country where homeschooling was illegal. You could literally be taken away from your parents by the government for truancy. That experience as a child really burned into me how an intrusive government could completely change your life. My parents dragged me to the Capitol at 10 and I started working on my first campaign at 12. I still maintain my healthy fear of a big and burdensome government.”

Elijah Haahr (1982)

Up Close and Personal with Speaker Pro Tem Elijah Haahr https://themissouritimes.com/40993/close-personal-speaker-pro-tem-elijah-haahr/ (May 18, 2017)

Life , Education , Fear , Home

“Belief in God's presence and action in American public life, in social events, in education, in civic celebrations and political discussions, which for two hundred years had been considered broadly beneficent, changed radically on September 11, 2001.”

Francis George (1937–2015) Catholic cardinal

God in Action: How Faith in God Can Address the Challenges of the World (2011) Ch. 1 "God in American Public Life," p. 21.

Life , God , Education , Change

“The new industrial methods have greatly accelerated certain tendencies that had already manifested themselves in the old domestic factories and some of these deserve more than passing notice as they are affecting not only productive processes but our social organization as well. Perhaps the most important of these influences are those that tend toward
(1) Aggregation or increase in size of industrial enterprises.
(2) Specialization or the limiting of the field of activity, not only of enterprises but also of men.
(3) Standardization or the reduction of all lines of product to a limited number of types and sizes.
(4) Extreme division of labor, following aggregation, specialization, and standardization and requiring special consideration.
These tendencies are all closely interlocked with each other, and with modern productive methods. It will be clearer, however, to discuss them separately before summing up their joint action.”

Dexter S. Kimball (1865–1952) American engineer

Source: Principles of industrial organization, 1913, p. 34

Men

“Members of the generation that came of age after World War II-Korean War who join in a relaxation of social and sexual tensions, and who espouse anti-regimentation, mystic-disaffiliation, and material-simplicity values, supposedly as a result of cold-war disillusionment. Coined by Jack Kerouac.”

Jack Kerouac book Beat Generation

Definition of "Beat Generation" offered to Random House publishers in 1959, after being asked him if there was anything he'd like to add to the definition they were preparing for the American College Dictionary: "Certain members of the generation that came of age after World War II who affect detachment from moral and social forms and responsibilities, supposedly the result of disillusionment. Coined by Jack Kerouac." The Random House definition eventually published read: "members of the generation that came of age after World War II who, supposedly as a result of disillusionment stemming from the Cold War, espoused forms of mysticism and the relaxation of social and sexual inhibitions."

War , Age , World

“People have always said - those words, 'too conservative,' is fairly relative. I'm sure that they probably said that about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. And truly, when you look at the Constitution and our founding fathers and their writings, the things that made this country great, you might draw those conclusions: That they were conservative. They were fiscally conservative and socially conservative.”

Sharron Angle (1949) Former member of the Nevada Assembly from 1999 to 2007

interview with New York Times, 2010-08-12
Adam
Nagourney
Tea Party Choice Scrambles in Taking On Reid in Nevada
New York Times
03624331
2010-08-17
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/us/politics/18vegas.html
Interview With Sharron Angle
2010-08-18
New York Times
03624331
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/us/politics/18angle.html

People , Drawing , Country

“Amid the general anarchy, against the coarse vice and brutality of the barbarians, herself harried by the rapacity of the nobles and weakened by the ignorance and barbarism of her own clergy, the Church did what she could, but a thorough social reconstruction was impossible. In modern life her power is broken by the prevalent doubt and apostasy, and the current of materialism and mammonism is now too great to be stemmed.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Ch.4 Why Has Christianity Never Undertaken the Work of Social Reconstruction?, p. 146

Life

“A United States of Europe is possible as an agreement between the European capitalists … but to what end? Only for the purpose of jointly suppressing socialism in Europe”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 21, p 341.
Collected Works

“…faced with a choice between an agreement that is to the advantage of the peoples of Europe and one that bolsters their own power within the EU institutions at the expense of Europe’s social economies, the Brussels establishment, and the powerful politicians behind them, will choose the latter every time.”

Yanis Varoufakis (1961) Greek-Australian political economist and author, Greek finance minister

People , Time

“You're not a homicidal, I checked that on your record before I came out after you. That is why I know you will join the Corps and get a great deal of pleasure out of going after the other kind of criminal who is sick, not just socially protesting. The man who can kill and enjoy it.”

Harry Harrison The Stainless Steel Rat

Inskipp the Uncatchable, recruiting Jim diGriz into the Special Corps, in "The Stainless Steel Rat" in Astounding magazine (August 1957)
The Stainless Steel Rat

Pleasure

“And so I am not concerned to justify the perpetrators of violence but to enquire into the function of the violence of the working classes in contemporary socialism.”

Georges Sorel book Reflections on Violence

Source: Reflections on Violence (1908), p. 42

“Social justice, ecological survival and freedom are threatened where we allow the proliferation of societal structures which in themselves tend to work against these goals.”

Margrit Kennedy (1939–2013) German architect

Source: Interest and Inflation Free Money (1995), Chapter Five, Money Reform & Global Transformation, p. 98

Justice , Freedom

“The rule systems governing transactions among agents in a defined sphere specify, to a greater or lesser extent, who participates (and who is excluded), who does what, when, where and how, and in relation to whom. ln particular, they define possible rights and obligations, including rules of command and obedience, governing specified categories of actors or roles vis a vis one another. The theory deals with the properties of social rule systems, their role in patterning social life, and the social and political processes whereby such systems are produced, maintained, and transformed as well as implemented in social action and interaction.”

Tom R. Burns (1937) American sociologist

Source: The shaping of social organization (1987), p. 8; Cited in: Carola Aili, Pamela Denicolo, Lars-Erik Nilsson (2008) In Tension Between Organization and Profession. p. 228.

Life

“Theory in the social sciences should have three major functions. First, it should aid in the codification of our existing concrete knowledge. It can do so by providing generalized hypotheses for the systematic reformulation of existing facts and insights, by extending the range of implication of particular hypotheses, and by unifying discrete observations under general concepts. Through codification, general theory in the social sciences will help to promote the process of cumulative growth of our knowledge. In making us more aware of the interconnections among items of existing knowledge which are now available in a scattered, fragmentary form, it will help us fix our attention on the points where further work must be done.
Second, general theory in the social sciences should be a guide to research. By codification it enables us to locate and define more precisely the boundaries of our knowledge and of our ignorance. Codification facilitates the selection of problems, although it is not, of course, the only useful technique for the selection of problems for fruitful research. Further than this, general theory should provide hypotheses to be applied and tested by the investigation of these problems…
Third, general theory as a point of departure for specialized work in the social sciences will facilitate the control of the biases of observation and interpretation which are at present fostered by the departmentalization of education and research in the social sciences.”

Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) American sociologist

Source: Toward a general theory of action (1951), p. 3

Education , Departure , Knowledge , Problem

“Socialism, communism, collectivism, philosophical anarchism, which promised paradise on earth for every male, cut off the few avenues of escape which capitalism had opened to the woman, and she saw before her only the future reserved for machine-made, collectivist females.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Communication , Future

“The individual has been allowed out of his socially constructed cage. That, at least, is the contemporary myth. What is not clear, however, is what that liberation has to do with the fulfullment of individualism. The lessons of history seem relatively clear. Societies on the rise are simple, unadorned and relatively uncompromising. Those on the decline are given to open-mindedness, self-indulgence and the baroque.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

Voltaire's Bastards (1992)

History

“Like Thelma and Louise, Medicare and Social Security are headed for the cliff. And we are in the back seat.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2000s, Where the Right Went Wrong (2004)

“To Bring political knowledge to the workers the Social-Democratss must go among all classes of the population, must dispatch units of their army in all directions”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Source: What is to be Done? (1902), Chapter Three, Section D, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)

Knowledge

“If we sit with Negroes at our tables, if we attend social functions with them as our social equals, if we disregard segregation in all other relations, is it then possible that we maintain it fixedly in the marriage of the South's Saxon sons and daughters? The answer must be "No." By the absolute denial of social equality to the Negro, the barriers between the races are firm and strong. But if the middle wall of the social partition should be broken down, then the mingling of the tides of life would surely begin. It would be a slow process, but the result would be the same. And though the process be gradual, it would be none the less irresistible and inevitable. The lower strata of the white population would probably feel the first effects, and within the foreseeable future the middle and upper classes would be invaded. Then, the Southern White race, the Southern Caucasian, would be irretrievably doomed.”

Theodore G. Bilbo (1877–1947) American politician

Source: Take Your Choice, Separation or Mongrelization (1946), Chapter 4: Southern Segregation and the Color Line.

Life , Marriage , Feeling , Strong

“Existing social conditions favour the production of an infinite number of acts of violence and there has been no hesitation in urging the workers not to refrain from brutality when this might do them service.”

Georges Sorel book Reflections on Violence

Source: Reflections on Violence (1908), p. 183

“By keeping historical events in their proper perspective, theology helps safeguard society and the Church from regarding as permanent what is only temporary. Critical reflection thus always plays the inverse role of an ideology which rationalizes and justifies a given social and ecclesial order.”

Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928) Peruvian theologian

Source: A Theology of Liberation (1971), p. 12

Help

“One of the most important elements of Christian religion is the idea that justice is an essential quality of God. Since God is the absolute, his justice must be absolute justice, that is to say, eternal and unchangeable. Only a religion whose deity is supposed to be just can play a role in social life. To attribute justice to the deity in order to make religion applicable to human relations implies a certain tendency of rationalizing something which, by its very nature, is irrational-the transcendental being, the religious authority, and its absolute qualities.”

Hans Kelsen (1881–1973) Austrian lawyer

"The Idea of Justice in the Holy Scriptures", Rivista Juridicade la Universidadde Puerto Rico, Sept., 1952-April, 1953., published in What is Justice? (1957)

Life , God , Religion , Justice

“Legislations are just a way to reach a certain social goal, the problem is that people focus on the words and forget the spirit of the text”

Ali Al-Wardi (1913–1995) Iraqi sociologist

People , Way , Problem , Forgetting

“A certain area within a channel may function as a “gate”; the constellation of the forces before and after the gate region is decisively different in such a way that the passing or not passing of the unit through the whole channel depends to a high degree upon what happens in the gate region. This holds not only for food channels but also for the travelling of a news item through certain communication channels in a group, for movement of goods, and the social locomotion of individuals in many organizations.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1940s, Frontiers in group dynamics II, 1947, p. 145.

Food , Way , Travel , Communication

“I have tried to show that psychiatric research can be empirical and experimental, controlled, and operational and not dependent on inferences, analogies, or anecdotes. Hypotheses can be derived which are testable. Theory is a different matter. At the present we rely heavily on psychoanalytic theory or on still poorly formulated and defined general systems theory, information theory, or transactional theory. To explain the depth and variety of the interrelationship of somatopsychosocial facets of the totality of human behavior in process requires a unified theory of human behavior which we have not yet even approached. Integration or synthesis of biological, psychological, and social theory is not enough.”

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

Ginker (1964) as cited in: S. Nassir Ghaemi (2009) The Rise and Fall of the Biopsychosocial Model. p. 24

Behavior , Dependency

“The spirit of true religion breathes gentleness and affability; it gives a native, unaffected ease to the behavior; it is social, kind, cheerful; far removed from the cloudy and illiberal disposition which clouds the brow, sharpens the temper, and dejects the spirit.”

Hugh Blair (1718–1800) British philosopher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 501.

Religion , Behavior

“We set ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, i. e., all organized and systematic violence, all use of violence against people in general. We do not expect the advent of a system of society in which the principle of subordination of the minority to the majority will not be observed.
In striving for socialism, however, we are convinced that it will develop into communism and, therefore, that the need for violence against people in general, for the subordination of one man to another, and of one section of the population to another, will vanish altogether since people will become accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social life without violence and without subordination.”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

Ch. 4 : Supplementary Explanations by Engels http://www.smirnov.demon.co.uk/socialism/writings/lenin/staterev/ch04.htm
The State and Revolution (1917)

Life , People , Communication

“Intellectual radicalism should not mean repeating stale dogmas of Marxism. It should not mean the study of socialism. It had better mean a restless, controversial criticism of current ideas, and a hammering out of some clear-sighted philosophy that shall be this pillar of fire. The young radical today is not asked to be a martyr, but he is asked to be a thinker, an intellectual leader. So far as the official radicals deprecate such an enterprise they make their movement sterile. Yet how often when attempts are made to group radicals on an intellectual basis does not some orthodox elder of the socialist church arise and solemnly denounce such intellectual snobbishness.”

Randolph Bourne (1886–1918) American writer

¶4.
"The Price of Radicalism" (1916)

Idea , Study

“I compared meat to tobacco as a killer, but to be fair, in one way alone tobacco outshines meat as an evil: it is physically addictive. As we all know, tobacco companies have a history of trying to target their ads to teenagers in the frequently fulfilled hope that these young people will be in their thrall for the rest of their lives. Meat, by contrast, is in no way physically addictive. Eating it is merely a habit, one that people are socially conditioned to believe is normal, even healthy. Whether you choose to phase meat out of your diet slowly, over time, or to stop on a dime and become a vegetarian overnight, you won't suffer any real symptoms of “withdrawal.””

Howard F. Lyman (1938) American activist

But you probably will feel more energy, and enjoy a longer and healthier life.
Source: Mad Cowboy (1998), Ch. 2: The Simple Facts, pp. 40-41

Life , People , Hope , Way

“Most of the people on the Cloud Ark were going to have to be women.
There were other reasons for it besides just making more babies. Research on the long-term effects of spaceflight suggested that women were less susceptible to radiation damage than men. They were smaller on average, requiring less space, less food, less air. And sociological studies pointed to the idea that they did better when crammed together in tight spaces for long periods of time.
This was controversial, as it got into fraught topics of nature vs. nurture and whether gender identity was a social construct or a genetic program.
But if you bought into the idea that boys had been programmed by Darwinian selection to run around in the open chucking spears at wild animals—something that every parent who had ever raised a boy had to take seriously—then it was difficult to envision a lot of them spending their lives in tin cans.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"Scouts"
Seveneves (2015), Part One

Women , Men , People , Food

“Over the last 50,000 years, modern humans have been subjected to enormous evolutionary pressures, in part from the consequences of their own social culture. They explored new ranges and climates and developed new social structures. Fast adaption, particularly to new social structures, was required as each population strove to exploit its own ecological niche and to avoid conquest by its neighbors. The genetic mechanism that made possible this rapid evolutionary change was the soft sweep, the reshaping of existing traits by quick minor adjustments in the sets of alleles that controlled them. But what began as a single experiment with the ancestral human population became a set of parallel experiments once the ancestral population had spread throughout the world. These independent evolutionary paths led inevitably to the different human populations or races that inhabit each continent.”

Nicholas Wade (1942) British writer

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

World , Change , Parting

“I've always been really anti-social, and being relatively famous has just given me an excuse to go out even less. If I didn't play in Soundgarden I'd have no excuse for being the way I am. My friends and family would hate me, whereas now they probably feel sorry for me. Y'know, 'Poor kid, he can't come out because he gets hassled a lot.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Interview with Team Rock Magazine, Summer 1996 http://teamrock.com/feature/2018-02-06/archive-the-real-chris-cornell,
On being anti-social

Hate , Family , Way , Feeling

“It is only by entering the transcendental, the supernatural, the authentically spiritual order that man rises above the social. Until then, whatever he may do, the social is transcendent in relation to him.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Great Beast (1947), p. 123

“The predecessor of the Reform party, the Social Credit party, was very much like this. Believing in funny money and control of banking, and a whole bunch of fairly non-conservative economic things.”

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

1990s, Speech to the Council for National Policy (1997)

Money

“The new Romanian elite, as well as any other elite in the world, must be based on the principle of social selection. In other words, a category of people endowed with certain qualities which they then cultivate, is naturally selected from the nation's body, namely from the large healthy mass of peasantry and workingmen, which is permanently bound to the land and the country. This category of people becomes the national elite meant to lead our nation.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

People , World , Nature , Country

“No doubt there is much immature talking and hasty writing and will always be where liberty of speech and press prevails. The political, religious, and social views of any age and even of the most radical members of society, were born, long before their time. Those who invented the alphabet and the printing press are indirectly responsible for much of the violence of a changing social state; but in the same way, they are responsible for the progress of the world, for the enlightenment, for the civilization, and for all that makes the present better than the past.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Voltaire (1916)

Age , World , Way , Change

“Forget 'redeeming social value,' dirty pictures are fun. When I die I want my ashes sprinkled over a nudist camp.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

The Venus Belt, 1980.

Forgetting

“The government is committed to extending the coverage of social security in the country to ensure Malaysians from all walks of life are covered by a sustainable and affordable social security system.”

Wan Azizah Wan Ismail (1952) Malaysian politician

Wan Azizah Wan Ismail (2018) cited in " 90% of Malaysian workers do not have social security, says Wan Azizah https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2018/10/02/dr-wan-azizah-137mil-malaysian-workers-do-not-have-social-security/" on The Star Online, 2 October 2018

Life , Country

“Maurice Joly: In “Caesar” I bluntly accused our emperor of evil offenses…in ‘’’this’’’ book I expose the nature of the man’s mind, how he thinks, y’see!
Alphonse: But, Maurice, this Napoleon has seduced the public with social gifts…libraries and wars to give them national patriotic pride.
Maurice Joly: BAH! That is the kind of pallitative all dictators give their masses! But at what price? I ask you!
Alphonse: So…you show his plan by the dialogue of Machiavelli who is known as a cunning manipulator of political power, eh?
Maurice Joly: Yes, this is the clearest way to show the similarity of Napoleon’s mind to Machiavelli’s!
Alphonse: Hmmm! A clever device I must admit!”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.13

War , Books , Way , Nature

“Theories of the postmodern - whether celebratory or couched in the language of moral revulsion and denunciation - bear a strong family resemblance to all those more ambitious sociological generalizations which, at much the same time, bring us the news of the arrival and inauguration of a whole new type of society, most famously baptized "postindustrial society"(Daniel Bell) but often also designated consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society, or high tech and the like. Such theories have the obvious ideological mission of demonstrating, to their own relief, that the new social formation in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism, namely, the primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of class struggle.”

Fredric Jameson (1934) American academic

Source: Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Chapter 1: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Family , Law , Question , Strong

“The notion that every well educated person would have a mastery of at least the basic elements of the humanities, sciences, and social sciences is a far cry from the specialized education that most students today receive, particularly in the research universities.”

Joseph E. Stiglitz (1943) American economist and professor, born 1943.

Autobiographical Essay (2001)

Education , Universe , Science , Personality

“In the absence of social awareness and appreciation of the scientiﬁc objectivity among sufficiently large number of civil servants or political leaders, the need of validity has not yet been accepted in the ofﬁcial tatistical system in India. Ofcial statistics in India is treated as an integral part of the dministrative system which is regulated by the principle of authority. Approval of statistical estimates at a high level of authority is accepted as a bstitnte for validity in many ases there is continuing opposition to independent cross-hccks for the validity of the data. Ofﬁcials have the feeling that two independent estimates, which might differ would be confusing and, in fact unthinkable; therefore independent cross-checks in statistics should be eliminated.”

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972) Indian scientist

Quote, Professor P.C. Mahalanobis and the Development of Population Statistics in lndia

Feeling , Parting

“Liberty once again must become more important to us than the desire for security and material comfort. Personal safety and economic prosperity can only come as the consequence of liberty. They cannot be provided by an authoritarian government… The foundation for a police state has been put in place, and it's urgent we mobilize resistance before it's too late… Central planning is intellectually bankrupt – and it has bankrupted our country and undermined our moral principles. Respect for individual liberty and dignity is the only answer to government force, force that serves the politically and economically powerful. Our planners and rulers are not geniuses, but rather demagogues and would-be dictators -- always performing their tasks with a cover of humanitarian rhetoric… The collapse of the Soviet system came swiftly and dramatically, without a bloody conflict… It came as no surprise, however, to the devotees of freedom who have understood for decades that socialism was doomed to fail… And so too will the welfare/warfare state fail… A free society is based on the key principle that the government, the president, the Congress, the courts, and the bureaucrats are incapable of knowing what is best for each and every one of us… A government as a referee is proper, but a government that uses arbitrary force to direct every aspect of society threatens freedom… The time has come for a modern approach to achieving those values that all civilized societies seek. Only in a free society do individuals have the best chance to seek virtue, strive for excellence, improve their economic well-being, and achieve personal happiness… The worthy goals of civilization can only be achieved by freedom loving individuals. When government uses force, liberty is sacrificed and the goals are lost. It is freedom that is the source of all creative energy. If I am to be your president, these are the goals I would seek. I reject the notion that we need a president to run our lives, plan the economy, or police the world… It is much more important to protect individual liberty and privacy than to make government even more secretive and powerful.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Video Address Announcing 2008 Presidential Exploratory Committee, February 19, 2007 http://blog.4president.org/2008/2007/02/ron_paul_video_.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPlPT4bncq8
2000s, 2006-2009

Love , Secret , World , Freedom

“Revolution is indeed a violent process. But if it is to result only in a change of dictatorship, in a shifting of names and political personalities, then it is hardly worth while. It is surely not worth all the struggle and sacrifice, the stupendous loss in human life and cultural values that result from every revolution. If such a revolution were even to bring greater social well being (which has not been the case in Russia) then it would also not be worth the terrific price paid: mere improvement can be brought about without bloody revolution.”

Emma Goldman book My Disillusionment in Russia

My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)

Life , Change , Loss , Personality

“Everything we hope to do, depends on an expanding economic pie. And only a vibrant, competitive, thriving private sector can create that. Government is a necessary partner, but it is the junior partner. Only the private sector can produce the revenues for the social programs that we Democrats care so much about. The financing of those programs through ever more public debt violates our generation responsibility.”

Paul Tsongas (1941–1997) American politician

ibid.

Hope , Dependency

“The black people I knew came from different places and backgrounds- social, economic, even ethnic- yet the color of our skin was somehow supposed to make us identical in spite of our differences. I didn't buy it. Of course we had all experienced racism in one way or another, but did that mean that we had to think alike?”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Page 62
2000s, (2008)

People , Color , Way , Thinking

“In the dynamic of today’s campus life, anti-racist codes are not really about enforcing a kind of social etiquette, universally applied. They are about power exercised by some over others.”

Jeffrey Tucker (1963) American writer

Source: Spooks and Speech Controls, archive.lewrockwell.com, 2016-05-22 http://archive.lewrockwell.com/orig/tucker4.html,

Life , Exercises , Universe

“So I shamelessly say, no, I want him to fail, if his agenda is a far-left collectivism, some people say socialism, as a conservative heartfelt, deeply, why would I want socialism to succeed?”

Rush Limbaugh (1951) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, author, and television personality

Asked if he wanted Barack Obama to succeed as a president on Hannity's America January 22, 2009 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,481484,00.html

People

“We face today two practical dilemmas. The first can be succinctly described as the return of the ‘social question’. For Victorian reformers—or American activists of the pre-1914 age of reform—the challenge posed by the social question of their time was straightforward: how was a liberal society to respond to the poverty, overcrowding, dirt, malnutrition and ill health of the new industrial cities? How were the working masses to be brought into the community—as voters, as citizens, as participants—without upheaval, protest and even revolution? What should be done to alleviate the suffering and injustices to which the urban working masses were now exposed and how was the ruling elite of the day to be brought to see the need for change?
The history of the 20th century West is in large measure the history of efforts to answer these questions. The responses proved spectacularly successful: not only was revolution avoided but the industrial proletariat was integrated to a remarkable degree. Only in countries where any liberal reform was prevented by authoritarian rulers did the social question rephrase itself as a political challenge, typically ending in violent confrontation. In the middle of the 19th century, sharp-eyed observers like Karl Marx had taken it for granted that the only way the inequities of industrial capitalism could be overcome was by revolution. The idea that they could be dissolved peacefully into New Deals, Great Societies and welfare states simply never would have occurred to him.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

Ill Fares the Land (2010), Ch. 5 : What Is to be Done?

Health , Age , Way , History

“Participation in parliamentary politics has affected the Socialist labour movement like an insidious poison. It destroyed the belief in the necessity of constructive Socialist activity and, worst of all, the impulse to self-help, by inoculating people with the ruinous delusion that salvation always comes from above.
Thus, in place of the creative Socialism of the old International, there developed a sort of substitute product which has nothing in common with real Socialism but the name. Socialism steadily lost its character of a cultural ideal, which was to prepare the peoples for the dissolution of capitalist society, and, therefore, could not let itself be halted by the artificial frontiers of the national states. In the minds of the leaders of this new phase of the Socialist movement the interests of the national state were blended more and more with the alleged aims of their party, until at last they became unable to distinguish any definite boundaries between them. So inevitably the labour movement was gradually incorporated in the equipment of the national state and restored to this equilibrium which it had actually lost before.”

Rudolf Rocker book Anarcho-Syndicalism

Source: Anarcho-Syndicalism (1938), Ch. 4 "The Objectives of Anarcho-syndicalism"

People , Help

“Ressentiment must therefore be strongest in a society like ours, where approximately equal rights (political and otherwise) or formal social equality, publicly recognized, go hand in hand with wide factual differences in power, property, and education.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 50

Education

“Our united belief in social justice demands no less.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Principles and Priorities : Programme for Government (September 5, 2007)

Justice

“Concepts like those of organization, wholeness, directiveness, teleology, control, self-regulation, differentiation, and the like are alien to conventional science. However, they pop up everywhere in the biological, behavioral, and social sciences and are, in fact, indispensable for dealing with living organisms or social groups. Thus, a basic problem posed to modem science is a general theory of organization. General Systems Theory is, in principle, capable of giving exact definitions for such concepts.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

1950s, "General systems theory," 1956

Behavior , Problem , Science

“Socialism knows that revolutionary upheavals and transformations proceed from the rock bed of material needs. With a full appreciation of and veneration for moral impulses that are balanced with scientific knowledge, it eschews, looks with just suspicion upon and gives a wide berth to balloon morality, or be it those malarial fevers that reformers love to dignify with the name of "moral feelings"”

Daniel De Leon (1852–1914) American newspaper editor

Materialism-Morality
Reform or Revolution (1896)

Love , Feeling , Knowledge

“It is irrelevant in that ethnies arc constituted, not by lines of physical descent, but by the sense of continuity, shared memory and collective destiny, i. e. by lines of cultural affinity embodied in distinctive myths, memories, symbols and values retained by a given cultural unit of population. In that sense much has been retained, and revived, from the extant heritage of ancient Greece. For, even at the time of Slavic migrations, in Ionia and especially in Constantinople, there was a growing emphasis on the Greek language, on Greek philosophy and literature, and on classical models of thought and scholarship. Such a ‘Greek revival’ was to surface again in the tenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as subsequently, providing a powerful impetus to the sense of cultural affinity with ancient Greece and its classical heritage. This is not to deny for one moment either the enormous cultural changes undergone by the Greeks despite a surviving sense of common ethnicity or the cultural influence of surrounding peoples and civilizations over two thousand years. At the same time in terms of script and language, certain values, a particular environment and its nostalgia, continuous social interactions and a sense of religious and cultural difference, even exclusion, a sense of Greek identity and common sentiments of ethnicity can be said to have persisted”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: National Identity (1991), p. 30: About Ethnic Change, Dissolution and Survival

People , Literature , Sense , Nostalgia

“The speed with which armies collapse, bureaucracies abdicate, and social structures dissolve once the autocrat is removed frequently surprises American Policy makers.”

Jeane Kirkpatrick (1926–2006) American diplomat and Presidential advisor

Dictatorship and Double Standards, Commentary (New York, Nov. 1979), quoted in The Economist , 23 December 2006:131

Speed

“In fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

“Socialism and Democracy,” essay published in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Arthur S. Link, ed., Vol. 5, Princeton University Press, 1968, pp. 559-62, (first published, August 22, 1887)
1880s

Men , Democracy , Communication

“Could it be that people accept evolution because […. ] They know that evolution is the only philosophy that can be used to justify their political agenda of: i. Communism, ii. Racism, iii. Abortion, iv. Nazism, v. Socialism, vi. Gay rights, vii. Women's liberation, viii. Extreme environmentalism, ix. Euthanasia, x. Pornography, xi. Humanism, xii. New Age Movement.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Unmasking the False Religion of Evolution (1996)

Women , People , Age , Communication

“And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with the black? how will it deal with the yellow man? how will it tackle that alleged termite in the civilized woodwork, the Jew? Certainly not as races at all. […] And the Jew also it will treat as any other man. It is said that the Jew is incurably a parasite on the apparatus of credit. If there are parasites on the apparatus of credit, that is a reason for the legislative cleaning of the apparatus of credit, but it is no reason for the special treatment of the Jew. If the Jew has a certain incurable tendency to social parasitism, and we make social parasitism impossible, we shall abolish the Jew, and if he has not, there is no need to abolish the Jew.”

H. G. Wells book Anticipations

Anticipations (1902)

“The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of "liberalism" they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”

Norman Thomas (1884–1968) American Presbyterian minister and socialist

Reagan biographer Lou Cannon noted that this was a suspect quotation, and that he could find no evidence of it. Thomas did say that both major political parties had borrowed items from the Socialist Party platform.
Cannon, Lou. Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power. New York: PublicAffairs Books, 2003. ISBN 1-586-48030-8 (p. 125).
Possibly Misattributed

People

“Hayek’s ultimate social goal—his utopia—was the unification of all humankind in one society.”

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

Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

“No area of life will be free from this concept in the future. That means that people will recognize the social organism, and they must think within this context. They must not only think about schools but also about the legal system and economic structures. They must always think through the entire social organism…”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

1970's, Every Man an Artist: Talks at Documenta 5', 1972

Life , People , School , Thinking

“True progress is not possible without a variety of opinions, for it is only through the friction of variously constituted intellects and through the stimulating effect they have on one another that social problems are gradually clarified and thus brought within the range of solution.”

Muhammad Asad book The Principles of State and Government in Islam

Source: The Principles of State and Government in Islam (1961), Chapter 3: Government By Consent And Consent, p 48

Problem

“Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in [sic] the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of Feminism.”

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

Falsely attributed to Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (First Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 10 in "Waste, Fraud, and Abuse: Hearing Before the Committee on Ways and Means", US House of Representatives, , and spread on the Internet.
Probably based on the quotation opening Chapter 1: "Marxism and feminism are one, and that one is Marxism." — Heidi Hartmann and Amy Bridges, "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism"
Misattributed

Communication

“Greek Phanariot merchants and traders dominated the commerce of the Ottoman empire, utilizing their kinship networks and social and religious institutions to maximize not only their business and assets, but also their cultural capital. Diaspora Greeks became especially prominent from the eighteenth century in the development of printing and the press, and experienced a major intellectual revival in cities as far afield as Vienna, Venice, Odessa, Paris, and Amsterdam”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: Myths and Memories of the Nation (1999), Chapter: Greeks, Armenians and Jews.

Business

“It is necessary to distinguish between socialism and socialism—in fact, between idea and idea of the same socialist conception, in order to distinguish among them those that are inimical to Fascism. It is well known that Sorellian syndicalism, out of which the thought and the political method of Fascism emerged—conceived itself the genuine interpretation of Marxist communism. The dynamic conception of history, in which force as violence functions as an essential, is of unquestioned Marxist origin. Those notions flowed into other currents of contemporary thought, that have themselves, via alternative routes, arrived at a vindication of the form of State—implacable, but absolutely rational—that finds historic necessity in the very spiritual dynamism through which it realizes itself.”

Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944) Italian neo-Hegelian Idealist philosopher and politician

Che cosa è il fascismo: Discorsi e polemiche (“What is Fascism?”), Florence: Vallecchi, (1925) pp. 42-45, 47-48, 49-51, 56,Origins and Doctrine of Fascism, A. James Gregor, translator and editor, Transaction Publishers, 2003, p. 59

History , Communication , Idea

“The idealist doctrine then may be summed up by saying that each individual has two orderings, one which governs him in his everyday actions, and one which would be relevant under some ideal conditions and which is in some sense truer than the first ordering. It is the latter which is considered relevant to social choice, and it is assumed that there is complete unanimity with regard to the truer individual ordering.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Source: 1950s-1960s, Social Choice and Individual Values (1951), p. 83

Sense

“But it has been necessary, for the benefit of the social order, to convert religion into a kind of police system, and hence hell. Oriental or Greek Christianity is predominantly eschatological, Protestantism predominantly ethical, and Catholicism is a compromise between the two, although with the eschatological element predominating.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), IV : The Essence of Catholicism

Religion , Hell

“The effectiveness of any model used to describe and understand behavior of a particular system as a whole ultimately depends on the degree to which that model accurately represents that system. Nevertheless, there have been and are situations in which application of deterministic or animate models to social systems have produced useful results for a short period of time. However, in a longer run, such mismatches usually result in less than desirable results because critical aspects of the social systems were omitted in the less complex model that was used.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Ackoff (1999, p. 34) cited in: Michael C. Jackson (2000) Systems Approaches to Management. p. 234.
1990s

Behavior , Understanding , Time , Animals

“Morally relevant emotions are essential for living in social groups and they provide the basis on which we may construct conceptual frameworks that help guide our actions, but human beings should more accurately be thought of as being endowed with morally relevant capacities rather than innate moral knowledge.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.128

Knowledge , Help

“When Churchill and Roosevelt state that they want to build up a new social order, later on, it is like a hairdresser with a bald head recommending an unfortunate hair-restorer. These men, who live in the most socially backward states, have misery and distress enough in their own countries to occupy themselves with the distribution of foodstuffs…. We are allied with strong peoples, who in the same need are faced with the same enemies. The American President and his Plutocratic clique have mocked us as the Have-nots-that is true, but the Have-nots will see to it that they are not robbed of the little they have.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Speech Declaring War Against the United States http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/hitler-s-speech-declaring-war-against-the-united-states (December 11, 1941)
1940s

Men , People , Strong , Country

“If our social skills (that is, our ability to secure co-operation between people) had advanced step by step with our technical skills, there would not have been another European War.”

Elton Mayo (1880–1949) Australian academic

Source: The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilisation, 1945, p. 30 (in 2014 edition); Cited in: Urwick & Brech (1949, 215)

War , People

“The rise of the welfare state, on the one hand, and of the military bureaucracy, on the other, are instances of the manner in which technology is enforcing a socialization of life.”

Robert L. Heilbroner (1919–2005) American historian and economist

Source: The Future As History (1960), Chapter IV, Part 1, A Recapitulation, p. 177

Life

“One could argue as well that Jesus is the most important person in the history of the West, looked at from a historical, social, or cultural perspective, quite apart from his religious significance.”

Bart D. Ehrman book Did Jesus Exist?

Source: Did Jesus Exist? (2012), Ch. 4: 'Evidence for Jesus from Outside the Gospels'

History , Personality

“Aristocrats might shrug, but commoners, dreading any collapse of the social order, wanted the rules of behavior to be observed.”

Robert Silverberg (1935) American speculative fiction writer and editor

Source: Short fiction, The Emperor and the Maula (2007), p. 443

Behavior

“When the speeches of Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George, the worst of the predators, the wild beasts of imperialism, are repeated here by Martov in the name of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party … then I say to myself that we have to be on the alert and to realise that the Cheka is indispensable!”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Address to the Seventh All-Russia Congress (5 December 1919); Collected Works, Vol. 30.
1910s

“An organization which depends solely upon its blueprints of prescribed behavior is a very fragile social system.”

Daniel Katz (1903–1998) American psychologist

Daniel Katz (1964) ""The motivational basis of organizational behavior". In: Behavioral science, 1964. p. 132

Behavior , Dependency

“We must recognise that the absolutely free working of such a system cannot now be accepted. We are living too closely knit a structure of society in which the very complication of our immense programme of social reform and industrial development necessitates strong powers being retained at the centre. It will be necessary to use the organising power and majesty of the State in a variety of ways. The State will have to be the grand arbiter between competing interests.”

Rab Butler (1902–1982) British politician

Fundamental Issues (Conservative Political Centre, 1946), p. 7.

Way , Strong

“I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.”

Ellen Goodman (1941) American journalist and writer

Attributed

Box

“Given the opportunity, Mussolini would have been glad as late as 1920-21 to take under his wing the Italian Communists, for whom he felt great affinities: greater, certainly, than for democratic socialists, liberals and conservatives. Genetically, Fascism issued from the 'Bolshevik' wing of Italian socialism, not from any conservative ideology or movement.”

Richard Pipes (1923–2018) American historian

Source: Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime (1994), p. 253

“Millions of artist create; only a few thousands are discussed or accepted by the spectator and many less again are consecrated by posterity.
In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally posterity include him in the primers of Art history.
I know that this statement will not meet with the approval of many artists who refuse this mediumistic role and insist on the validity of their awareness in the creative act.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

1951 - 1968, The Creative Act', 1957

Art , History , Waiting

“… there is nothing that the most prominent men in the Liberal party more earnestly desire than that labour representation, direct labour representation, shall be as large as possible… It is sometimes said to me, "Oh! but you are against State intervention in matters of great social reform". At this time of the day it would be absurd for any man who has mastered all the Mining Regulations Acts, the Factories Acts, the great mass of regulation which affects trade; it would be absurd for any man to stand on a platform and say he was entirely against State intervention. I, for my part, have never taken that position… My own belief is that in the matters of hours and of wages for adult male labour the interference would be a bad and mischievous thing… that in such matters, for example, as housing of the poor and so forth, the proper machinery through which to carry out these operations is municipal and not Parliamentary.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Speech at Huddersfield (21 May 1892), quoted in 'Mr. Morley At Huddersfield', The Times (23 May 1892), p. 7.

Men , Time , Parting , Housing

“A great prison structure was planned, whose different levels would correspond exactly to the levels of the centralized administration. The scaffold, where the body of the tortured criminal had been exposed to the ritually manifested force of the sovereign, the punitive theatre in which the representation of punishment was permanently available to the social body, was replaced by a great enclosed, complex and hierarchized structure that was integrated into the very body of the state apparatus.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter Three, The Gentle Way in Punishment

“I would like to comment briefly on Professor Zadeh's presentation. His proposals could be severely, ferociously, even brutally criticized from a technical point of view. This would be out of place here. But a blunt question remains: Is professor Zadeh presenting important ideas or is he indulging in wishful thinking? No doubt Professor Zadeh's enthusiasm for fuzziness has been reinforced by the prevailing climate in the U. S.-one of unprecedented permissiveness. 'Fuzzification, is a kind of scientific permissiveness; it tends to result in socially appealing slogans unaccompanied by the discipline of hard scientific work and patient observation.”

Rudolf E. Kálmán (1930–2016) Hungarian-born American electrical engineer

Rudolf E. Kálmán (1972), cited in: Lotfi A. Zadeh " My life and work - a retrospective http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~zadeh/papers/Preface%20ACM-My%20Life%20and%20Work--A%20Retrospective%20View.pdf" in: Appl. Comput. Math., V.10, N.1, Special Issue, 2011, p. 4-9

Idea , Question , Thinking

“With reference to practical social doctrines, our method permits and commands the same independence. Sociology thus understood will be neither individualistic, communistic, nor socialistic in the sense commonly given these words. On principle, it will ignore these theories, in which it could not recognize any scientific value, since they tend not to describe or interpret, but to reform, social organization.”

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) French sociologist (1858-1917)

Source: Rules of Sociological Method, 1895, p. 75

Sense

“Life is a difficult game. You can win it only by retaining your birthright to be a person. And to retain this right, you will have to be willing to take the social or external risks involved in ignoring pressures to do things the way others say they should be done.”

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam book Wings of Fire

Source: Wings of Fire, p. 176.

Life , Way , Game , Personality

“Social science is itself part of the social experience it seeks to interpret and explain.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

Discrepancies among the Social Sciences (1981)

Science , Parting

“Many of the early nationalisation measures were right. They have remained part of the social fabric. I favour measures of that type.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Speech in the House of Commons (Hansard, 10th November 1982, Col. 579).
1980s

Parting

“Social Democracy must remain for itself, must seek for and generate its power within itself. Every power outside of ourselves on which we seek to lean is for us only weakness. In the consciousness of our strength, in our faith in the world-conquering mission of socialism lies the secret of our extraordinary, almost miraculous success.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

Secret , World , Faith , Democracy

“And the venality of those Judaized is incapable of explaining anti-Semitism as a social phenomenon, we will call it the anti-Semitic theory.”

A.C. Cuza (1857–1947) Romanian politician

From "Ştiinţa antisemitismului" ("The Science of Anti-Semitism"), Apararea Nationala ("The National Defense") No. 16, Nov. 15, 1922, lst year.

“The social media is making conventional media obsolete. So its becoming necessary to hawk anything to keep going. I don’t blame the media. But where do you draw the line? Within the scheme of things, is it not possible to keep track of one’s responsibility and help nurture cultural legacy? How else will the coming generations know of our culture?”

Zakir Hussain (musician) (1951) Indian tabla player, musical producer, film actor and composer

Quote, I've never wanted to fit in Abbaji's shoes: Ustad Zakir Hussain

Help , Drawing

“Just as economic pressure from the base … is able to modify the production of surplus value, so pressure grounded in spatial practice is alone capable of modifying the apportionment of that surplus value — i. e. the distribution of the portion of social surplus production allotted to society's collective 'interests', to so-called social services. Such grass-roots pressure, if it is to be effective in this regard, cannot be confined to attacking the state qua guardian of the 'general interest'. For this state, born of the hegemony of a class, has as one of its functions — and a more and more significant function — the organization of space, the regularization of its flows, the control of its networks. It devotes to these purposes a considerable part of global surplus value, of the surplus production assigned to the running of society.”

Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) French philosopher

Henri Lefebvre (1974) The Production of Space. Translated to English in 1991 by Donald Nicholson-Smith; As cited in: "Henri Lefebvre on Governance and Space" on thepolisblog.org 2012.10
Other quotes

Grass , Parting

“National socialism is the determination to create a new man. There will no longer exist any individual arbitrary will, nor realms in which the individual belongs to himself. The time of happiness as a private matter is over.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

As quoted in Hitler (1974) by Joachim C. Fest, p. 533
Other remarks

Time , Happiness

“This is taking place inside Europe. This is taking place inside a once great nation. The nation that invented democracy. We are on the edge of total social breakdown. And frankly, as far as the euro is concerned and the austerity measures are concerned, the medicine is killing the patient.”

Nigel Farage (1964) British politician and former commodity broker

Segment from an article on the UKIP website, 31 May 2012. On the edge of social breakdown http://www.ukip.org/content/latest-news/2681-on-the-edge-of-social-breakdown
2012

Democracy