Social Institutions Quotes

• Only our deep moral values and our strong social institutions can hold back that jungle and restrain the darker impulses of human nature.

  Ronald Reagan

  Strong, Moral, Human Nature

  Reagan, Ronald (1982). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1981”, p.845, Best Books on

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• Human social institutions can effect the course of human evolution. Just as climate, food supply, predators, and other natural forces of selection have molded our nature, so too can our culture.

  Peter Singer

  Climate, Culture, Predator

  Peter Singer (1982). “The expanding circle: ethics and sociobiology”, Plume

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• The less a person knows about the workings of the social institutions in his society, the more he must trust those who wield power in it; and the more he trusts those who wield such power, the more vulnerable he makes himself to becoming their victim.

  Thomas Szasz

  Becoming, Vulnerable, Victim

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• On the surface the avant garde as a whole seems united primarily in terms of what they are against: the rejection of social institutions and established artistic conventions, or antagonism towards the public (as representative of the existing order). By contrast any positive programme tends to be claimed as exclusive property by isolated and even mutually antagonistic sub-groups. So modern art appears fragmented and sectarian, defined as much by manifestos as imaginative work.

  C. D. Innes

  Art, Order, Rejection

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• The genuine history of mankind is the history of ideas. It is
  ideas that distinguish man from all other beings. Ideas
  engender social institutions, political changes, technologi-
  cal methods of production, and all that is called economic
  conditions.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Men, Ideas, Political

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• A sustainable human community is designed in such a manner that its ways of life, technologies, and social institutions honor, support, and cooperate with nature's inherent ability to sustain life.

  Fritjof Capra

  Technology, Support, Community

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• Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself.

  Shunryu Suzuki

  Wisdom, Reality, Ego

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• I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends. I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

  John Dewey

  Education, Children, Believe

  John Dewey, Francis William Garforth (1966). “Selected educational writings”

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• It is only the belief and the confidence we have in a God why man is able to understand his own social institutions, and move and live like a rational human being.

  Marcus Garvey

  Moving, Godly, Men

  Marcus Garvey (2012). “Selected Writings and Speeches of Marcus Garvey”, p.31, Courier Corporation

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• The essential mark of the agitator is the high value he places on the emotional response of the public. Whether he attacks or defends social institutions is a secondary matter.

  Harold Lasswell

  Emotional, Atheism, Matter

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• What are all political and social institutions, but always a religion, which in realizing itself, becomes incarnate in the world?

  Edgar Quinet

  Political, World, Realizing

  Edgar Quinet (1845). “Ultramontanism: Or, The Roman Church and Modern Society”, p.78

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• The beginning of civilisation is the discovery of some useful arts, by which men acquire property, comforts, or luxuries. The necessity or desire of preserving them leads to laws and social institutions. The discovery of peculiar arts gives superiority to particular nations ... to subjugate other nations, who learn their arts, and ultimately adopt their manners;- so that in reality the origin as well as the progress and improvement of civil society is founded in mechanical and chemical inventions.

  Humphry Davy

  Art, Science, Reality

  Sir Humphry Davy (1840). “Salmonia: or, Days of fly-fishing; in a series of conversations: with some account of the habits of fishes belonging to the genus Salmo. Consolation in travel, or, The last days of a philosopher”, p.351

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• Outsiders tend to be the first to recognize the inadequacies of our social institutions. But, precisely because they are outsiders, they are usually in a poor position to fix them.

  Atul Gawande

  Outsiders, Firsts, Poor

  "Medical Report" by Atul Gawande, www.newyorker.com. January 24, 2011.

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• Those social behaviors which automatically preclude the building of a democratic world must go - every social limitation of human beings in terms of heredity, whether it be of race, or sex, or class. Every social institution which teaches human beings to cringe to those above and step on those below must be replaced by institutions which teach people to look each other straight in the face.

  Margaret Mead

  Sex, Equality, Race

  Margaret Mead (2000). “And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America”, p.161, Berghahn Books

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• The raw material from which social institutions are fashioned is always more or less recalcitrant and any human society will tend to produce a caricature of itself.

  Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth

  Raw Materials, Social, Institutions

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• The "family" has clearly emerged anew in the late 1970s as a central subject for discussion, debate, research and writing in bothscholarly and popular arenas. Anxiety over whether or not the family as a basic social institution is dying has diminished. In its stead has emerged a fairly broad consensus around the position that the family is "here to stay," but that it certainly is changing.

  Sheila Kamerman

  Change, Writing, Anxiety

  Sheila B. Kamerman (1980). “Parenting in an unresponsive society: managing work and family life”, Free Pr

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• We are confronted by the appearance of social institutions unintentionally created, vital for the welfare of society, which are not the result of reasoned planning

  Carl Menger

  Planning, Welfare, Appearance

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• Alas! how much there is in education, and in our social institutions, to prepare us and our children for insanity.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Education, Children, Insanity

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1842). “Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Travels”, p.78

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• For manipulation to be most effective, evidence of its presence should be nonexistent... It is essential, therefore, that people who are manipulated believe in the neutrality of their key social institutions.

  Herbert Schiller

  Life, Believe, Keys

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• With many countries on the verge of redefining a basic social institution, What Is Marriage? issues an urgent call for full deliberation of what is at stake. The authors make a compelling secular case for marriage as a partnership between a man and a woman, whose special status is based on society's interest in the nurture and education of children.

  Mary Ann Glendon

  Country, Children, Men

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• Preaching has always been the business of the Asiatics. The Western people are grand in organisation, social institutions, armies, governments, etc.; but when it comes to preaching religion, they cannot come near the Asiatic, whose business it has been all the time, and he knows it, and he does not use too much machinery.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Business, Army, Government

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “Practical Vedanta Philosophy”, p.48, editionNEXT.com

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• There are many female gods recognized and honored by the tribes and Nations. Femaleness was highly valued, both respected and feared, and all social institutions reflected this attitude. Even modern sayings, such as the Cheyenne statement that a people is not conquered until the hearts of the women are on the ground, express the Indians understanding that without the power of woman the people will not live, but with it, they will endure and prosper.

  Paula Gunn Allen

  Inspiring, Attitude, Heart

  Paula Gunn Allen (2015). “The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions”, p.172, Open Road Media

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• Time is a social institution and not a physical reality. There is no such thing as time in the natural world - the world of stars and waters, clouds, mountains and living organisms. There is such a thing as rhythm - rhythm of tides, rhythm of biological processes... There is rhythm and there is motion. Time is a way of measuring motion.

  Alan Watts

  Stars, Reality, Clouds

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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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• As the corporation's size and power grew, so did the need to assuage people's fears of it. The corporation suffered its first full-blown legitimacy crisis in the wake of the early-twentieth-century merger movement, when, for the first time, many Americans realized that corporations, now turned behemoths, threatened to overwhelm their social institutions and governments.

  Joel Bakan

  Government, People, Needs

  Joel Bakan (2005). “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power”, p.16, Simon and Schuster

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