Social Contract Quotes - Page 2

• I mean, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, the Black Lives Movement, it's very difficult to, in a sense, especially since the 1980s, to talk about what the social contract is and what it means, and what it means to celebrate public goods, what it means to make, create social investments.

  Henry Giroux

  Mean, Black, Movement

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• A social contract is the way out of this dilemma for corporations that want to lead in the 21st century by showing consumers how seriously they take customer loyalty and goodwill.

  Simon Mainwaring

  Loyalty, Want, Corporations

  "What #OccupyWallStreet Must Ask of Corporations and Themselves" by Simon Mainwaring, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 12, 2011.

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• They're rights that should be endemic to any democracy. The right to a free quality education, from elementary school right through higher education. The right to have a decent social wage. The right to a decent job. Political rights; the right to vote. These are all parts of the social contract, from the New Deal onwards, that never went far enough.

  Henry Giroux

  School, Political, Democracy

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• Everyone living under the social contract we call democracy has a duty to act responsibly, to obey the laws, and to abandon certain types of self-interested behaviors that conflict with the general good.

  Simon Mainwaring

  Democracies Have, Self, Law

  "What #OccupyWallStreet Must Ask of Corporations and Themselves" by Simon Mainwaring, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 12, 2011.

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• There is a social contract in "Fight Club" and in "Choke" where the protagonist has deceived a whole bunch of people. In "Choke" it's all of these people who think that they've saved his life, and really care about him because they've embraced him and they've been his saviors. In "Fight Club" it's all of these people who are dying of various diseases, and they thought that Edward Norton was also dying so they allowed him really strong pent-up emotions.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Strong, Fighting, Thinking

  "Chuck Palahnuik On 'Choke'". Interview with Cole Smithey, www.colesmithey.com. September 24, 2008.

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• I try to look at the evolution of these utopian claims. In the late '60s there was an assumption that the wealth generated by industry would be taxed and then put into social programs and it would provide a baseline of stability that would allow people to have the time for self-expression; and that social contract has eroded over the last four decades and now it's every person for themselves.

  Astra Taylor

  Expression, Self, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Throughout the 1980s, we did hear too much about individual gain and the ethos of selfishness and greed. We did not hear enough about how to be a good member of a community, to define the common good and to repair the social contract. And we also found that while prosperity does not trickle down from the most powerful to the rest of us, all too often indifference and even intolerance do.

  Hillary Clinton

  Powerful, Ethos, Community

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• Etiquette is about all of human social behavior. Behavior is regulated by law when etiquette breaks down or when the stakes are high - violations of life, limb, property and so on. Barring that, etiquette is a little social contract we make that we will restrain some of our more provocative impulses in return for living more or less harmoniously in a community.

  Judith Martin

  Law, Community, Social Behavior

  "Polite Company". Interview with Hara Estroff Marano, www.psychologytoday.com. March 1, 1998.

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• Economics now drives politics. This gives us a system in which the relationship between power and politics is no longer fused. Power is global. We have an elite that now floats in global flows. It could care less about the nation-state, and it could care less about traditional forms of politics. Hence, it makes no political concessions whatsoever. It attacks unions, it attacks public schools, it attacks public goods. It doesn't believe in the social contract.

  Henry Giroux

  Believe, School, Giving

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• The danger is not only that these austerity measures are killing the European economies but also that they threaten the very legitimacy of European democracies - not just directly by threatening the livelihoods of so many people and pushing the economy into a downward spiral, but also indirectly by undermining the legitimacy of the political system through this backdoor rewriting of the social contract.

  Ha-Joon Chang

  People, Political, Democracy

  "The root of Europe's riots" by Ha-Joon Chang, www.theguardian.com. September 28, 2012.

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• The 14th Amendment was passed after the Civil War to apply to former slaves to ensure that they are treated like all other citizens. It never did have anything to do with gay marriage. It was never intended to have anything to do with gay marriage or animal marriage or any other kind of social contract. It was specific to slavery, and after the Civli War.

  Rush Limbaugh

  War, Gay, Animal

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• We began to temper Western democracy with what I'd call a social contract. We put in Social Security, graduated income tax, workers' compensation. We developed strong unions to negotiate with business owners so workers got an equitable share of the profits.

  John Shelby Spong

  Strong, Democracy, Unions

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• I am prepared to maintain that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilization made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even, violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good.

  H. G. Wells

  Honesty, Lying, Civilization

  "Love and Mr Lewisham". Book by H. G. Wells, Chapter 23, 1899.

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• 24.9 percent of American children live in poverty, while the proportions in Germany, France and Italy are 8.6, 7.4 and 10.5 percent. And once born on the wrong side of the tracks, Americans are more likely to stay there than their counterparts in Europe. Those born to better-off families are more likely to stay better off. America is developing an aristocracy of the rich and a serfdom of the poor - the inevitable result of a twenty-year erosion of its social contract.

  Will Hutton

  Children, Erosion, Years

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• The first right of every human being is the right of self-defense. Without that right, all other rights are meaningless. The right of self-defense is not something the government bestows upon its citizens. It is an inalienable right, older than the Constitution itself. It existed prior to government and prior to the social contract of our Constitution.

  Larry Craig

  Rights, Government, Self

  Congressional Record, Volume 146, Pt. 7, June 06, 2000.

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• There would be no history as we know it, no religion, no metaphysics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, more fundamental, more axiomatic by far than any “social contract” or covenant with the postulate of the divine. This instauration of trust, this entrance of man into the city of man, is that between word and world.

  George Steiner

  Men, Cities, Would Be

  George Steiner (1991). “Real Presences”, p.89, University of Chicago Press

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• Mobile communications and pervasive computing technologies, together with social contracts that were never possible before, are already beginning to change the way people meet, mate, work, war, buy, sell, govern and create.

  Howard Rheingold

  War, Communication, Technology

  "The mobile technofuture" by Neil McIntosh, www.theguardian.com. October 9, 2002.

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• The notion that employees and companies have a social contract with each other that goes beyond a paycheck has largely vanished in United States business.

  Alex Berenson

  United States, Social, Contracts

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• Reading is at the beginning of the social contract.

  Alberto Manguel

  Reading, Social, Contracts

  "A History of Reading". Book by Alberto Manguel, 1996.

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• We witness a strange inversion: on the one hand, the endeavor to turn the social contract into a less calculating and more feeling connection among its members; on the other hand, the endeavor to turn the erotic relationship into a contractual one.

  Allan Bloom

  Hands, Erotic, Feelings

  Allan David Bloom (1993). “Love and Friendship”

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• Does it seem to you impossible to imagine anything more inextricable than the social contract, when you think of the frightful number of relations that it must regulate -- something like squaring the circle, or finding perpetual motion? That is the reason why, wearied of the struggle, you fall back on absolutism and force.

  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  Struggle, Fall, Thinking

  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (2007). “General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century”, p.131, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Locke had illegitimately selected those parts of man he needed for his social contract and suppressed all the rest, a theoretically unsatisfactory procedure and a practically costly one. The bourgeois is the measure of the price paid, he who most of all cannot afford to look to his real self, who denies the existence of the thinly boarded-over basement in him, who is most made over for the purposes of a society that does not even promise him perfection or salvation but merely buys him off.

  Allan Bloom

  Real, Men, Self

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.177, Simon and Schuster

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• The intellectual and moral satisfaction that I failed to gain from the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, the revolutionary methods of Marx and Lenin, the social contract theory of Hobbes, the "back to nature" optimism of Rousseau, and the superman philosophy of Nietzsche, I found in the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Gandhi. I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Philosophy, Struggle, People

  Martin Luther King (Jr.) (1964). “A Martin Luther King Treasury”

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• Wall Street sees a social fabric or social contract as inefficiencies, which need to be removed.

  David Korten

  Wall, Needs, Fabric

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• At the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism. But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy. And it's a kind of capitalism that's totally self-defeating because it's so narrow. It's a winner-take-all capitalism that's not sustaining.

  Jaron Lanier

  Self, People, Giving

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