Social Control Quotes

• 

  The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

  H. L. Mencken

  Freedom, Democracies Have, Government

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.29, Vintage

  183 Copy quote

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• Social control is best managed through fear.

  Michael Crichton

  Fear, Social

  28 Copy quote
• 

  Eugenics is ... the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.

  Margaret Sanger

  Eugenics, Political, Adequate

  "The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda". "Birth Control Review", (p. 5), October 1921.

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• The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information.

  Noam Chomsky

  Keys, Issues, Political

  31 Copy quote

• In ideal form of social control is an atomised collection of individuals focused on their own narrow concern, lacking the kinds of organisations in which they can gain information, develop and articulate their thoughts, and act constructively to achieve common ends.

  Noam Chomsky

  Information, Gains, Common

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• Our system of mass incarceration is better understood as a system of racial and social control than a system of crime prevention or control.

  Michelle Alexander

  Prevention, Crime, Social

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear – that is, if they sustain alienation. And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Choices, Toil, Doe

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.10, Routledge

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• Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns.

  Michelle Alexander

  Government, Punishment, Tools

  Michelle Alexander (2013). “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, p.7, The New Press

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• From a historical viewpoint, religion is just a kind of superstition, and from a political viewpoint it is a tool of social control.

  Mario Bunge

  Political, Historical, Tools

  Source: deutsche-denker.de

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• The most effective way of utilizing human energy is through an organized rivalry, which by specialization and social control is, at the same time, organized co-operation.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Way, Energy, Social

  Charles Horton Cooley (1922). “Human Nature and the Social Order”

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• Regulation of sexual behavior
  is the preferred route to wider social
  control.

  Alexander Cockburn

  Regulation, Behavior, Social

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• Every discipline develops standards of professional competence to which its workers are subject... Every scientific community is a society in the small, so to speak, with its own agencies of social control.

  Abraham Kaplan

  Agency, Discipline, Community

  Abraham Kaplan (1973). “The conduct of inquiry”, p.4, Transaction Publishers

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• The public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period. They’re operated as holding pens—miniature jails, really. It’s only when black children start breaking out of their pens and bothering white people that society even pays any attention to the issue of whether these children are being educated.

  Barack Obama

  Children, School, Cities

  Barack Obama (2007). “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance”, p.258, Broadway Books

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• Men have been adjudicating on what women are, and how they should behave, for millennia through the institutions of social control such as religion, the medical profession, psychoanalysis, the sex industry. Feminists have fought to remove the definition of what a woman is from these masculine institutions and develop their own understandings.

  Sheila Jeffreys

  Sex, Men, Feminist

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• “Healthy" and “diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control.

  Naomi Wolf

  Self Esteem, Mean, Long

  "The Beauty Myth". Book by Naomi Wolf, 1990.

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• If I had to guess and put a name on it, I'd say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism.

  David Simon

  War, Class, Names

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• Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control.

  Hugh Jackman

  Motivation, Liberty, Libertarian

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• Eugenics is the study of the agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally.

  Francis Galton

  Eugenics, Agency, Quality

  Francis Galton (2015). “Memories of My Life”, p.335, Routledge

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• The appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and "psychic hermaphroditism" made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of "perversity"; but it also made possible the formation of a "reverse" discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or "naturality" be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.

  Michel Foucault

  Strong, Psychics, Vocabulary

  "The History of Sexuality, Volume I: The Will to Knowledge". Book by Michel Foucault, 1978.

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• These [NSA] programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power.

  Edward Snowden

  Nsa, Manipulation, Terrorism

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• We have, in our day, witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control.

  Thomas Szasz

  Birth, Social, States

  Thomas Szasz (2017). “Words to the Wise: A Medical-Philosophical Dictionary”, p.278, Routledge

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• Socialism to me is establishing social control of power in society, and where that differs from liberalism for example which aims at a similar situation in some respects, is we think you can only establish control over power by changing the structure and distribution of power, notably economic power.

  Denis Healey

  Thinking, Distribution Of Power, Example

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• The mere fact of leaving ultimate social control in the hands of the people has not guaranteed that men will be able to conduct their lives as free men. Those societies where men know they are free are often democracies, but sometimes they have strong chiefs and kings.they have, however, one common characteristic: they are all alike in making certain freedoms common to all citizens, and inalienable.

  Ruth Benedict

  Strong, Kings, Freedom

  Ruth Benedict (2011). “An Anthropologist at Work”, p.392, Transaction Publishers

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• You see there are people who believe the function of the police is to fight crime,
  and that's not true, the function of the police is social control and protection of
  property.

  Michael Parenti

  Believe, Fighting, People

  57 Copy quote