Institutions Quotes - Page 31

• Government seems to me to be a part of religion itself - a thing sacred in its institutions and ends.

  William Penn

  Government, Sacred, Ends

  Thomas Clarkson, William Penn (1827). “Memoirs of the private and public life of William Penn: who settled the state of Pennsylvania, and founded the city of Philadelphia”, p.116

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• I should be very sorry to see the United States holding anyone in confinement on account of any opinion that that person might hold. It is a fundamental tenet of our institutions that people have a right to believe what they want to believe and hold such opinions as they want to hold without having to answer to anyone for their private opinion.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Sorry, Believe, People

  Ferrell, Calvin Coolidge, Robert H. Ferrell, Howard H. Quint (1979). “TALKATIVE PRESIDENT OFF”, Dissertations-G

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• No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.

  Adrienne Rich

  Consciousness, Masculine, Rich Women

  Adrienne Rich (1994). “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985”, p.12, W. W. Norton & Company

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• To think of education as a means of preserving institutions however excellent, is to have a superficial notion of its end and purpose, which is to mould and fashion men who are more than institutions, who create, outgrow, and re-create them.

  John Lancaster Spalding

  Fashion, Mean, Men

  John Lancaster Spalding (1901). “Aphorisms and Reflections: Conduct, Culture and Religion”

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• I intend to discuss some perplexing issues which are raised once we embrace the hypothesis that society can be deschooled; to search for criteria which may help us distinguish institutions which merit development because they support learning in a deschooled milieu; and to clarify those personal goals which would foster the advent of an Age of Leisure (schole) as opposed to an economy dominated by service industries.

  Ivan Illich

  Issues, Goal, Support

  "Deschooling Society". Book by Ivan Illich, 1971.

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• The characteristic danger of great nations, like the Romans or the English which have a long history of continuous creation, is that they may at last fail from not comprehending the great institutions which they have created

  Walter Bagehot

  Long, May, Lasts

  Walter Bagehot (1915). “The Works and Life of Walter Bagehot”

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• For example: (1) As if governed by Newton's First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds; (3) Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.

  Warren Buffett

  Law, Leader, Peers

  Warren Buffett (2009). “Warren Buffett on Business: Principles from the Sage of Omaha”, p.151, John Wiley & Sons

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• The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine - but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Catholic, Church, Divinity

  "The Life of Hilaire Belloc". Book by Robert Speaight, 1957.

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• Oh, the inmates and the prisoners I found they were my kind And it was there inside the bars I found my peace of mind But the jails they were too crowded Institutions overflowed So they turned me loose to walk upon Life's hurried tangled road

  Bob Dylan

  Jail, Tangled, Mind

  Song: Ballad of Donald White

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• Power broken into a thousand pieces can be hidden and disowned. If no individual or institution possesses the authority to act without of everybody else in the room, then nobody is at fault if anything goes wrong.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Broken, Faults, Anything Goes

  Lewis H. Lapham (1997). “Waiting for the Barbarians”, p.75, Verso

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• A constitution is framed for ages to come, and is designed to approach immortality as nearly as human institutions can approach it.

  John Marshall

  Age, Constitution, Framed

  John Marshall, Joseph Potter Cotton (2000). “The Constitutional Decisions of John Marshall”, p.415, The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.

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• The cry for freedom is a sign of suppression. It will not cease to ring as long as man feels himself captive. As diverse as the cries for freedom may be, basically they all express one and the same thing: The intolerability of the rigidity of the organism and of the machine-like institutions which create a sharp conflict with the natural feelings for life. Not until there is a social order in which all cries for freedom subside will man have overcome his biological and social crippling, will he have attained genuine freedom.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Freedom, Men, Order

  "The Mass Psychology of Fascism". Book by Wilhelm Reich, 1933.

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• True majorities, in a TV-dominated and anti-intellectual age, may need sound bites and flashing lights and I am not against supplying such lures if they draw children into even a transient concern with science. But every classroom has one [Oliver] Sacks , one [Eric] Korn, or one [Jonathan] Miller , usually a lonely child with a passionate curiosity about nature, and a zeal that overcomes pressures for conformity. Do not the one in fifty deserve their institutions as well magic places, like cabinet museums, that can spark the rare flames of genius?

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Lonely, Children, Museums

  Stephen Jay Gould (1995). “Dinosaur in a haystack: reflections in natural history”, Harmony

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• Human beings today are surrounded by huge institutions we can never penetrate: the City, the banking system, political and advertising conglomerates, vast entertainment enterprises. They've made themselves user friendly, but they define the tastes to which we conform. They're rather subtle, subservient tyrants, but no less sinister for that.

  J. G. Ballard

  Wall, Cities, Tyrants

  "A User's Guide to the Millennium". Book by J. G. Ballard, 1996.

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• England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God save the King than of stealing from a poor box.

  George Orwell

  Country, Horse, Kings

  George Orwell (1970). “A Collection of Essays”, p.275, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I would advise no one to send his child where the Holy Scriptures are not supreme. Every institution that does not unceasingly pursue the study of God's word becomes corrupt. Because of this we can see what kind of people they become in the universities and what they are like now.

  Martin Luther

  Children, People, Doe

  Martin Luther (1970). “Three Treatises”, p.100, Fortress Press

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• We cannot afford to raise any institution to the rank of a fetish. To do so would be simply to become the slaves of our own machinery.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Would Be, Slave, Machinery

  "New Lamps for Old". Nine articles by Sri Aurobindo in the "Indu Prakash" (a Bombay daily newspaper), August 7, 1893.

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• The great task of our time is to blow up all existing institutions to destroy.

  Henrik Ibsen

  Blow, Tasks, Our Time

  "The Drama of Ibsen and Strindberg". Book by Frank Laurence Lucas (p. 34), 1962.

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• It happens from time to time in every complex and active society, that certain persons feel the complexity and insistence as a tangle, and seek freedom in retirement, as Thoreau sought at Walden Pond. They do not, however, in this manner escape from the social institutions of their time, nor do they really mean to do so; what they gain, if they are successful, is a saner relation to them.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Retirement, Mean, Successful

  Charles Horton Cooley (1992). “Human Nature and the Social Order”, p.429, Transaction Publishers

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• No major institution in the US has so poor a record of performance over so long a period as the Federal Reserve, yet so high a public reputation.

  Milton Friedman

  Long, Records, Reputation

  1988 'The Fed Has No Clothes', in The Wall Street Journal,15 Apr.

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• When free discussion is denied, hardening of the arteries of democracy has set in, free institutions are but a lifeless form, and the death of the republic is at hand.

  William Randolph Hearst

  Democracies Have, Hands, Democracy

  "In the News", June 13, 1941.

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• The ultimate aim of politics is not politics, but the activities which can be practised within the political framework of the State. Therefore an effective statement of these activities - e.g. science, art, religion - is in itself a declaration of ultimate aims around which the political means will crystallise... a society with no values outside of politics is a machine carrying its human cargo, with no purpose in its institutions reflecting their care, eternal aspirations, loneliness, need for love.

  Stephen Spender

  Art, Loneliness, Mean

  "Life and the Poet". Book by Stephen Spender, 1942.

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• Intriguingly, in poll after poll, when Americans are asked what public institutions they most respect, three bodies are always at the top of their list: the Supreme Court, the armed forces, and the Federal Reserve System. All three have one thing in common: they are insulated from the public pressures and operate undemocratically. It would seem that Americans admire these institutions, precisely because they lead rather than follow.

  Fareed Zakaria

  Three, Body, Pressure

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• If one takes pleasure in calling the gold standard a "barbarous relic," one cannot object to the application of the same term to every historically determined institution. Then the fact that the British speak English - and not Danish, German, or French - is a barbarous relic too, and every Briton who opposes the substitution of Esperanto for English is no less dogmatic and orthodox than those who do not wax rapturous about the plans for a managed currency.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Speak English, Gold, Facts

  "The Gold Standard". Excerpt from chapter 17 of "Human Action, The Scholar's Edition", book by Ludwig von Mises, mises.org. 1949.

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• Organized religion has too often followed the road of other people's institutions. It has made adjustments, compromises, and surrenders to a materialistic civilization for the benefit of material security in spite of occasional twinges of conscience and moral protests. The result has been that today much of organized religion is materialistically solvent but spiritually bankrupt.

  Saul Alinsky

  Civilization, People, Religion

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