Social Systems Quotes

• To get useful new ideas, we must go beyond our immediate circle and make contact with distant parts of the social system.

  Richard Koch

  Circles, Ideas, Social

  Richard Koch, Greg Lockwood (2010). “Superconnect: Harnessing the Power of Networks and the Strength of Weak Links”, p.28, W. W. Norton & Company

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• No social system will bring us happiness, health and prosperity unless it is inspired by something greater than materialism.

  Clement Attlee

  Money, Inspired, Materialism

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• We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Inspiring, Women, 4th Of July

  Declaration of Sentiments, First Woman's Rights

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• The proper way to understand any social system was to view it from above.

  Eleanor Catton

  Views, Way, Social

  Eleanor Catton (2013). “The Luminaries”, p.18, Granta Books

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• Many people see technology as the problem behind the so-called digital divide. Others see it as the solution. Technology is neither. It must operate in conjunction with business, economic, political and social system.

  Carly Fiorina

  Business, Technology, People

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• The technology is the independent variable, the social system the dependent variable. Social, systems are therefore determined by systems of technology; as the latter change, so do the former.

  Leslie White

  Independent, Technology, Variables

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• A society with too few independent thinkers is vulnerable to control by disturbed and opportunistic leaders. A society which wants to create and maintain a free and democratic social system must create responsible independence of thought among its young.

  John Dewey

  Independent, Leader, Independence

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• We live in a world where our social system is old, our language is old, the way we acquire goods and services is outdated, our cities are detrimental to our health, chaotic and a tremendous waste of resource, and most of all our politics and values no longer serve us.

  Jacque Fresco

  Health, Cities, Political

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• Religion is the mortar that binds society together; the granite pedestal of liberty; the strong backbone of the social system.

  Thomas Guthrie

  Strong, Religion, Liberty

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• Throughout the world, the family is increasingly under attack. If families fail, many of our political, economic, and social systems will also fail.

  Russell M. Nelson

  Political, World, Failing

  "Salvation and Exaltation" by Russell M. Nelson, www.lds.org. April 2008.

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• The social system is taking on a form in which finding out what you want to do is less and less of an option because your life is too structured, organised, controlled and disciplined.

  Noam Chomsky

  Want, Life Is, Social

  "Work, Learning And Freedom". Interview with Michael Kasenbacher, www.newleftproject.org. December 24, 2012.

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• I believe that we can create a poverty-free world because poverty is not created by poor people. It has been created and sustained by the economic and social systems that we have designed for ourselves; the institutions and concepts that make up that system; the policies that we pursue.

  Muhammad Yunus

  Believe, People, World

  Muhammad Yunus' Nobel Lecture in Oslo, www.nobelprize.org. December 10, 2006.

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• Each of us has some change within us, we cannot change the political or the social system of the world unless we change inside of us as individuals and that’s the direction I am in now which I call spiritual.

  Ziggy Marley

  Spiritual, Political, World

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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• The truth is that capitalism has not only multiplied population figures, but at the same time, improved the people's standard of living in an unprecedented way. Neither economic thinking nor historical experience suggests that any other social system could be as beneficial to the masses as capitalism. The results speak for themselves. The market economy needs no apologists and propagandists. It can apply to itself the words of Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph in St. Paul's: Si monumentum requires, circumspice.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Thinking, People, Historical

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• A living system continually re-creates itself. But how this occurs in social systems such as global institutions depends on our level of awareness, both individually and collectively... As long as our thinking is governed by industrial, "machine age" metaphors such as control, predicatbility, and "faster is better", we will continue to re-create institutions as we have, despite their increasing disharmony with the larger world.

  Betty Sue Flowers

  Thinking, Long, Age

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• Education must be a great equaliser in our society. It must be the tool to level the differences that our various social systems have created over the past thousands of years.

  Rajiv Gandhi

  Past, Years, Differences

  Rajiv Gandhi (1987). “Selected speeches and writings”

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• But revolutionary is not an acceptable term to those who benefit from, and deny at the same time, the savage exploitativeness of the social system.

  Herbert Schiller

  Savages, Benefits, Revolutionary

  "Living In The Number One Country". Book by Herbert Schiller, 2000.

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• This war is not as in the past: whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system.

  Joseph Stalin

  War, Past, World

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• In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.

  James Henry Hammond

  Skills, Order, Civilization

  James Henry Hammond (1866). “Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond: Of South Carolina”, p.318

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• The organizer of industry who thinks he has 'made' himself and his business has found a whole social system ready to his hand in skilled workers, machinery, a market, peace and order - a vast apparatus and a pervasive atmosphere, the joint creation of millions of men and scores of generations. Take away the whole social factor, and we have not Robinson Crusoe with his salvage from the wreck and his acquired knowledge, but the native savage living on roots, berries and vermin.

  Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse

  Thinking, Men, Hands

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• It is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country's social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it.

  Doris Lessing

  Country, Borders, Easy

  Doris May Lessing (1991). “Martha Quest”, Plume

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• Diversity is essential to happiness and in Utopia there is hardly any. This is a defect in all planned social systems.

  Bertrand Russell

  Diversity, Essentials, Investing

  Bertrand Russell (2013). “History of Western Philosophy: Collectors Edition”, p.421, Routledge

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• Let’s begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes - indeed, deletes - the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Fashion, Thinking, Would Be

  "John Kenneth Galbraith: Free Market Fraud' by John Kenneth Galbraith, progressive.org. April 12, 2006.

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  There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery

  Karl Marx

  Rotten, Misery, Wealth

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (1980). “Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Marx and Engels Collected Works 1858-60”, Intl Pub

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• Unless we do change our whole way of thought about work, I do not think we shall ever escape from the appalling squirrel-cage of economic confusion in which we have been madly turning for the last three centuries or so, the cage in which we landed ourselves by acquiescing in a social system based upon Envy and Avarice. A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Work, Thinking, Squirrels

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