Quotes about society (5797 quotes, page 21)

“Hand in hand with freedom of speech goes the power to be heard, to share in the decisions of government which shape men's lives. Everything that makes man's life worthwhile — family, work, education, a place to rear one's children and a place to rest one's head — all this depends on the decisions of government; all can be swept away by a government which does not heed the demands of its people, and I mean all of its people. Therefore, the essential humanity of men can be protected and preserved only where government must answer — not just to the wealthy, not just to those of a particular religion, or a particular race, but to all its people.
And even government by the consent of the governed, as in our own Constitution, must be limited in its power to act against its people; so that there may be no interference with the right to worship, or with the security of the home; no arbitrary imposition of pains or penalties by officials high or low; no restrictions on the freedom of men to seek education or work or opportunity of any kind, so that each man may become all he is capable of becoming.
These are the sacred rights of Western society.”

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

Day of Affirmation Address (1966)

Life , Men , Pain , Children

“Trudeau keeps pushing his “diversity is our strength” slogan. Yes, Canada is a huge and diverse country. This diversity is part of us and should be celebrated. But where do we draw the line?
Ethnic, religious, linguistic, sexual and other minorities were unjustly repressed in the past. We’ve done a lot to redress those injustices and give everyone equal rights. Canada is today one of the countries where people have the most freedom to express their identity.
But why should we promote ever more diversity? If anything and everything is Canadian, does being Canadian mean something? Shouldn’t we emphasize our cultural traditions, what we have built and have in common, what makes us different from other cultures and societies?
Having people live among us who reject basic Western values such as freedom, equality, tolerance and openness doesn’t make us strong. People who refuse to integrate into our society and want to live apart in their ghetto don’t make our society strong.
Trudeau’s extreme multiculturalism and cult of diversity will divide us into little tribes that have less and less in common, apart from their dependence on government in Ottawa. These tribes become political clienteles to be bought with taxpayers $ and special privileges.
Cultural balkanisation brings distrust, social conflict, and potentially violence, as we are seeing everywhere. It’s time we reverse this trend before the situation gets worse. More diversity will not be our strength, it will destroy what has made us such a great country.”

Maxime Bernier (1963) Canadian politician

12 August 2018 on Twitter https://twitter.com/MaximeBernier/status/1028800406535716864

People , Freedom , Strong , Time

“After a major terrorist attack, every society faces a choice between fear and resolve. The world’s great democracies can’t sacrifice our values or turn our backs on those in need. Therefore, we must choose resolve. And we must lead the world to meet this threat.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Speech on fighting ISIS (November 20, 2015)

World , Fear , Democracy

“Saying that a state or regime is a murderer is a convenient personification of an abstraction. Regimes are in realty people with the power to command a whole society. It is these people that have committed the kilo- and megamurders of our century, and we must not hide their identity under the abstraction of the ‘state,’ ‘regime,’ ‘government,’ or ‘communist.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

Source: Death by Government (1994), p. 8

People

“Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling — it never forgives the preaching of a new gospel.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Actually from Frederic Harrison's essay "Ruskin as Prophet", in his Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, and Other Literary Estimates (1899).
Misattributed

Forgiveness

“Those who suffer from the abuse of drugs have themselves to blame for it. This does not mean that society is absolved from active concern for their plight. It does mean that their plight is subordinate to the plight of those citizens who do not experiment with drugs but whose life, liberty, and property are substantially affected by the illegalization of the drugs sought after by the minority.”

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) American conservative author and commentator

The War On Drugs Is Lost (1995)

Life , Suffering

“China [is a] society which forbids any flow of the information and freedom of speech. This is on record, so everybody should know this.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, Digital Activism in China, 2010

Freedom

“This leads me of course to at least mention here the cruel methods used in the slaughtering of animals and fowls for human consumption. The creatures are treated as if they possessed no feeling or consciousness of their own - and such attitudes show a most unfortunate misreading of natural events. As a direct result, at least as many diseases develop through such procedures as would exist in a highly primitive society with unsanitary conditions.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Way Toward Health (1997), p. 197

Disease , Feeling , Nature , Animals

“American corporations often say human resources are their most important asset. In our national discourse, everyone talks about jobs. Yet as a society we somehow tolerate persistent high unemployment, 30 years of stagnating wages and growing wage inequality, two decades of declining job satisfaction and loss of pension and retirement benefits, and continuous challenges from the consequences of unemployment on family life. If we really valued work and human resources, we would address these problems with the vigor required to solve them.”

Thomas A. Kochan (1947) American academic

Thomas A. Kochan in: "An interview with Thomas A. Kochan," in: Harvard Magazine, Sept. 2012. online at harvardmagazine.com.

Life , Family , Problem , Loss

“Every culture, or subculture, is defined by a set of common values, that is, generally agreed upon preferences. Without a core of common values a culture cannot exist, and we classify society into cultures and subcultures precisely because it is possible to identify groups who have common values.”

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

Source: 1960s, Economics As A Moral Science, 1969, p. 12

“Brexit was a chilling example of how truly intolerant and despicable the left in this country are. I know people whose own parents almost disowned them because they voted leave. I have probably received in the region of 300 death threats – mainly from Muslims who want to prove Islam is a “religion of peace” by killing me, as well as Black Lives Matter supporters. I now really enjoy the death threats because I post them all on social media and they allow me to illustrate how we are stupidly shaping society to cater for the most aggressive, hateful, bigots imaginable. The left denounces people like me as bigots for standing up for true liberal principles which made Western civilisation great in the first place.”

Paul Joseph Watson (1982) English YouTuber, radio host, writer, editor, and conspiracy theorist

"An interview with Paul Joseph Watson", The Tab (7 November 2016)

Death , Hate , People , Peace

“Man abhors the absence of integration. He demands integration, and will create religions, achieve heroic self-sacrifice, pursue mad ambitions, or follow the ecstasy of danger, rather than live without. If society refuses him this satisfaction in a constructive form he will seize a destructive principle to which he can devote himself and will take revenge on the society that thought his only demand was pleasure.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 188

Pleasure , Religion , Revenge , Madness

“Since World War Two, Britain's elite has suffered from a collective collapse of cultural nerve. Many things contributed: postwar exhaustion, the collapse of the British Empire (and therefore of national purpose), and post-colonial flagellatory guilt of the kind that white western liberals have made their specialty. This left the British establishment vulnerable to the revolutionary ideology of the New Left, at the core of which lay a hatred of western society. As a consequence, the British elite decided not only that the British nation was an embarrassment but also that the very idea of the nation was an anachronism.”

Melanie Phillips (1951) British journalist

"The Country That Hates Itself" http://www.melaniephillips.com/the-country-that-hates-itself (June 16, 2006)

War , World , Idea , Suffering

“Cambodia is not a peaceful place for good people to live in. In this situation, there are only 3 available options for you. Firstly, live in fear which you try to hide, whereas possible, in order to live comfortably even when you’re aware that it is an injustice for you and other victims in the society. Secondly, learn to be an evil person and ignoring your conscious as a human for the survival of…”

Khem Veasna (1971) Cambodian politician

Quoted on his facebook profile (3 April 2015)

People , Fear , Peace , Learning

“Interviewer: Are there any groups you won’t go after?
Penn: We haven’t tackled Scientology [in Penn & Teller: Bullshit! ] because Showtime doesn’t want us to. Maybe they have deals with individual Scientologists—I’m not sure. And we haven’t tackled Islam because we have families.
Interviewer: Meaning, you won’t attack Islam because you’re afraid it’ll attack back …
Penn: Right, and I think the worst thing you can say about a group in a free society is that you’re afraid to talk about it—I can’t think of anything more horrific.”

Penn Jillette (1955) American magician

Interview in Las Vegas Weekly (24 June 2010) https://lasvegasweekly.com/ae/2010/jun/24/celebrity-issue/.
2010s

Family , Thinking

“The liberation of our continent means more than overcoming economic, social, and political dependence. It means, in a deeper sense, to see the becoming of mankind as a process of the emancipation of man in history. It is to see man in search of a qualitatively different society in which he will be free from all servitude, in which he will be the artisan of his own destiny.”

Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928) Peruvian theologian

Source: A Theology of Liberation (1971), p. 91

History , Search , Sense , Dependency

“History moves in contradictions. The skeleton of historic existence, the economic structure of society, also develops in contradictions. Forms eternally follow forms. Everything has only a passing being. The dynamic force of life creates the new over and over again — such is the law inherent in reality.”

Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938) Soviet politician

Imperialism and World Economy (1917), Ch. 15 http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1917/imperial/index.htm

Life , Law , History , Reality

“In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.”

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) English historian and Member of Parliament

This quotation appeared in an article by Margaret Thatcher, "The Moral Foundations of Society" ( Imprimis, March 1995 https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-moral-foundations-of-society/), which was an edited version of a lecture Thatcher had given at Hillsdale College in November 1994. Here is the actual passage from Thatcher's article:
<blockquote>[M]ore than they wanted freedom, the Athenians wanted security. Yet they lost everything—security, comfort, and freedom. This was because they wanted not to give to society, but for society to give to them. The freedom they were seeking was freedom from responsibility. It is no wonder, then, that they ceased to be free. In the modern world, we should recall the Athenians' dire fate whenever we confront demands for increased state paternalism.</blockquote>
The italicized passage above originated with Thatcher. In characterizing the Athenians in the article she cited Sir Edward Gibbon, but she seems to have been paraphrasing statements in "Athens' Failure," a chapter of classicist Edith Hamilton's book The Echo of Greece (1957), pp. 47–48 http://www.ergo-sum.net/books/Hamilton_EchoOfGreece_pp.47-48.jpg).
Misattributed

Life , Freedom

“…as individuals and as nations we live in states of society utterly different from each other. As a collection of individuals, we live under the highest and latest development of civilization, in which the individual is rigidly forbidden to defend himself, because society is always ready and able to defend him. As a collection of nations we live in an age of the merest Faustrecht, in which each one obtains his rights precisely in proportion to his ability, or that of his allies, to fight for them…In practice it is found that International Law is always on the side of strong battalions…It is puerile…to apply to the dealings of a nation with its neighbour's territory the morality which would be applicable to two individuals possessing adjoining property, and protected from mutual wrong by a law superior to both.”

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

Quarterly Review, 151, 1881, pp. 542-544
1880s

Age , Law , Strong , Fight

“I would say off the cuff that I am an anxious person. I worry about everything. I need to know everything. I tend to live in a state of anxiety with the feeling that life is some kind of great catastrophe. I feel the desire, or rather the intense need, to do something useful for society, and that is what stimulates me. In every situation I always look for what is positive and beneficial for my fellow citizens. I am interested in study, reflection, philosophy — but always as a dilettante. I also consider myself a dilettante as a painter.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

As quoted in "Antoni Tapies" by Serafin Garcia Ibanez in the UNESCO Courier (June 1994) http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1310/is_1994_June/ai_15630919/print?tag=artBody;col1.
1991 - 2000

Life , Feeling , Study , Personality

“Hewson: I ask the Prime Minister: if you are so confident about your view of Fightback, why will you not call an early election?
Keating: The answer is, mate, because I want to do you slowly. There has to be a bit of sport in this for all of us. In the psychological battle stakes, we are stripped down and ready to go. I want to see those ashen-faced performances; I want more of them. I want to be encouraged. I want to see you squirm out of this load of rubbish over a number of months. There will be no easy execution for you. You have perpetrated one of the great mischiefs on the Australian public with this thing, trying to rip away our social wage, trying to rip away the Australian values which we built in our society for over a century.”

Paul Keating (1944) Australian politician, 24th Prime Minister of Australia

Question Time, Australian House of Representatives, 1992, Labor in Power (w:Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1993), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_CHXDBq9Ps

Confidence , Sport

“The subject of a science is never well circumscribed and there is little use sharpening its definition. However, nobody will deny that physics deals with nature and sociology with human society in some of their aspects. With logic, it is another matter. Logic is usually understood nowadays as a study of certain formal systems, though in former times there were philosophers who held that the subject matter of logic was the formal rules of human thought. In the latter sense it would be an empirical rather than a formal science, though its empirical subject matter would still be fundamentally different from that of psychology of thinking. One interpretation of logic does not exclude the other. Formal approaches are often easier than empirical ones, and for this reason one can understand why logic as a study of formal systems has till now made more progress than logic as a study of the formal rules of thought, even if restricted to scientific thought.”

Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990) Dutch mathematician

Source: Realistic models in probability (1968), p. 1

Understanding , Nature , Thinking , Sense

“Christianity does not, repeat, not, look forward to a gradual betterment of human behaviour and society or to the progressive spread of peace and justice upon earth. Still less does Christianity purport to offer a scheme or general outline for bringing that about. Quite the reverse, it uniformly teaches, as if to emphasize the point for good measure, that things will get worse rather than better before we are through.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Wrestling with the Angel (1977), p. 61
1970s

Peace , Justice

“The crown and glory of life is Character. It is the noblest possession of a man, constituting a rank in itself, and an estate in the general goodwill; dignifying every station, and exalting every position in society. It exercises a greater power than wealth, and secures all the honour without the jealousies of fame. It carries with it an influence which always tells; for it is the result of proved honour, rectitude, and consistency — qualities which, perhaps more than any other, command the general confidence and respect of mankind.”

Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) Scottish author

Source: Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859), Ch. XIII : Character — The True Gentleman

Life , Jealousy , Exercises , Confidence

“The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror.”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

"Words of a Rebel"; as quoted in The Heretic's Handbook of Quotations: Cutting Comments on Burning Issues (1992) by Charles Bufe, p. 26

Men , Law

“It is, of course, merely a truism to say that war, like other social or political evils, is the outcome of the bad management of human society, which is, in its turn, due to certain errors or deficiencies. But our task is to discern the sort of error or deficiency.”

Norman Angell (1872–1967) British politician

Peace and the Public Mind (1935)

War , Error , Evil

“The success story of the word postmodernism demands to be written, no doubt in best-seller format; such lexical neoevents, in which the coinage of a neologism has all the reality impact of a corporate merger, are among the novelties of media society which require not merely study but the establishment of a whole new media-lexicological subdiscipline.”

Fredric Jameson (1934) American academic

Introduction
Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)

Reality , Study , Success

“Every human society which has endured long enough to leave records has had elaborate customs and institutions which were effective in instilling into the young the sentiments necessary for its perpetuation. Now for the first time in recorded history Western capitalism offers us a spectacle of a system which not only has given up altogether the task of moral education, but actually employs vast resources and the means of persuasion of unprecedented power to destroy the customs, norms and ideals indispensable for its survival; and to implant fundamentally anti-social attitudes which are incompatible with any reasonable social order. It would be miraculous if a social order which permits such massive anti-socialisation could fail to destroy itself.”

Stanislav Andreski (1919–2007) Polish-British sociologist

Social Sciences as Sorcery (1972)

Education , History , Time

“The modern clercs have created in so-called cultivated society a positive romanticism of harshness. The have also created a romanticism of contempt.”

Julien Benda (1867–1956) French essayist

Source: Treason of the Intellectuals (1927), p. 143

“The basic hypothesis is that, while the total supply of entrepreneurs varies among societies, the productive contribution of the society's entrepreneurial activities varies much more because of their allocation between productive activities such as innovation and largely unproductive activities such as rent seeking or organized crime. This allocation is heavily influenced by the relative payoffs society offers to such activities. This implies that policy can influence the allocation of entrepreneurship more effectively than it can influence its supply. Historical evidence from ancient Rome, early China, and the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe is used to investigate the hypotheses.”

William J. Baumol (1922–2017) American economist

Source: "Entrepreneurship: Productive, unproductive, and destructive," 1996, p. 3

Age

“.. The thought crossed my mind, how society today in its fall, at moments seen against the light of a renewal, stands out as a large, gloomy silhouette. Yes, for me, the drama of storm in nature, the drama of sorrow in life, is the most impressive.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from The Hague, The Netherlands, Summer 1883; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 319) p. 21
1880s, 1883

Life , Nature , Light

“Values, means and ends… [that drive this process in current societies; mean that we now] stagger under the double load of not only having to construct (his) own future but having to create the values that will determine its design.”

Fred Polak (1907–1985) Dutch futurologist

Source: The Image of the Future, 1973, p. 9 as cited in: Rowena Morrow (2006) "Hope, entrepreneurship and foresight". In: Regional frontiers of entrepreneurship research

Future

“But just because I believe that religion is a cynical perversion of the human spirit that exists purely for the benefit of the parasites we know as clergy, doesn't mean I'm not looking for answers to the big questions just like everybody else — you know, the questions that religion pretends it has answers to, because it knows that for some people, anyone answer is better than no answer at all. Questions like, Why are we here? Where did we come from? Where are we going?…Is there an afterlife, and if so, is it fully licensed for alcoholic drinks? That last bit may seem like a trivial concern to you, but not to me, because I live in a society where many people enjoy a social drink from time to time — not a huge amount, just enough to kill a horse. And in these enlightened days of the twenty-first century, when everyone's human rights and cultural identity are so very important, I don't see why I should have to abandon my culture, just because I'm dead. It's only the afterlife, not Saudi Arabia. Let's keep things in perspective. Of course in reality, we know that there will be beer in heaven, and lots of it, otherwise it wouldn't be heaven, would it? It's almost not even worth pointing that out, but I thought I would anyway, just in case someone wants to take the opportunity to be offended.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"God is not enough" (23 May 2008) http://youtube.com/watch?v=1czXvHSjDac&feature=related)
2008

People , Alcohol , Religion , Drink

“Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society… But for me, education means making creators… You have to make inventors, innovators, not conformists.”

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) Swiss psychologist, biologist, logician, philosopher & academic

Conversations with Jean Piaget (1980) by Jean Claude Bringuier

People , Education

“Individualism is one of the great foundations of Western culture. But unless society secures personal independence and basic security for the individual, it can lead to disaffection, anxiety, and chaos. For a long time now the United States has been turning toward its Wild West past, while the Nordic nations have been taking individualism in the logical direction of further progress, and into the future.”

Anu Partanen (1975) journalist

Source: The Nordic Theory of Everything, Chapter 9

Time , Past , Future , Personality

“Talk can be cheap, very cheap. It can also be costly. “Speak out!” we say. “Why are you afraid to speak out?” we say. In dictatorships, it can be very, very hard to speak out. Many people have been imprisoned or worse for talk. But even in democratic societies, talk can be hard. It can be hard not only in politics but also in high schools and families and churches and professional communities and other arenas. But even in democratic societies, talk can be hard. It can be hard not only in politics but also in high schools and families and churches and professional communities and other arenas.”

Jay Nordlinger (1963) American journalist

2010s, Some Talk about Talk (2018)

People , School , Family , Communication

“This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise or, at least, neglect persons of poor and mean conditions, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

Adam Smith book The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Section III, Chap. II.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Part I

Universe , Time , Personality

“Monotheism came to this country for the first time as the war-cry of Islamic invaders who marched in with the Quran in one hand and the sword in the other. It proclaimed that there was no God but Allah and that Muhammad was the Prophet of Allah. It claimed that Allah had completed his Revelation in the Quran and that Muslims who possessed that Book were the Chosen People. It invoked a theology which called upon the believers to convert or kill the infidels, particularly the idolaters, capture their women and children and sell them into slavery and concubinage all over the world, slaughter their sages and saints and priests, break or at least desecrate their idols, destroy or convert into mosques their places of worship, plunder their properties, occupy their lands, and heap humiliations on such of them as cannot be converted or killed either due to their capacity for fighting back or the need of the conquerors for slave labour. The enormities which the votaries of Islamic Monotheism practised on a vast scale and for a long time vis-a-vis Hindu religion, culture and society, were unheard of by Hindus in the whole of their hoary history. Muslim theologians, sufis and historians who witnessed or read or heard of these doings hailed the doers as soldiers of Allah and heroes of Islam. They thanked Allah and the Prophet who had declared a permanent war on the infidels and bestowed their progeny and properties on the believers. They quoted chapter and verse from the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet in order to prove that what was being done to Hindus was fully in keeping with the highest teachings of Islam.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)

Women , God , War , Children

“The more the Jew is a Jew, the more universalist will his views and aspirations be, the less aloof will he be from anything that is noble and good, true and upright, in art or science, in culture or education; the more joyfully will he applaud whenever he sees truth and justice and peace and the ennoblement of man prevail and become dominant in human society.”

Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888) Jewish theologian, germany 19th century

Essay "Religion Allied to Progress" http://www.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/363_Transp/Orthodoxy/SRHirsch.html

Truth , Education , Peace , Justice

“Question: As a doctor, is it meaningful to you when somebody say that healthcare is a right, or that people have a right to good medical care?
Ron Paul: That's incorrect, because you don't have a right to the fruits of somebody else's labor. You don't have a right to a house, you don't have a right to a job, you don't have a right to medical care. You have a right to your life, you have your right to your liberty, you have a right to keep what your earn. And that's what produces prosperity. So you want equal justice. And this is not hard for me to argue, because if you really are compassionate and you care about people, the freer the society the more prosperous it is, and more likely that you are going to have medical care… When you turn it over to central economic planning, they're bound to make mistake. The bureaucrats and the special interests and the Halliburtons are gonna make the money. Whether it's war, or Katrina, these noncompetitive contracts, the bureaucrats make a lot of money and you end up with inefficiency.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

All Things Considered, NPR, July 25, 2007 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12224561
2000s, 2006-2009

Life , Money , War , People

“But it's deeper than that. We have given in to the politics of anger- the belief that riling up the base can make up for failed attempts to broaden the electorate. These are the spasms of a dying party. Anger and resentment and blaming groups of people for our problems might work politically in the short term, but it's a dangerous impulse in a pluralistic society, and we know from history that it's an impulse that, once acted upon, never ends well.”

Jeff Flake (1962) American politician

Source: Conscience of a Conservative (2017), p. 8

People , History , Problem , Anger

“The media is the thought-form of the technological society, and it finds nothing it does to be laughable, a sure sign that it is not human.”

Donald Phillip Verene (1937) philosopher

Source: Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (1997), p. 169

“There is a correlation between crude yuppies buying Porsches in the City and the number of people sleeping on the street. The tax rip-offs that are used to buy second homes, swimming pools and extended holidays mean an increase in the number of people sleeping on the street because there is insufficient public expenditure to provide housing for them. The Tories have always supported the creed which blames poverty on the poor. We believe that the poor are the victims of the society created by the Conservatives and the Government whom they so avidly support…There would indeed be no need for anyone to be homeless if a large number of previously privately rented houses were not deliberately kept empty by property speculators as a result of Government policies. It is sheer hypocrisy for Tory Members to blame the poor unfortunate people who have to sleep in cardboard boxes when they themselves put those people on the street, splash them every night as they drive past in their Porsches and kick dirt in the faces of the poor. They are the people to blame for the situation faced by so many people in London, and it is a matter of grave concern.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1988/jun/24/policing-london in the House of Commons (24 June 1988).
1980s

People , Home , Support , Sleep

“Iraqis have not had a permanent constitution since 1958. This process of engaging society as a whole in its own future, engaging it once again in the idea of a permanent constitution, is a beginning, it seems to me, of creating the kind of civil society that we hope to see flourish in Iraq once again.”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"This way to the promised land", Globe and Mail (April 10, 2003)

Hope , Idea , Future

“Certainly if the fundamental problem of society is that demands are infinite and resources are always limited, politics, not economics is the master science.”

Bernard Crick (1929–2008) British political theorist and democratic socialist

A Footnote To Rally The Academic, p. 164.
In Defence Of Politics (Second Edition) – 1981

Problem , Science

“Dalits have faced a unique discrimination in our society that is fundamentally different from the problems of minority groups in general. The only parallel to the practice of untouchability was apartheid.”

Manmohan Singh (1932) 13th Prime Minister of India

Comparing the caste system with apartheid, as quoted in "Indian leader likens caste system to apartheid regime" http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/dec/28/india.mainsection, The Guardian (UK) (28 December 2006)
2006-2010

Problem

“In social terms the identification of poet with teacher is now complete. The first question one poet now asks another upon being introduced is "Where do you teach?" The problem is not that poets teach. The campus is not a bad place for a poet to work. It's just a bad place for all poets to work. Society suffers by losing the imagination and vitality that poets brought to public culture. Poetry suffers when literary standards are forced to conform with institutional ones.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Imagination , Question , Problem , Suffering

“The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.”

Edward S. Herman book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Source: Manufacturing Consent, with Noam Chomsky, 1988, p. 1.

World , Behavior , Communication , Wealth

“The immaterial Blue colour shown at Iris Clert’s in April [1958, together with Jean Tinguely ] had in short made me inhuman, had excluded me from the world of tangible reality; I was an extreme element of society who lived in space and who had no means of coming back to earth. Jean Tinguely saw me in space and signaled to me in speed to show me the last machine to take to return to the ephemerality of material life.”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

In 1958; p. 47
before 1960, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings"

Life , World , Reality , Speed

“What we have now come to regard as typical of Middle Eastern regimes is not typical of the past. The regime of Saddam Hussein, the regime of Hafiz al Assad, this kind of government, this kind of society, has no roots either in the Arab or in the Islamic past. It is due and let me be quite specific and explicit it is due to an importation from Europe, which comes in two phases.
Phase one, the 19th century, when they are becoming aware of their falling behind the modern world and need desperately to catch up, so they adopt all kinds of European devices with the best of intentions, which nevertheless have two harmful effects. One, they enormously strengthen the power of the state by placing in the hands of the ruler, weaponry and communication undreamt of in earlier times, so that even the smallest petty tyrant has greater powers over his people than Harun al-Rashid or Suleyman the Magnificent, or any of the legendary rulers of the past.
Second, even more deadly, in the traditional society there were many, many limits on the autocracy, the ruler. The whole Islamic political tradition is strongly against despotism. Traditional Islamic government is authoritarian, yes, but it is not despotic. On the contrary, there is a quite explicit rejection of despotism. And this wasn't just in theory; it was in practice too because in Islamic society, there were all sorts of established orders in society that acted as a restraining factor. The bazaar merchants, the craft guilds, the country gentry and the scribes, all of these were well organized groups who produced their own leaders from within the group. They were not appointed or dismissed by the governments. And they did operate effectively as a constraint.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, Islam and the West: A Conversation with Bernard Lewis (2006)

People , World , Communication , Time

“Libertarianism is not libertinism or hedonism. It is not a claim that "people can do anything they want to, and nobody else can say anything." Rather, libertarianism proposes a society of liberty under law, in which individuals are free to pursue their own lives so long as they respect the equal rights of others. The rule of law means that individuals are governed by generally applicable and spontaneously developed legal rules, not by arbitrary commands; and that those rules should protect the freedom of individuals to pursue happiness in their own ways, not aim at any particular result or outcome.”

David Boaz (1953) libertarian, author and editor

"Key Concepts of Libertarianism" (1 January 1999)

People , Law , Way , Freedom

“To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible, and promote the best interests of humanity.”

Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902) British businessman, mining magnate and politician in South Africa

1877 will, quoted in Cecil Rhodes by John Flint

War , Secret , World , Parting

“The world needs this renewal! In so many of our societies, side by side with material prosperity, a spiritual desert is spreading interior emptiness, unnamed fears, a quiet sense of despair. How many of our contemporaries have built broken and empty cisterns in a desperate search for meaning - the ultimate meaning that only love can give?…. The Church also needs this renewal! She needs your faith, your idealism and your generosity, so that she can always be young in the Spirit!”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2008, Closing Mass (19 July 2008)

Love , World , Fear , Faith

“If indeed adulterers were executed, very quickly society would be much more calm, and I'm not saying we should do it, but I'm just saying we should look at the biblical pattern.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

-Edited Version- Pastor Steve Anderson interviews Dr Kent Hovind (Re-upload) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y4J7o62-w8, Youtube (January 22, 2015)

“Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 81

Money , War

“We are moving towards another type of society than that to which we have become accustomed. This is sometimes referred to as a new service society, the society of the second industrial revolution or the post-industrial society. There is no guarantee of our safe arrival. Not only are the interdependencies greater – they are differently structured… The changes in the policy field [housing, health care, urban rehabilitation, education, etc. ] demand a new mobilization of the sciences.”

Eric Trist (1909–1993) British scientist

Eric Trist (1969) cited in: Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld ed. (2011) INNOVATION SUMMIT April 13 & 14, 2011 http://summit.research.illinois.edu/files/posters/CutcherGershenfeldWorkshopPoster.pdf.

Health , Education , Science , Change

“Long before the party's arrival in power Goebbels had written the famous article in which he pointed out the kinship between National Socialism and Bolshevism. At times he spoke enthusiastically in favor of a peaceful permeation of Bolshevism by Nazism and a German-Russian symbiosis. But to his confidants he always showed how clearly he realized that Communism is at all times simply a path leading to a new system of private property and private capital, and that the classless society is bound to lead to a new class formation with a new grading of incomes.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: Men in Chaos (1942), p. 47

Peace , Confidence , Communication , Time

“You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that’s precisely what our society is doing!”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 6 (p. 165)

Idea , Thinking , Change

“All change is disruptive. We have seen that the specter of terrorism is enough to cast stable democracies into turmoil. Climate change will have even more dramatic consequences. Men and women will be thrown back upon the resources of the state. They will look to their political leaders and representatives to protect them: open societies will once again be urged to close in upon themselves, sacrificing freedom for ‘security’. The choice will no longer be between the state and the market, but between two sorts of state. It is thus incumbent upon us to re-conceive the role of government. If we do not, others will.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

Ill Fares the Land (2010), Introduction

Women , Men , Democracy , Freedom

“The contemporary scene of labor and production, we will explain, is being transformed under the hegemony of immaterial labor, that is, labor that produces immaterial products, suchs as information, knoledges, ideas, images, relationships, and affects. This does not mean that there is no more industrial working class whose calloused hands toil with machines or that there ae no more agricultural workers who till the soil. It does not even mean that the numbers of such workers have decreased globally. In fact, workers involved primarily in immaterial production are a small minority of the gloval whole. What it means, rather, is that the qualities and characteristics of immaterial production are tending to transform the other forms of labor and indeed society as a whole. Some of these new characteristics are decidedly unwelcome. When our ideas and affects, or emotions, are put to work, for insance, and when they thus become subject in a way to the command of the boss, we often experience new and intense forms of violation or alienation. Furthermore, the contractual and material conditions of immaterial labor that tend to spread to the entire labor market are making the position of labor in general more precarious. The is one tendency, for example, in various forms of immaterial labor to blur the distinction between work time and nonwork time, extending the working day indefinietly to fill all of life, and another tendency for immaterial labor to function without stable long-term contracts, and thus to adopt the precarious position of becoming flexible (to accomplish several tasks) and mobile (to move continually among locations). […] The production of ideas, knowledges, and affects, for example, does not merely create means by which society is formed and maintained; such immaterial labor also directly produces social relationships. […] immaterial labor tends to take the social form of network based on communication.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

65-66
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Life , Way , Communication , Idea

“The free expression of the hopes and aspirations of a people is the greatest and only safety in a sane society.”

Emma Goldman book Living My Life

Living My Life (1931)

People , Hope

“The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion. In a free society these institutions must be wholly free – which is to say that their function is to serve as checks upon the state.”

Alan Barth (1906–1979) American journalist

The Rights of Free Men: An Essential Guide to Civil Liberties (1984).

Universe

“If we feel less threatened today, if we feel as though we live in a non-violent society, it is only because we have ceded so much power over our daily lives to the state. Some call this reason, but we might just as well call it laziness. A dangerous laziness, it would seem, given how little most people say they trust politicians.”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

Violence is Golden
A Sky Without Eagles (2014)

People , Feeling

“What made the West successful was neither capitalism, nor science, nor an historical accident such as a favourable geography. Instead, political and mental diversity combined to create an ever changing panorama of technologically creative societies.”

Joel Mokyr (1946) Israeli American economic historian

p 302
The lever of riches: Technological creativity and economic progress, 1992

Science , Change , Success

“Whatever we know about society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media. This is true not only of our knowledge of society but also of our knowledge of nature.”

Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) German sociologist, administration expert, and social systems theorist

Source: The reality of the Mass Media (2000), p. 1.

World , Nature , Knowledge

“To disgust men with their work is a serious blunder on the part of human society; what could be more natural than their liking for what they do? Work keeps off boredom, vice, and poverty. It is the remedy for all imagined evils. "The souls' joy lies in doing," said Shelly. Active work saves man from himself; indolence make shim a prey to useless regrets, dangerous reveries, enviousness, and hate. Also the first rule of the art of governing is, at all costs, to keep a nation at work. A bored nation is impossible to govern, but a nation occupied by work which it believes to be useful and accomplishes on its own initiative is already a happy one.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Working

Men , Hate , Art , Soul

“The thing to understand is that if you are going to reform society you don't start with cops. And if you are going to reform intellect you don't start with psychiatrists. If you don't like our present social system or intellectual system the best thing you can do with either cops or psychiatrists is stay out of their way. You leave them till last.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Lila: An Inquiry into Morals

Lila (1991)

Way , Understanding

“The single idea that resounds on every page of this book is the idea of the infinity of the human spirit, in the individual as well as in humanity. It is a view of the wonderful and terrible disproportion of that spirit to everything that would contain and diminish it, of its awakening to its own nature through its confrontation with the reality of constraint and the prospect of death, of its terror before the indifference and vastness of the nature around it, of its discovery that what it most shares with the whole of the universe is its ruination by time, of its subsequent recognition that time is the core of reality if anything is, of its enslavement to orders of society and culture that belittle it, of its need to create a world, a human world, in which it can be and become itself even if to do so it must nevertheless rebel against every dogma, every custom, and every empire, and of its power to realize this seemingly impossible and paradoxical program by identifying, in each intellectual and political situation, the next steps.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 26-7

Death , Books , World , Idea

“The story begins with a somewhat disgruntled hero, who perceived of the world as populated with stupid people, everywhere committing the environmental fallacy. The fallacy was a case not merely of the “mind’s falling into error,” but rather of the mind leading all of us into incredible dangers as it first builds crisis and then attacks crisis.
Like all heroes, this one looked about for resources, for aids that would help in a dangerous battle, and he found plenty of support – in both the past and the present. It won’t hurt to summarize the story thus far. If the intellect is to engage in the heroic adventure of securing improvement in the human condition, it cannot rely on “approaches,” like politics and morality, which attempt to tackle problems head-on, within the narrow scope. Attempts to address problems in such a manner simply lead to other problems, to an amplification of difficulty away from real improvement. Thus the key to success in the hero’s attempt seems to be comprehensiveness. Never allow the temptation to be clear, or to use reliable data, or to “come up to the standards of excellence,” divert you from the relevant, even though the relevant may be elusive, weakly supported by data, and requiring loose methods.
Thus the academic world of Western twentieth century society is a fearsome enemy of the systems approach, using as it does a politics to concentrate the scholars’ attention on matters that are scholastically respectable but disreputable from a systems-planning point of view.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Systems Approach and Its Enemies (1979), p. 145; cited in C. WEST CHURCHMAN: CHAMPION OF THE SYSTEMS APPROACH http://filer.case.edu/nxb41/churchman.html, 2004-2007 Case Western Reserve University

People , Stupidity , World , Error

“This wasteful governing by fear, by contempt for the basic dignities of life, this steady asphyxiation of a dependent people, should be the very last means to be adopted by those who themselves know too well the awful significance, the unforgettable suffering of such an existence. It is unworthy of my great people, the Jews, who have striven to abide by a code of moral rectitude for some 5,000 years, who can create and achieve a society for themselves such as we see around us but can yet deny the sharing of its great qualities and benefits to those dwelling amongst them.”

Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) American violinist and conductor

Source: Americans for Justice in the Middle East A J M E News, Volumes 14-17 http://books.google.co.in/books?id=lTVtAAAAMAAJ, 1988, p. 30

Life , People , Fear , Suffering

“In the lifetime that has passed since Calvin Coolidge gave his speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in which he famously proclaimed that “the chief business of the American people is business,” the dominion of the ants has grown enormously. Look about: The business of business is everywhere and inescapable; the song of the buyers and the sellers never stops.”

Mark Slouka (1958) author

Quitting the paint factory: On the virtues of idleness

People , Business

“All this probing and grappling we must do, out in society: how much easier, Annabelle thinks, it is to stay in rooms you know as well as your own body, having a warm meal and an evening of television, where it's all so comfortably one-way.”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

Way , Thinking

“If it be of the highest importance to man, as an individual, that his religion should be true, the case of society is not the same. Society has no future life to hope for or to fear; and provided the citizens profess a religion, the peculiar tenets of that religion are of very little importance to its interests.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Variant translation: Though it is very important for man as an individual that his religion should be true, that is not the case for society. Society has nothing to fear or hope from another life; what is most important for it is not that all citizens profess the true religion but that they should profess religion.
Source: Democracy in America, Volume I (1835), Chapter XV-IXX, Chapter XVII.

Life , Fear , Religion , Hope

“Canada is a great country, one of the hopes of the world. We can be a better one – a country of greater equality, justice, and opportunity. We can build a prosperous economy and a society that shares its benefits more fairly. We can look after our seniors. We can offer better futures for our children. We can do our part to save the world’s environment. We can restore our good name in the world. We can do all of these things because we finally have a party system at the national level where there are real choices; where your vote matters; where working for change can actually bring about change. In the months and years to come, New Democrats will put a compelling new alternative to you. My colleagues in our party are an impressive, committed team. Give them a careful hearing; consider the alternatives; and consider that we can be a better, fairer, more equal country by working together. Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done.”

Jack Layton (1950–2011) Leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada

"A letter to Canadians from the Honourable Jack Layton." https://pdf.yt/d/RKyhnDdu-DXG3J6s 20 August 2011.
Released upon his death.

Children , World , Justice , Hope

“Political skepticism is the source of so many of our dilemmas. Even if free markets worked as advertised, it would be hard to claim that they constituted a sufficient basis for the well-lived life. So what precisely is it that we find lacking in unrestrained financial capitalism, or ‘commercial society’ as the 18th century had it? What do we find instinctively amiss in our present arrangements and what can we do about them? What is it that offends our sense of propriety when faced with unfettered lobbying by the wealthy at the expense of everyone else? What have we lost?
We are all children of the Greeks. We intuitively grasp the need for a sense of moral direction: it is not necessary to be familiar with Socrates to feel that the unexamined life is not worth much. Natural Aristotelians, we assume that a just society is one in which justice is habitually practiced; a good society one in which people behave well. But in order for such an implicitly circular account to convince, we need to agree on the meaning of ‘just’ or ‘well’.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

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

Life , Children , People , Justice

“These days there are painters that go inside a factory in order to be inspired by the noise of machines, so that it affects their works. Of course, artists need sensibility; sensibility towards their environment and their community, but when they are stirred enough by their experiences in their society they can create their art in small studios.”

Guity Novin (1944) artist

Source: Negin (1971), p. 57

Art , Communication

“Society is eliminating the prerogatives and privileges of feudal. aristocratic culture together with its content. The fact that the transcending truths of the fine arts, the aesthetics of life and thought, were accessible only to the few wealthy and educated was the fault of a repressive society. But this fault is not corrected by paperbacks, general education, long-playing records, and the abolition of formal dress in the theater and concert hall. The cultural privileges expressed the injustice of freedom, the contradiction between ideology and reality, the separation of intellectual from material productivity; but they also provided a protected realm in which the tabooed truths could survive in abstract integrity—remote from the society which suppressed them.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 64-65

Life , Truth , Education , Art

“We still think and talk of the basic problems of an industrial society as problems that can be solved by changing the system, that is the superstructure of political organization. Yet the real problems lie within the [industrial] enterprise. …our representative institution… a mirror in which we look when we want to see ourselves.”

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

1930s- 1950s, The New Society (1950)

Lie , Problem , Thinking , Change

“History will judge societies and governments — and their institutions — not by how big they are or how well they serve the rich and the powerful, but by how effectively they respond to the needs of the poor and the helpless.”

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

As quoted in Cesar Chavez : A Triumph of Spirit (1997) by Richard Griswold del Castillo and Richard A. Garcia, p. 116

History

“It is of great importance in a republic, not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure. There are but two methods of providing against this evil: the one by creating a will in the community independent of the majority, that is, of the society itself; the other, by comprehending in the society so many separate descriptions of citizens as will render an unjust combination of a majority of the whole very improbable, if not impracticable.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Federalist No. 51 (6 February 1788)
1780s, Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

Communication , Evil , Parting

“Institutionalized desublimation thus appears to be an aspect of the “conquest of transcendence” achieved by the one-dimensional society. Just as this society tends to reduce, and even absorb opposition (the qualitative difference!) in the realm of politics and higher culture, so it does in the instinctual sphere. The result is the atrophy of the mental organs for grasping the contradictions and the alternatives and, in the one remaining dimension of technological rationality, the Happy Consciousness comes to prevail.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 79

Appearance , Happiness

“The problem that confronts most of us is whether the individual is merely the instrument of society or the end of society. Are you and I as individuals to be used, directed, educated, controlled, shaped to a certain pattern by society and government; or does society, the State, exist for the individual? Is the individual the end of society; or is he merely a puppet to be taught, exploited, butchered as an instrument of war? That is the problem that is confronting most of us. That is the problem of the world; whether the individual is a mere instrument of society, a plaything of influences to be moulded; or whether society exists for the individual.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

1950s, The First and Last Freedom (1954)

War , World , Education , Problem

“Interviewer says "How do you become a member of the World/Inferno Friendship Society?"”

Jack Terricloth (1970)

Interviews

Friendship , World

“It is impossible to have workers' control within a capitalist society. Capitalism, by its very nature, produces contradictions which cannot be resolved until and unless we change the system of society…The unions could only have class collaboration and compromise with the mixed economy, and those who advanced the theory of workers' control in present-day society were putting forward an intellectual, Utopian dream, idealistic, unworkable and unattainable.”

Arthur Scargill (1938) British trade unionist

The Miner (5 December 1977), quoted in Paul Routledge, "Scargill attack on idea of worker directors", The Times (5 December 1977), p. 17

Dreams , Nature , Change

“Above all I feel that you must resign yourself to taking me as I am, that is, with the congenital quality (or weakness) which ever since my childhood has caused my spiritual life to be completely dominated by a sort of profound 'feeling' for the organic realness of the World. At first it was an ill-defined feeling in my mind and heart, but as the years have gone by it has gradually become a precise, compelling sense of the Universe's general convergence upon itself; a convergence which coincides with, and culminates at its zenith in, him in quo omina constant, and whom the Society has taught me to love.”

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881–1955) French philosopher and Jesuit priest

Letter from Cape Town to Father General, Jean-Baptiste Janssens (12 October 1951)

Love , Life , World , Feeling

“All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Idea , Personality

“Society cannot share a common communication system so long as it is split into warring factions.”

Bertolt Brecht A Short Organum for the Theatre

¶ 55
A Short Organum for the Theatre (1949)

War , Communication

“Appropriate patterns of reproductive, gender, and sexual conduct are all products of specific cultures and all can be viewed as examples of socially scripted conduct. Western societies now have a system of gender and sexual learning in which gender differential scripts are learned prior to sexual scripts, but take their origins in part from the previously learned gender scripts… There are two important points: The first is that both gender and sexuality are learned forms of social practice, and the second is that looking to "natural differences" between women and men for lessons about sexual conduct is an error.”

John Gagnon

"The Explicit and Implicit Use of the Scripting Perspective in Sex Research", Annual Review of Sex Research, Vol. 1, (1990), 5

Women , Men , Error , Nature

“It’s hard to know how to deal with liberalization in cultures that have been repressed for a long time, that don’t have strong civil societies. But for the United States, of all countries, to be talking about human rights just rings very, very hollow in light of all the objections to our policy in Israel — the perception that we’re hard on one side and not on the other, and that we don’t contest the settlements or human-rights abuses committed by Israeli soldiers, and so on. Plus the fact that we have turned our back on international treaties and not been a global citizen, I think, makes people, even democrats, the leading lights in these repressed societies, very squeamish about being associated with the United States.”

Samantha Power (1970) Irish-American academic, author and diplomat

Samantha Power: How to lose friends and make enemies http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/top/features/documents/02844399.htm, Boston Phoenix, 2003.

People , Thinking , Light , Strong