Social Conditions Quotes - Page 2

• A religion true to its nature must also be concerned about man's social conditions....A ny religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Men, Dust, Soul

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• If you open up the mind, the opportunity to address both profits and social conditions are limitless. It's a process of innovation.

  Jerry Greenfield

  Opportunity, Innovation, Mind

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• He who negates present society, and seeks social conditions based on the sharing of property, is a revolutionary whether he calls himself an anarchist or a communist.

  Johann Most

  Revolutionary, Anarchist, Communist

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• Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Social, Force

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• Since the time of the ancient Greeks a democracy has depended on its philosophers and creative artists. It can only flourish by continuous probing, prodding, and questioning of the social conditions under which man exists and tries to better himself. One of the first moves of a dictatorship is to stifle the artists and thinkers who have the ability to stir up dissent from any prescribed dogma which might enslave them. Because the artist can arouse the curiosity and conscience of his community, he becomes a threat to those who have taken power.

  Uta Hagen

  Women, Moving, Taken

  Uta Hagen (1991). “Challenge For The Actor”, p.3, Simon and Schuster

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• . . . freedom to creat and construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine . . . It is not enough that men are not slaves; if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death.

  Erich Fromm

  Love Life, Men, Venture

  Erich Fromm (1963). “War Within Man: A Psychological Enquiry Into the Roots of Destructiveness”

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• Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.

  Salman Rushdie

  World Religions, Historical, Islam

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• Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.

  Walter Lippmann

  Change, Mean, Social

  Walter Lippmann (1914). “A Preface to Politics”

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• No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Depression, Death, Pain

  "A Reply to Kenneth Tynan: The Playwright's Role". The Observer, June 29, 1958.

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• As a child I always had a sense of social conditions and political situations. I think it had to do with the fact that my mother was always discussing things with my sister and me - also because I read a lot.

  Tracy Chapman

  Mother, Children, Thinking

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• Without country you have neither name, token, voice, nor rights, no admission as brothers into the fellowship of the Peoples. You are the bastards of Humanity. Soldiers without a banner, Israelites among the nations, you will find neither faith nor protection; none will be sureties for you. Do not beguile yourselves with the hope of emancipation from unjust social conditions if you do not first conquer a Country for yourselves.

  Giuseppe Mazzini

  Country, Brother, Rights

  Giuseppe Mazzini (2005). “The Duties of Man and Other Essays”, p.53, Cosimo, Inc.

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• However gifted an individual is at the outset, if his or her talents cannot be developed because of his or her social condition, because of the surrounding circumstances, these talents will be still-born.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Individuality, Talent, Social

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• In the midst of a culture that is rationally organized for a vocational workaday life, there is hardly any room for the cultivation of acosmic brotherliness, unless it is among strata who are economically carefree. Under the technical and social conditions of rational culture, an imitation of the life of Buddha, Jesus, or Francis seems condemned to failure for purely external reasons.

  Max Weber

  Jesus, Culture, Rooms

  Max Weber, Hans Gerth (1991). “From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology”, p.357, Psychology Press

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• I’m a believer in luck and think the social conditions you’re born into provide the opportunity for you to prove your luck. And I suppose I’ve been lucky.

  Sigmar Polke

  Opportunity, Thinking, Luck

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• Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration.

  James Connolly

  Inspiration, People, Literature

  James Connolly (1971). “Labour in Irish History”, p.20, Lulu.com

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• A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all.

  Allen Tate

  Two, Quality, Three

  allen tate (1953). “the man of letters in the modern world”

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• Now culture being a social product, I firmly believe that any work of art should have a social function to beautify, to glorify, to dignify man... Since any social system is forced to change to another by concrete economic forces, its art changes also to be recharged, reshaped, and revitalized by the new conditions... The making of a genuine artist or writer is not mysterious. It is not
  the work of Divine Providence. Social conditions, history, and the people's struggle are the factors behind it.

  Carlos Bulosan

  Art, Believe, Struggle

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• The American teacher stands on the front lines of poverty and inequity that our fellow Americans refuse to acknowledge, on the front lines of the real social condition of our nation–not the advertised one–and we stand together. When we look over our shoulders, there’s no one there backing us up. The rest of the army is off pretending there is no fight to be had here, no excuses to be made, no hardships to decry, no supply lines to worry about, that things in American society are just hunky-dory outside of the fact that the teachers just don’t care enough

  John Kuhn

  Teacher, Real, Fighting

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• Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.

  George C. Marshall

  Country, Hunger Poverty, Political

  The Marshall Plan, delivered 5 June 1947 at Harvard University

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• People create social conditions and people can change them.

  Osonye Tess Onwueme

  Justice, Diversity, People

  Osonye Tess Onwueme (1993). “Three Plays”, p.11, Wayne State University Press

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• The intellectual content of religions has always finally adapted itself to scientific and social conditions after they have become clear.... For this reason I do not think that those who are concerned about the future of a religious attitude should trouble themselves about the conflict of science with traditional doctrines.

  John Dewey

  Religious, Attitude, Thinking

  John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, Paul Kurtz (2008). “The Later Works, 1925-1953: 1929-1930”, p.273, SIU Press

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• Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society... Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.

  Theodore Kaczynski

  Depression, Depressing, Mean

  "The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future" by Theodore J. Kaczynski, ("Control of Human Behavior", item 145), 1995.

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• Terrorism isn't insanity. It grows out of social conditions that are well known: poverty, social oppression, dictatorship, and a void of meaning in the lives of ordinary people.

  Deepak Chopra

  Life, People, Insanity

  "Superpower, Real and Unreal" by Deepak Chopra, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 17, 2005.

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• It is knowledge that influences and equalizes the social condition of man; that gives to all, however different their political position, passions which are in common, and enjoyments which are universal.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Passion, Knowledge, Men

  "The Value of Literature to Men of Business". Benjamin Disraeli's speech at the Manchester Athenaeum, October 23, 1844.

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• Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.

  Murray Bookchin

  Eye, Technology, Long

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