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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• I do think that women could make politics irrelevant; by a kind of spontaneous cooperative action the like of which we have never seen; which is so far from people’s ideas of state structure or viable social structure that it seems to them like total anarchy — when what it really is, is very subtle forms of interrelation that do not follow some heirarchal pattern which is fundamentally patriarchal. The opposite to patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity, yet I think it’s women who are going to have to break this spiral of power and find the trick of cooperation.

  Germaine Greer

  Thinking, Opposites, Ideas

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• To humiliate and be humiliated, I think, is a crucial element in our whole social structure. It's not only the artist I'm sorry for. It's just that I know exactly where he feels most humiliated.

  Ingmar Bergman

  Sorry, Humility, Pride

  Interview with Torsten Manns, as quoted in Stig Bjoerkman, Torsten Manns and Jonas Sima "Bergman on Bergman: Interviews with Ingmar Bergman" translated by Paul Britten Austin, 1973.

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• Despite long-standing claims by elites that Blacks, women, Latinos, and other similarly derogated groups in the United States remain incapable of producing the type of interpretive, analytical thought that is labeled theory in the West, powerful knowledges of resistance that toppled former social structures of social inequality repudiate this view. Members of these groups do in fact theorize, and our critical social theory has been central to our political empowerment and search for justice.

  Patricia Hill Collins

  Powerful, Views, Long

  Patricia Hill Collins (1998). “Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice”, p.16, U of Minnesota Press

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• The spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself sufficiently against it. Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon.

  Erich Fromm

  Life, Love Is, Important

  "The Art of Loving". Book by Erich Fromm, 1956.

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• There are millions and millions of Sufis who have existed in Islamic history and have the deepest impact on every aspect of Islamic culture and civilization to philosophy to art to science to social structure to economics who have not met the destiny of al-Hallaj.

  Seyyed Hossein Nasr

  Art, Philosophy, Islamic

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• [The task is to] covertly lower the standard of living, the whole social structure, of America so that we can be merged with all other nations.

  Horace Rowan Gaither

  America, Historical, Tasks

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• What we experience in various and specific milieux, I have noted, is often caused by structural changes. Accordingly, to understand the changes of many personal milieux we are required to look beyond them. And the number and variety of such structural changes increase as the institutions within which we live become more embracing and more intricately connected with one another. To be aware of the idea of social structure and to use it with sensibility is to be capable of tracing such linkages among a great variety of milieux. To be able to do that is to possess the sociological imagination

  C. Wright Mills

  Ideas, Numbers, Imagination

  C. Wright Mills (2000). “The Sociological Imagination”, p.10, Oxford University Press

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