Social Structure Quotes

• As human beings, we are always torn between individual freedom and the ability of choose our actions, and the need for at least enough social structure so that anarchy, chaos, and warlordery - or the war of all against all - can be avoided.

  Margaret Atwood

  War, Needs, Our Actions

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• What we are headed for is a sort of social structure in which the highbrows are the elite, the middlebrows are the bourgeoisie and the lowbrows are hoi polloi.

  Russell Lynes

  Art, Bourgeoisie, Social

  Russell Lynes (1966). “Confessions of a dilettante”

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• A commitment to love and justice demands the transformation of social structures as well as of hearts.

  Mary E. Hunt

  Heart, Commitment, Justice

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• Raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place. It's the most important thing that happens, and it's the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure that has evolved.

  Michael Crichton

  Children, Important, Tools

  Michael Crichton (1996). “The lost world”

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• Our body is simply a social structure made of many souls.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Soul, Body, Social

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• Tolerance, openness and understanding towards other peoples' cultures, social structures, values and faiths are now essential to the very survival of an interdependent world.

  Aga Khan IV

  Understanding, Tolerance, Survival

  Speech at the Ceremony to Inaugurate the Restored Humayun's Tomb Gardens, New Delhi, India, April 15, 2003.

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• The strike, the boycott, the refusal to serve, the ability to paralyze the functioning of a complex social structure-these remain potent weapons against the most fearsome state or corporate power.

  Howard Zinn

  Fear, Weapons, Economy

  Howard Zinn (2013). “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress”, p.26, City Lights Books

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• As a result of the World War, this old Germany collapsed. It collapsed in its constitution, in its social order, in its economic structure. Its thinking and feeling changed.

  Gustav Stresemann

  War, Thinking, Order

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• The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare—all this and more is written in its fiscal history, stripped of all phrases. He who knows how to listen to its message here discerns the thunder of world history more clearly than anywhere else.

  Joseph A. Schumpeter

  People, Phrases, World

  "The Crisis of the Tax State" (1918)

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• The question of questions for the politicians should ever be-What type of social structure am I tending to produce? But this is a question he never entertains.

  Herbert Spencer

  Politics, Politician, Social

  Herbert Spencer (1894). “The Man Versus the State: Containing "The New Toryism," "The Coming Slavery," "The Sins of Legislators" and "The Great Political Superstition”

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• Women tend to be preservers of the social structure, of marriage. They don't want to upset their husbands or their significant others. They don't want to hurt people.

  Erica Jong

  Hurt, Husband, People

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• Reforming the social structures which perpetuate poverty and the exclusion of the poor first requires a conversion of mind and heart.

  Pope Francis

  Heart, Mind, Injustice And Oppression

  Pope Francis' address at the meeting with authorities and the diplomatic corps during his apostolic journey to Rio Sri Lanka and the Philippines, at Rizal Ceremonial Hall of the Malacanang Presidential Palace in Manila, w2.vatican.va. January 16, 2015.

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• When the church hears the cry of the oppressed it cannot but denounce the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises.

  Oscar Romero

  Giving, Church, Misery

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• I like to think there is something deep in our own world of reality that will create a dynamic balance between technology and human existence, the relationship between which has a decisive effect on contemporary cultural forms and social structure.

  Kenzo Tange

  Technology, Reality, Thinking

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• There's over 100 species of lemurs. Each is a little bit different in their social structure except for one thing: they are all female dominant. The females are the leaders. They are the ones that call the shots. When you watch a group, you can see the females are the first one to say “We’re going to move.” Then she moves off and everybody just follows.

  Patricia Wright

  Moving, Leader, Littles

  "Interview: “Island Of Lemurs” Filmmakers". Interview with Nell Minow, moviemom.maxlazebnik.com. April 5, 2014.

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• All of us have to be prevaricators, hypocrites, and liars every day of our lives; otherwise the social structure would fall into pieces the first day. We must act in one another's presence just as we must wear clothes. It is for the best

  O. Henry

  Liars, Fall, Hypocrite

  O. Henry (1953). “The complete works of O. Henry [pseud.]”

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• But just as elevators have changed the shape of buildings and cars have changed the shape of cities, bits will change the shape of organizations, be they companies, nations, or social structures.

  Nicholas Negroponte

  Cities, Organization, Car

  "Negroponte" by Nicholas Negroponte, www.wired.com. October 1, 1997.

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• The belief, not only of the socialist but of those so-called liberals who are diligently preparing the way for them is that by due skill an ill working humanity may be framed into well-working initiations. It is delusion. The defective natures of citizens will show themselves in bad acting of whatever social structure they are arranged into. There is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of laden instincts.

  Herbert Spencer

  Skills, Political, Humanity

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• The speed with which armies collapse, bureaucracies abdicate, and social structures dissolve once the autocrat is removed frequently surprises American Policy makers.

  Jeane Kirkpatrick

  Army, Surprise, Speed

  "Jeane Kirkpatrick". www.economist.com. December 19, 2006.

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• Those in authority within institutions and social structures attempt to justify their rule by linking it, as if it were a necessary consequence, with moral symbols, sacred emblems, or legal formulae which are widely believed and deeply internalized. These central conceptions may refer to a god or gods, the 'votes of the majority,' the 'will of the people,' the 'aristocracy of talents or wealth,' to the 'divine right of kings' or to the alleged extraordinary endowment of the person of the ruler himself.

  C. Wright Mills

  Kings, Divine Right, People

  "Character and Social Structure". Book by C. Wright Mills, 1953.

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• It cannot be denied that Islam, regarded as an ethical ideal plus a certain kind of polity - by which expression I mean a social structure regulated by a legal system and animated by a specific ethical ideal - has been the chief formative factor in the life-history of the Muslims of India. It has furnished those basic emotions and loyalties which gradually unify scattered individuals and groups, and finally transform them into a well-defined people, possessing a moral consciousness of their own.

  Muhammad Iqbal

  Loyalty, Mean, Expression

  Sir Muhammad Iqbal (2005). “Speeches, Writings, and Statements of Iqbal”

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• In terms of the class structure that you see so much in European portraiture, I don't think one feels that in America in the 21st century. But we have these other kinds of social structures now, like celebrity, who establish new hierarchies.

  Will Cotton

  Thinking, Class, America

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• Scientific and technological "solutions" which poison the environment or degrade the social structure and man himself are of no benefit, no matter how brilliantly conceived or how great their superficial attraction.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Men, Poison, Benefits

  E.F. Schumacher (1975). “Small is Beautiful”

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• Study, analyse the social structure - that's always far more effective than moralising.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Morality, Study, Social

  Vincent Van Gogh (2013). “Van Gogh on Art and Artists: Letters to Emile Bernard”, p.86, Courier Corporation

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• The one and only substitute for experience which we have not ourselves had is art, literature. We have been given a miraculous faculty: Despite the differences of language, customs and social structure we are able to communicate life experience from one whole nation to another, to communicate a difficult national experience many decades long which the second of the two has never experienced.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Art, Differences, Two

  "Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn Art —for Man's Sake: I", www.nytimes.com. September 30, 1972.

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