Quotes about society (5797 quotes, page 30)

“All intellectual property rights are just licenses granted by society because it was thought, rightly or wrongly, that society as a whole would benefit by granting them. But in any particular situation, we have to ask: are we really better off granting such license? What kind of act are we licensing a person to do?”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

1980s, GNU Manifesto (1985)

Personality

“The irony is that the healthier Western society becomes, the more medicine it craves… Immense pressures are created – by the medical profession, by the media, by the high pressure advertising of pharmaceutical companies to expand the diagnosis of treatable illnesses. Scares are created, people are bamboozled into lab tests, often of dubious reliability. Thanks to diagnostic creep or leap, ever more disorders are revealed, extensive and expensive treatments are then urged … [This] is endemic to a system in which an expanding medical establishment, faced with a healthier population, is driven to medicalising normal events, converting risks into diseases and treating trivial complaints with fancy procedures… The law of diminishing returns necessarily applies. Extending life becomes feasible, but it may be a life exposed to degrading neglect as resources grow overstretched. What an ignominious destiny if the future of medicine turns into bestowing meagre increments of unenjoyed life?”

Roy Porter (1946–2002) British historian

Roy Porter as cited in: " The cost of chronic disease and the lack of NHS reform http://abetternhs.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/the-cost/" at abetternhs.wordpress.com. Posted on May 16, 2011

Life , People , Disease , Law

“When you grow up in the Soviet society under the communists you heard about the one man who is especially dangerous, especially crazy, and absolutely mad, and which would destroy all the human beings and the economies and so on, and this man was called Milton Friedman.”

Mart Laar (1960) Estonian politician and historian

Interview with Stephen J. Dubner, for 'Freakonomics Radio' podcast (24 March 2010)

Madness

“The dominant social thought shapes the institutionalized order of society… and the malfunctioning of established institutions in turn alters social thought.”

Theodore Schultz (1902–1998) American economist

Theodore W. Schultz (1977) In: Cambridge University Marshall Lecture – Development and Transition: Idea, Strategy, and Viability, Justin Yifu Lin, PDF http://www.eaber.org/intranet/documents/41/1822/CCER_Lin_2007.pdf,

“Notice that there is no sociology in the book. Scientific communities and their practices are, however, at its core, entering with paradigms, as we saw, at page 10 and continuing to the final page of the book. There had been sociology of scientific knowledge before Kuhn, but after Structure it burgeoned, leading to what is now called science studies. This is a self-generating field (with, of course, its own journals and societies) that includes some work in the history and the philosophy of sciences and technology, but whose emphasis is on sociological approaches of various kinds, some observational, some theoretical. Much, and perhaps most, of the really original thinking about the sciences after Kuhn has had a sociological bent.
Kuhn was hostile to these developments. In the opinion of many younger workers, that is regrettable. Let us put it down to dissatisfaction with growing pains of the field, rather than venturing into tedious metaphors about fathers and sons. One of Kuhn’s marvelous legacies is science studies as we know it today.”

Ian Hacking (1936) Canadian philosopher

Ian Hacking (2012), Introductory Essay, in 50th anniversary edition of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolution

Pain , Hostility , Books , History

“It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur:—like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927), chapter 3, p. 88; final paragraph of the book.
1920s

Life , Wisdom , Art , Freedom

“A liberal society cannot be defended by herbivores. We need carnivores to save us, but we had better make sure the meat-eaters hunt only on our orders.”

Michael Ignatieff (1947) professor at Harvard Kennedy School and former Canadian politician

New York Times magazine op-ed piece, May 2, 2004

“Lying on my hotel bed, mesmerized by the lazy turns of the ceiling fan, I pondered the possibility that I was nuts. It wasn’t unheard of, even in the days of the Bitchun Society, and even though there were cures, they weren’t pleasant.”

Cory Doctorow book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)

Lying

“Could it be argued that if the Chinese revolution seems to be a response to the needs of rural society, whereas the Russian is an urbanized phenomenon, this difference corresponds to that which exists between the users of two different forms of written communication, the one archaic, the other alphabetic?”

Eric A. Havelock (1903–1988) 1903-1988, British classical philologist

"Chinese Characters and the Greek Alphabet" in Sino-Platonic Papers, 5 (December 1987)

Communication

“We must completely support the civil resistance throughout the Arab world. Corrupt secular nationalist rulers are as bad as corrupt undemocratic religious rulers. We must support the people all over the Muslim world with friendship and solidarity in support of democracy. We should be their partner in building mass popular trade unions to prevent them from exploitation in the market storm they are moving towards in their modernisation plans. Who on the left in Italy is working with the resistance to Gaddafi? I don’t know the answer to that but my suspicion is that there are not many. Again, you are on the wrong side of history on that. Support for democracy, for a democratic organised society, for resistance to capitalist domination and state despotism. That is the Blue Labour position. It goes without saying that China is the worst of all worlds, it combines market exploitation with state dictatorship. Blue Labour places unreserved solidity and support to the free democratic trade unions in China, and that is an important struggle for the Labour Movement all over the world.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

A Conversation with Maurice Glasman, Europa Quotidiano, 3 June 2011 http://europa.118.aws.dol.it/gw/producer/dettaglio.aspx?id_doc=127105

Friendship , People , World , Democracy

“Jesus once said that the dead should left to bury the dead (Luke 9:60). This shows no disrespect for the dead. It shows an awareness that there are some functions in society that will be well taken care of without Christians investing their creativity in those functions. Someone else, in meeting such needs, can make a stable living. Burying the dead is still one of the businesses in which you can make a stable living. There are other such services that we can count on society handling by itself. Leadership in government and business are among these. Let us reserve our limited creativity for functions that will not be taken care of if we do not to it.”

John Howard Yoder (1927–1997) 20th century American Mennonite theologian

Source: Radical Christian Discipleship (2012), p. 41

Business , Dead

“You talk a great deal about building a better world for your children, but when you are young you can no more envision a world inherited by your children than you can conceive of dying. The society you mold, you mold for yourself.
It was this way with my generation. We were unhappy with what we inherited and we tried to reshape it in ways that would make it more tolerable to us. You were not uppermost in our thoughts.
Now, in middle age, some of us are trying to rewrite history. Some of us tell you, "We labored and dared and sacrificed — all for you — yet we hear no thanks."
You will not be unduly moved, I hope, by these laments. They are sentimental cries from persons so attached to the society they have rebuilt that they cannot bear the thought of seeing it overhauled by new proprietors.”

Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States

"The Becoming Looseness of Doom" (p.79)
There's a Country in My Cellar (1990)

Children , Age , World , Hope

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) French writer and philosopher

As quoted in Totalitarian Temptation http://www.friesian.com/gonzalz2.htm#note-9 (1976).
1970s

Secret , History , Falseness

“Any society which gives lip-service to the idea of equal opportunity is going to generate jealousy of others who are better off than you are, even if the thing that’s in short supply can’t be carved up and shared without destroying it.”

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

continuity (13) “Multiply by a Million”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

Jealousy , Idea

“The great thing about multiculturalism is it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures — the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It's fundamentally a fraud, and I think was subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced Western society.”

Mark Steyn (1959) Canadian writer

It's the Demography, Stupid (2006)

Feeling , Idea , Fraud , Thinking

“Jesus said that we could not serve both God and wealth, and it is obvious that Western society is organized in the service of wealth.”

John B. Cobb (1925) American theologian

Eastern View of Economics http://web.archive.org/web/20150906075839/http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=3607

God , Wealth

“This book is not for the engineer content with hardware, nor for the biologist uneasy outside his specialty; for it depicts that miscegenation of Art and Science which begets inanimate objects that behave like living systems. They regulate themselves and survive: They adapt and they compute: They invent. They co-operate and they compete. Naturally they evolve rapidly.
Pure mathematics, being mere tautology, and pure physics, being mere fact, could not have engendered them; for creatures to live, must sense the useful and the good; and engines to run must have energy available as work : and both, to endure, must regulate themselves. So it is to Thermodynamics and to its brother Σp log p, called Information Theory, that we look for the distinctions between work and energy and between signal and noise.
For like cause we look to reflexology and its brother feedback, christened Multiple Closed Loop Servo Theory, for mechanical explanation of Entelechy in Homeostasis and in appetition. This is that governance, whether in living creatures and their societies or in our living artefacts, that is now called Cybernetics.”

Warren S. McCulloch (1898–1969) American neuroscientist

McCulloch (1961) in: Pask An approach to Cybernetics http://www.pangaro.com/pask/pask%20approach%20to%20cybernetics.pdf. Preface. p. 7

Books , Art , Mathematics , Nature

“Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

Le monde offre énormément d’énigmes dont le mot paraît difficile à trouver. Il y a des intrigues multipliées.
Part I, ch. IV.
Letters of Two Brides (1841-1842)

Perfection

“If society is the prison, families are the cells, with no time off for good behavior. Good behavior in fact tends to lengthen the sentence.”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

Family , Behavior , Time

“Why did not Indians enter White society, particularly in view of the numerous attempts by Whites to "civilize" them? The answer is that White settlers possessed no traditions and institutions comparable to the Indians' hospitality and sharing, adoption, and complete social integration. …Whites who educated Indians did so with the idea that the Indians would return to their own people as missionaries to spread the gospel, not that they might become functioning parts of White society.”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

People , Education , Idea , Parting

“By "Revolution", we mean the ultimate establishment of an order of society which may not be threatened by such breakdown, and in which the sovereignty of the proletariat should be recognized and a world federation should redeem humanity from the bondage of capitalism and misery of imperial wars.”

Bhagat Singh (1907–1931) Indian revolutionary

As quoted in Bhagat Singh and His Ideology (1981) by Shiri Ram Bakshi

War , World

“At the beginning [of The X-Files] the pay disparity was massive. But that happens all the time in Hollywood. It's, 'Do this for me, I'll get you a job.' All the stuff in the papers today about people in entertainment who have abused their position… it's built into our society. It's easy to miss and it's easy to get used to it. There are things that are intolerable in today's world, in terms of the perception of women. Whether they're vamps or vixens, the expectation that, if a woman is wearing a short skirt, she's 'asking for it.”

Gillian Anderson (1968) American-British film, television and theatre actress, activist and writer

About the wage gap in Hollywood and sexism — Red Online "Life Is Short, Follow your Heart" http://www.redonline.co.uk/red-women/interviews/interview-gillian-anderson-talks-jamie-dornan-pictures (November 10, 2014)
2010s

Women , People , World , Time

“Why do we forget our childhood? With rare exceptions we have no memory of our first four, five, or six years, and yet we have only to watch the development of our own children during this period to realize that these are precisely the most exciting, the most formative years of life. Schachtel’s theory is that our infantile experiences, so free, so uninhibited, are suppressed because they are incompatible with the conventions of an adult society which we call ‘civilized’. The infant is a savage and must be tamed, domesticated. The process is so gradual and so universal that only exceptionally will an individual child escape it, to become perhaps a genius, perhaps the selfish individual we call a criminal. The significance of this theory for the problem of sincerity in art (and in life) is that occasionally the veil of forgetfulness that hides our infant years is lifted and then we recover all the force and vitality that distinguished our first experiences—the ‘celestial joys’ of which Traherne speaks, when the eyes feast for the first time and insatiably on the beauties of God’s creation. Those childhood experiences, when we ‘enjoy the World aright’, are indeed sincere, and we may therefore say that we too are sincere when in later years we are able to recall these innocent sensations.”

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

Source: Collected Poems (1966), pp. 16-17

Life , God , Children , World

“A mere verbal formula often distinguishes a truism from a paradox. ‘It is the duty of society to protect the weak;’ but protection cannot be efficient without the power of control; therefore, ‘It is the duty of society to enslave the weak’.”

George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) American activist

Source: Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters (1857), p. 278

“"Life" in this "society" being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of "society" being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex.”

Valerie Solanas (1936–1988) American radical feminist and writer. Attempted to assassinate Andy Warhol.

Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. [1].

Life , Women , Money , Sex

“Whether it be in the toleration of sharia courts, or the turning of a blind eye to cultural practices which go against our laws, too often it has been women who have been the victims of those problems. I have always believed that a multi-ethnic society such as ours can be successful if it can be united by a common set of values and sense of identity, instead of a constant emphasis on division. It’s amazing to think that this was once considered outlandish. It can be difficult to explain this crucial difference in a city like London. More than one TV interviewer has asked me how, as UKIP’s Mayoral candidate, I can appeal to such a multicultural place as our capital. But this is to miss the point entirely. Like anybody else, I enjoy the huge profusion of completely diverse cuisine, fashion and music. Indeed the different cultural influences on our city are so big and ingrained it’s easy to take them for granted. But this is not the same thing as ensuring and, indeed, standing up for the common values and laws which should and must underpin any cohesive society. Here, as across Europe, one of those values – enshrined in our legal system – is that everybody is equal before the law regardless of their gender, sexuality or ethnicity.”

Peter Whittle (politician) (1961) British author, politician, and journalist

‘Cultural Cringe’: Women Are The First Victims Of State-Sponsored Multiculturalism http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/01/13/2764329/ (January 13, 2016)

Women , Law , Music , Fashion

“Before a just society can be established the property system and the penal code of such a social order must be radically transformed.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Individualism and Socialism (1933)

“The theory of independence is as old as man himself, and it was not invented in this hall. But it was in this hall that the theory became a practice; that the word went out to all, in Thomas Jefferson's phrase, that "the God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time." And today this Nation — conceived in revolution, nurtured in liberty, maturing in independence — has no intention of abdicating its leadership in that worldwide movement for independence to any nation or society committed to systematic human oppression.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1962, Address at Independence Hall

Life , God , Time

“On the occasion of the International Women’s Day 2016, I call on all Filipino men, women and the LGBT community to be united as one powerful force in promoting and protecting the Filipino women’s physical and emotional health and overall well-being. As one collective group, we must all work to ensure that discrimination and violence against Filipino women, and all women all over the world, do not happen in any instance. Everyday, discrimination and violence against women in so many forms—visible and invisible, physical and verbal—take place. These acts have deep and lasting effects on the women’s health and well-being. On this day, let us also renew our resolve and commitment to uphold, advance and protect our achievements in making the Philippine society more sensitive to the issues affecting the lives of Filipino women. More work needs to be done to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment, factors seen by experts as associated with discrimination and violence. Let us do everything within our power and might to stop all forms of discrimination and violence against women, that their rights are protected and upheld, and that they optimally enjoy and achieve the possible maximum standard of physical and emotion health.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Escudero, F. [Francis]. (2016, March 8). Retrieved from Official Facebook Page of Francis Escudero https://www.facebook.com/senchizescudero/posts/10153923936700610/
2016, Facebook

Women , Men , Health , World

“The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and … people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

Conversations with a Christian Lady (1774)

People , Religion

“Should not the Society of Indexers be known as Indexers, Society of, The?”

Keith Waterhouse (1929–2009) British writer

Bookends (1990), cited from Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell; Mr. And Mrs. Nobody; and, Bookends (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992) p. 135

“Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World Revisited

Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 3 (p. 20)

Life , Help , Happiness

“Where equality is enthroned, freedom is extinguished. The rise of the egalitarian society means the death of the free society.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2010s, Suicide of a Superpower (2011)

Death , Freedom

“The movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract.”

Henry James Sumner Maine (1822–1888) British comparative jurist and historian

‘Ancient Law’ (1861) ch. 5.

“Information science is identified as… the study of the communication of information in society. This meaning is only beginning to emerge from its practical background, the social activity of facilitating information transfer.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Information Science in Theory and Practice (1987), p. 1; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Communication , Study , Science

“I have also seen it stated that Capital punishment is murder in its worst form. I should like to know upon what principle of human society these assertions are based and justified.”

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939) American journalist and anarchist

Individual Liberty (1926), Anarchism and Capital Punishment

“Almost anything one says or has said about what society wants or should get is threatened with internal inconsistency.”

Charles Plott (1938) American economist

Cited in: Sarah Joseph (2004), Political Theory and Power, p. 22

“The postwar [WWII] GI Bill of Rights - and the enthusiastic response to it on the part of America's veterans - signaled the shift to the knowledge society. Future historians may consider it the most important event of the twentieth century.
We are clearly in the midst of this transformation; indeed, if history is any guide, it will not be completed until 2010 or 2020. But already it has changed the political, economic and moral landscape of the world.”

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

Source: 1990s and later, Post-Capitalist Society (1993), p. 3

World , History , Knowledge , Change

“These individual actions are really trans-actions instead of either individual behavior or the "exchange" of commodities. It is this shift from commodities and individuals to transactions and working rules of collective action that marks the transition from the classical and hedonic schools to the institutional schools of economic thinking. The shift is a change in the ultimate unit of economic investigation. The classic and hedonic economists, with their communistic and anarchistic offshoots, founded their theories on the relation of man to nature, but institutionalism is a relation of man to man. The smallest unit of the classic economists was a commodity produced by labor. The smallest unit of the hedonic economists was the same or similar commodity enjoyed by ultimate consumers. One was the objective side, the other the subjective side, of the same relation between the individual and the forces of nature. The outcome, in either case, was the materialistic metaphor of an automatic equilibrium, analogous to the waves of the ocean, but personified as "seeking their level." But the smallest unit of the institutional economists is a unit of activity -- a transaction, with its participants. Transactions intervene between the labor of the classic economists and the pleasures of the hedonic economists, simply because it is society that controls access to the forces of nature, and transactions are, not the "exchange of commodities," but the alienation and acquisition, between individuals, of the rights of property and liberty created by society, which must therefore be negotiated between the parties concerned before labor can produce, or consumers can consume, or commodities be physically exchanged.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

"Institutional Economics," 1931

Pleasure , School , Behavior , Nature

“In the future (…) people will become more sensitive and aware than they are now. They will have to, because society will become more complicated, more full of people, with more different things happening. People will have to become much cleverer and much sharper. Then they will like my music.”

Elliott Carter (1908–2012) American composer

From the documentary A Labyrinth of Time (2004) by Frank Scheffer.

People , Music , Future

“Imagine each family as a kind of little factory--a multiperson unit producing meals, health, skills, children, and self-esteem from market goods and the time, skills, and knowledge of its members. This is only one of the remarkable concepts explored by Gary Becker in his landmark work on the family. Becker applies economic theory to the most sensitive and fateful personal decisions, such as choosing a spouse or having children. He uses the basic economic assumptions of maximizing behavior, stable preferences, arid equilibria in explicit or implicit markets to analyze the allocation of time to child care as well as to careers, to marriage and divorce in polygynous as well as monogamous societies, to the increase and decrease of wealth from one generation to another.”

Gary S. Becker book A Treatise on the Family

Book abstract 2009
A Treatise on the Family, 1981

Fate , Marriage , Children , Health

“In the words of the old saying, every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.”

Robert F. Kennedy book The Pursuit of Justice

The Pursuit of Justice http://books.google.com/books?id=o3mHAAAAMAAJ&q="Every+society+gets+the+kind+of+criminal+it+deserves+What+is+equally+true+is+that+every+community+gets+the+kind+of+law+enforcement+it+insists+on" pt. 3, "Eradicating Free Enterprise in Organized Crime," (1964)
Alexander Lacassange https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Lacassagne Attribution of original quote

Law , Communication

“Do we want the Muslim peoples to break out of the cycle of dependence, backwardness and poverty?… Then we can clearly show the way which leads to this goal: the generating of Islam in all areas of personal individual life, in the family and society, through the renewal of Islamic religious thought and the creation of a unified Islamic community from Morocco to Indonesia.”

Alija Izetbegović (1925–2003) Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Source: The Islamic Declaration (1970), p. 5.

Life , People , Family , Way

“But has man's political skill marched hand-in-hand with his technical and scientific skill? Man can chain lightning to his command-can be control the society in which be lives? The answer is No! The political skill of man has been far outstripped by technical skill, and what lie has made he cannot be sure of controlling.”

Sukarno (1901–1970) first President of the Republic of Indonesia

Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference

Lie

“Not for a long time shall we be able to know if President Johnson ever seriously thought of bringing about some of the reforms needed by his people — to iron out the barbed class contradictions that grow each day with explosive power. The truth is that the improvements announced under the pompous title of the "Great Society" have dropped into the cesspool of Vietnam.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Message to the Tricontinental (1967)

People , Truth , Time

“There must be renewed recognition that societies are kept stable and healthy by reform, not by thought police; this means there must be free play for so-called subversive ideas - every idea subverts the old to make way for the new. To shut off subversion is to shut off peaceful progress and to invite revolution and war.”

I. F. Stone (1907–1989) American investigative journalist and author

I.F. Stone's Weekly (1954-03-15)

War , Peace , Way , Idea

“Reason, it is true, is DICTATOR in the Society of Mankind; from her there ought to lie no Appeal; But here we want a Pope in our Philosophy, to be the infallible Judge of what is or is not Reason.”

Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) English trader, writer and journalist

An Essay upon Publick Credit (1710).

Lie

“The Objective of Ahlehadeeth movement is to propagate and inculcate pure Tawheed in all spheres of life by following exact instructions of Kitab and Sunnah to gain satisfaction of Allah. The social and political objectives of Ahl-i-Hadeeth Movement is to bring about all round reforms of the society through ensuring the rectification of Aqeedah and 'Amal”

Muhammad Asadullah Al-Ghalib (1948) Bangladeshi academic

i.e. faith & deeds
(English Translation). http://www.ahlehadeethbd.org/porichitienglish.html
Organizational leaflet

Life , Faith

“…the three Powers, discarding the ideologies of individualism and democracy, have adopted the principle of dealing with human society from the totalitarian point of view.”

Toshio Shiratori (1887–1949) Japanese politician

Quoted in "Honorable Enemy" - Page 258 - by Ernest O. Hauser - 1941.

Democracy

“The advanced members of the medical profession know that the health of society is not to be obtained or maintained by medicines; — that it is far better, far more easy and far wiser, to adopt substantive measures to prevent disease of body or mind, than to allow substantive measure to remain continually to generate causes to produce physical and mental disorders.”

Robert Owen (1771–1858) Welsh social reformer

3rd Part
The Book of the New Moral World (1836-1844)

Health , Disease

“One of the crucial yardsticks by which we shall have to judge the results of the new abortion law combined with the voluntary sterilisation law will be whether it tends to raise or lower the total quality of our population. We must encourage those who earn less than $200 per month and cannot afford to nurture and educate many children never to have more than two. Intelligent application of these laws can help reduce the distortion that has already set in. Until the less educated themselves are convinced and realise that they should concentrate their limited resources on one or two to give their children the maximum chance to climb up the educational ladder, their children will always be at the bottom of the economic scale. It is unlikely that the results will be discernible before five years. Nor will the effect be felt before fifteen to twenty years. But we will regret the time lost if we do not now take the first tentative steps towards correcting a trend which can leave our society with a large number of the physically, intellectually and culturally anaemic.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

Abortion Bill (As reported from Select Committee), 29 Dec 1969. Singapore Parliament Reports http://sprs.parl.gov.sg/search/topic.jsp?currentTopicID=00054060-ZZ&currentPubID=00069213-ZZ&topicKey=00069213-ZZ.00054060-ZZ_1%2Bid015_19691229_S0003_T00031-bill%2B
1960s

Children , Education , Law , Intelligence

“When two-thirds or three-quarters of the C. E. O. s in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think. . . A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”

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

Breitbart News Daily - Donald Trump - November 5, 2015 https://soundcloud.com/breitbart/breitbart-news-daily-donald-trump-november-5-2015#t=16:38

Thinking , Country

“All fathers and mothers, in all societies, want their children to be educated, and live free from poverty and violence. No people on Earth yearn to be oppressed, or aspire to servitude, or eagerly await the midnight knock of the secret police.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2002, State of the Union address (January 2002)

Children , People , Secret , Education

“Wilt thou then, my soul, never be good and simple and one and naked, more manifest than the body which surrounds thee? Wilt thou never enjoy an affectionate and contented disposition? Wilt thou never be full and without a want of any kind, longing for nothing more, nor desiring anything, either animate of inanimate, for the enjoyment of pleasures? nor yet desiring time wherein thou shalt have longer enjoyment, or place, or pleasant climate, or society of men with whom thou mayst live in harmony? but wilt thou be satisfied with thy present condition, and pleased with all that is around thee, and wilt thou convince thyself that thou hast everything and that it comes from the gods, that everything is well for thee, and will be well whatever shall please them, and whatever they shall give for the conservation of the perfect living being, the good and just and beautiful, which generates and holds together all things, and contains and embraces all things which are dissolved for the production of other like things? Wilt thou never be such that thou shalt so dwell in community with gods and men as neither to find fault with them at all, nor to be condemned by them?”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

X, 1
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book X

Men , God , Pleasure , Beauty

“You can stay in society and be alone, as long as you can be detached from the world. This is why I don’t think I have ever gone for the easy option or done things that were expected of me.”

Eugéne Ionesco (1909–1994) Romanian playwright

The Paris Review interview (1984)

World , Thinking

“.. Whenever it ceases to be true that mankind, as a rule, prefer themselves to others, and those nearest to them to those more remote, from that moment Communism is not only practicable, but the only defensible form of society…”

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) British philosopher and political economist

On Representative Government (1861)

Communication

“The invisible hand is an emergent property of this system, which never reaches an optimal equilibrium, but instead is fundamentally dynamic and unstable, with complex effects on society.”

David Orrell (1962) Canadian mathematician

Introduction, p. 19
The Other Side Of The Coin (2008)

Optimism

“When we study history we obtain a more profound insight into human nature by instituting a comparison between the present and former states of society.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.1, p. 1
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

History , Nature , Study

“No group is able, and few are willing, to stand up to the potent homogenizing forces of advanced industrial society. All Americans, from African Americans to Greek Americans, buy the same goods, look at the same movies and television, pursue the same activities and have—more or less—the same desires for success.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: The End of Utopia (1999), p. 48

Success

“The effort necessary to remain uncorrupted in an environment where fear is an integral part of everyday existence is not immediately apparent to those fortunate enough to live in states governed by the rule of law. Just laws do not merely prevent corruption by meting out impartial punishment to offenders. They also help to create a society in which people can fulfil the basic requirements necessary for the preservation of human dignity without recourse to corrupt practices. Where there are no such laws, the burden of upholding the principles of justice and common decency falls on the ordinary people. It is the cumulative effect on their sustained effort and steady endurance which will change a nation where reason and conscience are warped by fear into one where legal rules exist to promote man's desire for harmony and justice while restraining the less desirable destructive traits in his nature.”

Aung San Suu Kyi book Freedom from Fear

Freedom from Fear (1991)

People , Fear , Justice , Law

“The common damn'd shun their society.”

Robert Blair The Grave

Referring to suicides in Hell. Attributed to Lamb, but not found in his works.
The Grave (1743)

“There is danger that totalitarian governments, not subject to vigorous popular debate, will underestimate the will and unity of democratic societies where vital interests are concerned.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

President Kennedy's 13th News Conferences on June 28, 1961 John Source: F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/Press-Conferences/News-Conference-13.aspx
1961

“Considering that our culture invented napalm and nuclear weapons, I'm not sure we're in a position to judge the smaller scale violence of other cultures. But it's important to note that none of the cannibal or headhunting groups were true hunter-gatherers. They had already begun to use agriculture. It is now generally conceded that agriculture usually leads to a rise in labor, a decrease in sharing, an increase in violence, and a shorter life expectancy. This is not to say that all agricultural societies are violent, but rather that violence is by and large not characteristic of true hunter-gatherers.”

John Zerzan (1943) American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author

Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (2002)

Life

“Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Dryden
Literary Essays, vol. III (1870-1890)

Imagination , Solitude

“It is important, of course, that controversies be settled right, but there are many civil questions which arise between individuals in which it is not so important the controversy be settled one way or another as that it be settled. Of course a settlement of a controversy on a fundamentally wrong principle of law is greatly to be deplored, but there must of necessity be many rules governing the relations between members of the same society that are more important in that their establishment creates a known rule of action than that they proceed on one principle or another. Delay works always for the man with the longest purse.”

William Howard Taft (1857–1930) American politician, 27th President of the United States (in office from 1909 to 1913)

"Adequate Machinery for Judicial Business," Journal of the American Bar Association, vol. 7, p. 454 (September 1921).

Law , Way , Question

“I believe we have to put art back at the center of everyday life rather than allowing it to become a specialist activity at the margins of society.”

Martin Firrell (1963) British artist and activist

Quoted in The International Herald Tribune (19 September 2005).

Life , Art

“In my view, if there's going to be an army, I think it ought to be a citizens' army. Now, here I do agree with some people, the top brass, they don't want a citizens' army. They want a mercenary army, what we call a volunteer army. A mercenary army of the disadvantaged. And in fact, in the Vietnam War, the U. S. military realized, they had made a very bad mistake. I mean, for the first time I think ever in the history of European imperialism, including us, they had used a citizens' army to fight a vicious, brutal, colonial war, and civilians just cannot do that kind of a thing. For that, you need the French Foreign Legion, the Gurkhas or something like that. Every predecessor has used mercenaries, often drawn from the country that they're attacking, like England ran India with Indian mercenaries. You take them from one place and send them to kill people in the other place. That's the standard way to run imperial wars. They're just too brutal and violent and murderous. Civilians are not going to be able to do it for very long. What happened was, the army started falling apart. One of the reasons that the army was withdrawn was because the top military wanted it out of there. They were afraid they were not going to have an army anymore. Soldiers were fragging officers. The whole thing was falling apart. They were on drugs. And that's why I think that they're not going to have a draft. That's why I'm in favor of it. If there's going to be an army that will fight brutal, colonial wars… it ought to be a citizens' army so that the attitudes of the society are reflected in the military.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Quotes 2000s, 2004, 25th Anniversary of Coalition for Peace Action, 2004

War , People , Way , History

“You don't have to go to college to be a success … We need the people who run the offices, the people who do the hard physical work of our society.”

George H. W. Bush (1924–2018) American politician, 41st President of the United States

Statement to the students of East Los Angeles' Garfield High School (5 May 1988)

People , Success

“Hayek emphasized the importance of rules. He thought that what society should do is not to direct the individual in his or her particular actions, but to create a metaphysical structure, as it were, enforced by rules or laws, that create stable expectations and thus allow rational action.”

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

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

Law

“Trudeau: Well there are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don't like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is, go on and bleed. But it's more important to keep law and order in the society than to be worried about weak-kneed people who don't like the looks of a soldier—
CBC reporter Tim Ralfe [interrupting]: At any cost? How far would you go with that? How far would you extend that?
Trudeau: Well, just watch me.”

Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) 15th Prime Minister of Canada

Responses to reporters following the kidnapping by the FLQ of a provincial cabinet minister who was eventually murdered. CBC video archives http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-71-162-429-21/unforgettable_moments/conflict_war/trudeau_just_watch_me (13 October 1970)

People , Law , Heart

“Imagine a society of saints, a perfect cloister of exemplary individuals. Crimes, properly so called, will there be unknown; but faults which appear venial to the layman will create there the same scandal that the ordinary offense does in ordinary consciousnesses. If, then, this society has the power to judge and punish, it will define these acts as criminal and will treat them as such.”

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

Source: Rules of Sociological Method, 1895, p. 68-69

Imagination , Appearance , Perfection

“The homosexual never thinks of himself when someone is branded in his presence with the name homosexual…. His sexual tastes will doubtless lead him to enter into relationships with this suspect category, but he would like to make use of them without being likened to them. Here, too, the ban that is cast on certain men by society has destroyed all possibility of reciprocity among them. Shame isolates.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

Men , Thinking

“We strive to form a single national front against the Judeo-Masonic lodges, against Moscow and the Marxist societies.”

Francisco Franco (1892–1975) Spanish general and dictator

Statement in El defensor de Córdoba (24 July 1936), as cited by Javier Navarrete in Más Allá http://mcedhou1.housings.nexica.net/MAS_ALLA/html/version_texto.asp?IDArt=29

“If our commitment to remain an open society is one of the pillars of our nationhood, the other is our commitment to remain an open economy. An economy that guarantees the freedom of enterprise, respects individual creativity, and at the same time mobilizes public investment for social infrastructure and the development of human capabilities. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to suggest that these are the principles to which all countries will increasingly want to adhere. In relating to the world, we must never lose sight of this vital aspect of our Nationhood.”

Manmohan Singh (1932) 13th Prime Minister of India

As quoted in "Speech by Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh at India Today Conclave, New Delhi" http://www.mea.gov.in/Speeches-Statements.htm?dtl/2464/, Ministry of External Affairs (India) (25 February 2005)
2001-2005

World , Freedom , Time , Country

“The expansion of Europe was a phenomenon of such magnitude with such a profound and irreversible effect on humankind that it might be thought that our moralising tendency would be silenced in the face of it. But as we saw on the 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage in 1992, there are those who think that its disastrous consequences for indigenous people make it quite definitely a bad thing which should not have happened. Unprovoked invasion of the territory of another society is immoral by our standards and breaches current international law, but if these be the standards we apply to history there will be no end to our condemning.”

John Hirst (1942–2016) Australian historian

Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (2005)

People , Law , History , Thinking

“But somewhere [during the 1950's, in East-Germany at the Art Academy] along the way we all began to notice that there was something wrong. We saw a few art magazines from the West and got a sense of another world. We began to talk about a third way between capitalism and Communism in art. I saw the work of graphic designers from Poland, the only ones [in communist area] I came across who seemed to be doing something for society but in a style that was more modern.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

World , Art , Way , Communication

“The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization….
The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.
The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.
It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.
But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

Remarks at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (May 22, 1964). Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963–64, book 1, p. 704.
1960s

Life , Wisdom , Men , Hunger

“The progress of society is mainly—is, in its proper sense, the improvement in the condition of the workingmen of the world.”

Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893) American politician, 19th President of the United States (in office from 1877 to 1881)

Diary(27 February 1890)
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922 - 1926)

World , Sense

“What kind of a society is this where a person can’t express attraction without fearing that they’re going to be murdered for it? If the person who came out with the secret was a Jewish woman or a black woman or an Asian woman, and he went over to her house the next day and killed her because he was so repulsed and she had embarrassed him that way on national television, nobody would be writing stories on the TV show’s responsibility. Everyone would be writing stories about this racist, this anti-Semite.”

Jeffrey Montgomery (1953–2016) American LGBT rights activist and public relations executive

The New York Times, 1995 [Remembering Jeff Montgomery, LGBTQ rights advocate, Ennis, Dawn, LGBTQ Nation, July 19, 2016, 2016-07-19, http://www.lgbtqnation.com/2016/07/remembering-jeff-montgomery-lgbtq-rights-advocate/]

Secret , Fear , Way , Housing

“No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 2: The Singing School

Life , Religion , Literature

“The difficulty of determining whether a man is or is not good has now become a commonplace of moralists and satirists. It is almost impossible to discover any test which is satisfactory, and the test which is actually applied by society is known to be unsatisfactory in the extreme.”

John Robert Seeley (1834–1895) British historian

pp. 57–58 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433068235500;view=1up;seq=87
Ecce Homo (1866)

“Marx teaches us to blame society for our frailties, Freud teaches us to blame our parents, and astrology teaches us to blame the universe. The only place to look for blame is within: you didn't have the guts to bring up your full moon and live the life that was your potential.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Source: Pathways to Bliss (2004), p. 104

Life , Parent , Universe

“I believe leaders of the business community, with few exceptions, have chosen to wage a one-sided class war today in our country—a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society.”

Douglas Fraser (1916–2008) American labor leader

<sub>Resignation letter from National Committee of Labor-Management Group</sub> http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/fraserresign.html, July 17, 1978; Published in: North Country Anvil, Nr. 28, (1978) p. 22

War , People , Communication , Business

“The conservative realizes that many orthodox positions, once abandoned in panic because they were thought to be indefensible, are quite defensible in only one gives a little thought to basic issues. Surely one of these positions is the right of an individual or society to hold a belief which, though unreasoned, is uncontradicted.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“Life without prejudice,” p. 13.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

“What we’re after is to remind ourselves that we didn’t come to Anarres for safety, but for freedom. If we must all agree, all work together, we’re no better than a machine. If an individual can’t work in solidarity with his fellows, it’s his duty to work alone. His duty and his right. We have been denying people that right. We’ve been saying, more and more often, you must work with the others, you must accept the rule of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 12 (p. 359)

People , Law , Hope , Freedom

“If you were right [that the Ten Commandments are all that's necessary for an ideal society], then the world would have been less cruel thousands of years ago than it is today, and we wouldn't see all these improvements in our condition coming so late in history or accelerating in recent times. As our world becomes more secular, we would not see the consistent decline in inhuman atrocities that we have, nor the unprecedented rise in humanitarian compassion that continues today.”

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

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

World , History , Time

“The three main elements of public relations are practically as old as society: informing people, persuading people, or integrating people with people. Of course, the means and methods of accomplishing these ends have changed as society has changed.”

Edward Bernays (1891–1995) American public relations consultant, marketing pioneer

Public Relations (1952) p. 12 https://books.google.com/books?id=wBFP_qrOYk8C&pg=PA12

People , Change

“By a kind of happy pre-established harmony, such as a later age discovered between the needs of society and the self-interest of the individual, success in business is in itself almost a sign of spiritual grace, for it is a proof that a man has laboured faithfully in his vocation.”

R. H. Tawney (1880–1962) English philosopher

describing the Puritan view, Part IV, Ch. 4
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

Age , Business , Success , Happiness

“The War of the Roses in England and the Civil War in America were both intestinal conflicts arising out of similar ideas. In the first the clash was between feudalism and the new economic order; in the second, between an agricultural society and a new industrial one. Both led to similar ends; the first to the founding of the English nation, and the second to the founding of the American. Both were strangely interlinked; for it was men of the old military and not of the new economic mind—men, such as Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh — who founded the English colonies in America.”

J. F. C. Fuller (1878–1966) British Army general

Grant and Lee: A Study in Personality and Generalship, ch. 1 (1957).

Men , War , Idea

“And yet I think that the Full House model does teach us to treasure variety for its own sake—for tough reasons of evolutionary theory and nature's ontology, and not from a lamentable failure of thought that accepts all beliefs on the absurd rationale that disagreement must imply disrespect. Excellence is a range of differences, not a spot. Each location on the range can be occupied by an excellent or an inadequate representative—and we must struggle for excellence at each of these varied locations. In a society driven, often unconsciously, to impose a uniform mediocrity upon a former richness of excellence—where McDonald's drives out the local diner, and the mega-Stop & Shop eliminates the corner Mom and Pop—an understanding and defense of full ranges as natural reality might help to stem the tide and preserve the rich raw material of any evolving system: variation itself.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

Source: Full House (1996), p. 230

Moms , Failure , Understanding , Nature

“The economic crisis was a reflection of narcissism and very primitive defense mechanisms (such as a complete denial of economic reality) built into the financial system. The best and brightest MBA students have been going into investment banking; many of them used their brains essentially to play casino games, and not to add much value to society.
Now, we’ve seen the result. Look at the least-admired professions in most countries over the years: telemarketers and used-car salesmen. Today, you have bankers and CEOs achieving the same low rating. Companies like Citibank — which was the brainchild of one of the most visibly narcissistic executives in the world, Sanford Weill — have essentially collapsed. They have grown too complex for the people who work there to understand. I strongly question what the different parts of Citibank have in common. No matter what kinds of regulatory reforms are initiated, more companies will collapse this way, because narcissism breeds this kind of unmanageable grandiosity.”

Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries (1942) Dutch academic

Manfred Kets de Vries in: " The Thought Leader Interview: Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries http://www.strategy-business.com/article/10209?gko=cbe31," in: Strategy + business. May 10, 2010. Originally published by Booz & Company.

People , World , Cars , Way

“You can't expect to work for the Daily Mail group and have the rest of society treat with you respect as a useful member of society, because you are not.”

Ken Livingstone (1945) Mayor of London between 2000 and 2008

Remarks concerning Oliver Finegold, Evening Standard journalist. in Guardian Unlimited (13 December 2005) http://politics.guardian.co.uk/gla/story/0,,1666536,00.html

“I was filled with joy when studying quantum physics at the university as a means to understand the universe. But at the same time, I was preoccupied with the oppressive conditions in my country and the tyranny suffered by our universities, intellectuals, and the media. Like many others in our universities, I felt compelled to join the struggle for freedom. What we experience is a decades-old tyranny, that cannot tolerate freedom of speech and thought. In the name of religion, it restricts and punishes science, intellect, and even love. It labels as a threat to national security and toxic to society whatever is not compatible with its political and economic interests. It considers punishing unwelcome ideas as a positive thing. It does not tolerate differences of opinion; it responds to logic not by logic, discussion or dialog, but by suppression. By tyranny I mean a ruling power that tries to make only one voice—the voice of a ruling minority in Iran—dominant, with no regard for pluralism in the society. By tyranny I mean a judiciary that disregards even the Islamic Republic’s own constitution, and sentences intellectuals, writers, journalists, and political and civil activists to long prison terms, without due process and trial in a court of law. … By tyranny I mean power-holders who believe they stand above the law and who disregard justice and the urgent demands of the human conscience.”

Narges Mohammadi (1972) Iranian human rights activist

Letter Accepting 2018 Andrei Sakharov Prizefrom (2018)

Love , Religion , Justice , Law

“Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are ourselves, i. e., those who pay our painful, embarrassing, humanistic duties to society and who are compromised by our intellectually dubious commitment to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals humanist.) This word has long been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot be readily matched in England or America.”

V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) British writer and critic

"Jean Genet: A Modern Nihilist", p. 102
The Myth Makers: European and Latin American Writers (1979)

Pain , Hell , Evil , Parting

“We ought, as far as we can by law, to support the government of all societies and corporations, especially this of the city of London; and if the mayor and aldermen should not have power to punish offenders in a summary way, then farewell the government of the city.”

John Holt (Lord Chief Justice) (1642–1710) English lawyer and Lord Chief Justice of England

Clark's Case (1696), 5 Mod. Rep. 320.

Law , Way , Support

“The political history of the 20th century is the history of social-engineering projects executed by well-intentioned people that began well and ended badly. There were big errors like communism, but also lesser ones, like a Vietnam War designed by the best and the brightest, urban renewal efforts that decimated neighborhoods, welfare policies that had the unintended effect of weakening families and development programs that left a string of white elephant projects across the world.These experiences drove me toward the crooked timber school of public philosophy: Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Banfield, Reinhold Niebuhr, Friedrich Hayek, Clinton Rossiter and George Orwell. These writers — some left, some right — had a sense of epistemological modesty. They knew how little we can know. They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.”

David Brooks (1961) American journalist, commentator and editor

[David, Brooks, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/opinion/24brooks.html?_r=1&ref=opinion, The Big Test, New York Times, February 23, 2009, February 24, 2009]
2000s

War , People , School , Family