Social Quotes - Page 16

• Contemplating a purported work of art is a social activity. Either you have a rewarding time, or you don't. You don't have to say why afterward. You don't have to say anything.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Art, Say Anything, Contemplating

  Kurt Vonnegut (1998). “Timequake”, p.129, Penguin

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• The dominant, almost general, idea of revolution - particularly the Socialist idea - is that revolution is a violent change of social conditions through which one social class, the working class, becomes dominant over another class, the capitalist class. It is the conception of a purely physical change, and as such it involves only political scene shifting and institutional rearrangements

  Emma Goldman

  Class, Ideas, Political

  Emma Goldman (1998). “Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader”

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• Today is the parent of tomorrow. The present casts its shadow far into the future. That is the law of life, individual and social. Revolution that divests itself of ethical values thereby lays the foundation of injustice, deceit, and oppression for the future society. The means used to prepare the future become its cornerstone.

  Emma Goldman

  Mean, Law, Parent

  "My Disillusionment in Russia". Book by Emma Goldman, 1925.

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• A schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of a return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death -- the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.

  Joseph Campbell

  Old Things, Together Again, Elements

  Peter A. Clayton, Joseph Campbell (1994). “Great figures of mythology”, Gramercy

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• Conscience is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part on positive law, the exercise of that being a natural and unalienable right. To guard a man's house as his castle, to pay public and enforce private debts with the most exact faith, can give no title to invade a man's conscience, which is more sacred than his castle, or to withhold from it that debt of protection for which the public faith is pledged by the very nature and original conditions of the social pact.

  James Madison

  Exercise, Men, Law

  James Madison (1865). “Letters and other writings of James Madison”, p.479

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• Never let anyone or any social attitude stand in the way of your productivity.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Attitude, Way, Productivity

  Rita Mae Brown (2011). “Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writers' Manual”, p.25, Bantam

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• If democracy is control by the people, as it is supposed to be, it is the right form of government. I believe in a complete democracy - individual, political, social, economic. If we really had that, which we don't now, it would be in harmony with divine purpose.

  Peace Pilgrim

  Believe, Government, People

  Peace Pilgrim (1992). “Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words”, p.155, Friends of Peace PIlgrim

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• How powerful social mores are!  Only a spider's web lies across the volcano, yet it refrains from erupting.

  Karl Kraus

  Powerful, Lying, Volcanoes

  Karl Kraus, Jonathan McVity (2001). “Dicta and Contradicta”, p.24, University of Illinois Press

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• U.S. domestic drug policy does not carry out its stated goals, and policymakers are well aware of that. If it isn't about reducing substance abuse, what is it about? It is reasonably clear, both from current actions and the historical record, that substances tend to be criminalized when they are associated with the so-called dangerous classes, that the criminalization of certain substances is a technique of social control.

  Noam Chomsky

  Class, Goal, Historical

  "On the War on Drugs". Week Online interview, chomsky.info. February 8, 2002.

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• Science fiction - and the correct shortcut is 'sf' - uses actual scientific facts or theories for the source ideas or framework of the story. It has some scientific content, however speculative. If it breaks a law of physics, it knows it's doing so and follows up the consequences. If it invents a society of aliens, it does so with some respect for and knowledge of the social sciences and what you might call social probabilities. And some of it is literarily self-aware enough to treat its metaphors as metaphors.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Self, Law, Ideas

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• The great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts. For evil to appear disguised as light, charity, historical necessity, or social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our traditional ethical concepts, while for the Christian who bases his life on the Bible, it merely confirms the fundamental wickedness of evil.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Christian, Light, Justice

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2011). “Letters Papers from Prison”, p.8, Simon and Schuster

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• Every day I am being told to sign up for Tumblr, Yammer, Friendfeed, Plaxo, Last.fm, ping.fm or the hot social-media tool du jour that happened to get mentioned on Mashable.com. It is like a social-media arms race. Each one of these new tools is like a cool new night club. Hot today, gone tomorrow, replaced with something else.

  Mark McKinnon

  Night, Media, Race

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• In the party of Lincoln and Reagan and much of the donor class, the defense of human life is what they think loses elections. They think we need to spend time on really popular ideas, like cutting your mom's Social Security check.

  Gary Bauer

  Mom, Party, Cutting

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• Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.

  Philip K. Dick

  Memories, Moving, Errors

  Philip K. Dick (2011). “A Scanner Darkly”, p.287, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Two hundred years ago, before the advent of capitalism, a man's social status was fixed from the beginning to the end of his life; he inherited it from his ancestors and it never changed.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Men, Years, Two

  Ludwig Von Mises (2006). “Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow”, p.1, Ludwig von Mises Institute

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• Free markets. What does this system mean? The answer is simple: it is the market economy, it is the system in which the cooperation of individuals in the social division of labor is achieved by the market.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Mean, Simple, Division Of Labor

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• I may have been prejudiced against lawyer members of Congress, having run against one or two and having been threatened politically by a few others, and also because my own professional background was academic, principally in the liberal arts. Good lawyers, I asserted in campaigns, can be found in the yellow pages of the telephone books. Good historians, or political and social philosophers, are not so easily found or classified.

  Eugene McCarthy

  Running, Art, Book

  Eugene J. McCarthy (1987). “Up'til Now: A Memoria”, Harcourt

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• Why should old people get [Social Security]? They just sit around all day doing nothing.

  Pat Paulsen

  People, Doing Nothing, Should

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• A solitary ascetic is a symbol of the most cowardly egotism; a hermit who flees from his brothers instead of helping them to carry the burden of life, to work for others, and to put their shoulders to the wheel of social life, is a coward who hides himself when the battle is on, and goes to sleep drunk on an opiate.

  H. P. Blavatsky

  Brother, Sleep, Burdens Of Life

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• We need to reverse three centuries of walling the for-profit and non-profit sectors off from one another. When you think for-profit and non-profit, you most often think of entities with either zero social return or zero return on capital and zero social return. Clearly, there's some opportunity in the spectrum between those extremes. What's missing is the for-profit finance industry coming in to that area. Look at the enormous diversity of the for-profit financial industry as opposed to monolithic nature of the non-profit world; it's quite astonishing.

  Bill Drayton

  Zero, Opportunity, Thinking

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• What man could afford to pay for all the things a wife does, when she's a cook, a mistress, a chauffeur, a nurse, a baby-sitter? But because of this, I feel women ought to have equal rights, equal Social Security, equal opportunities for education, an equal chance to establish credit.

  Betty Ford

  Baby, Opportunity, Men

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• Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Animal, Brain, Groups

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• The Rule of 150 says that congregants of a rapidly expanding church, or the members of a social club, or anyone in a group activity banking on the epidemic spread of shared ideals needs to be particularly cognizant of the perils of the bigness. Crossing the 150 line is a small change that can make a big difference.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Small Changes, Epidemics, Differences

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• Democratic capitalism: A cooperative enterprise to earn enough money to buy enough Congressional influence to gain control over the government's guns so as to get even more money for your special-interest group.Social democratic capitalism: A cooperative enterprise to promise sufficient government benefits to enough voters to gain control over the government's guns so as to keep any other special-interest group from getting as much power as yours.

  Gary North

  Gun, Government, Promise

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• I can't help but react to the painful realities of the two-tiered society we live in, where the signs of poverty and inequity are everywhere. Almost twenty five percent of our children live at or below the poverty line. We expect the no-option life cycle of the poor to be interrupted by the weak social safety net and then wonder why building more jails doesn't solve the problems.

  Peter Yarrow

  Children, Reality, Two

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