Social Institutions Quotes

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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 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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• 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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• 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 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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• 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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• The state should never have instituted and enforced legal property rights in persons, and should not have been in the business of returning runaway slaves to their "rightful owners." The whole institution of property in human beings was an unjust social institution and should not have been maintained in existence. It is this sort of thought that I'm appealing to at the supranational level.

  Thomas Pogge

  Rights, Levels, Unjust

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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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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• 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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• Women's liberation, if not the most extreme then certainly the most influential neo-Marxist movement in America, has done to the American home what communism did to the Russian economy, and most of the ruin is irreversible.  By defining relations between men and women in terms of power and competition instead of reciprocity and cooperation, the movement tore apart the most basic and fragile contract in human society, the unit from which all other social institutions draw their strength.

  Ruth Wisse

  Home, Men, America

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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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• A man's jealousy is a social institution; a woman's prostitution is an instinct.

  Karl Kraus

  Jealousy, Sex, Men

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & one-and-a-half truths: selected aphorisms”

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• We now live in a 'post-Christian' America . The Judeo-Christian ethic no longer guides our social institutions. Christian ideals and values no longer dominate social thought and action. The Bible has ceased to be a common base of moral authority for judging whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable.

  Harvey Cox

  Christian, Religious, America

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• I remain a religious agnostic, but, unlike most atheists, I not only am not hostile to traditional religion but consider it a highly valuable, not to say essential, social institution... I am convinced that the moral regeneration and repair of a frayed social fabric that this country so badly needs will not take place unless more people take their religion seriously.

  Guenter Lewy

  Christian, Country, Religious

  Guenter Lewy (1996). “Why America Needs Religion: Secular Modernity and Its Discontents”, p.12, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• While I am happy to make the occasional foray into educational philosophy - writing, for example, of the difficulty in the contemporary context for a teacher to be 'truthful' - it is more the personal conduct of a life than social institutions that I am concerned to examine.

  David E. Cooper

  Teacher, Educational, Philosophy

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I have a deep suspicion of social institutions and tradition in general.

  George Meyer

  Tradition, Social, Institutions

  Source: www.ericspitznagel.com

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• Corporations are economic entities, to be sure, but they are also social institutions that must justify their existence by their overall contribution to society.

  Henry Mintzberg

  Corporations, Economic, Social

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• I want to always move forward with everything I am doing. So, I do the radio show, speak at universities and other social institutions all around the world, appear on TV, and continue to create music all in the hope to keep the struggle alive.

  Chuck D

  Struggle, Moving, Alive

  Interview with Antonino D'Ambrosio, progressive.org. July 20, 2005.

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