Social Structure Quotes - Page 2

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Each child is poisoned by the society through teaching him ambition. Ambition is a poison far more dangerous than any alcohol can ever be, far more dangerous than marijuana or LSD, because ambition destroys your whole life. It keeps you moving in a false direction. It keeps you imagining, desiring, dreaming, it keeps you wasting your life. Ambition means a subtle creation of the ego, and once the ego is created you are in the grip of darkness. And the whole social structure depends on ambition.

  Rajneesh

  Dream, Children, Moving

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• We know: of course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Information, Facts, Social

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• The most frightening pages of history are those which reveal how easily conditions making a desert of the human spirit may come into existence, with the oozings away of incentive and kindliness in our natural social structure.

  Haniel Long

  Desert, Incentives, May

  Haniel Long (1950). “A letter to St. Augustine: after re-reading his confessions”

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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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• But what the working-class can do, when once they grow into a solidified organization, is to show the possessing class, through a sudden cessation of all work, that the whole social structure rests on them; that the possessions of the others are absolutely worthless to them without the workers' activity; that such protests, such strikes, are inherent in the system of property and will continually recur until the whole thing is abolished - and having shown that effectively, proceed to expropriate.

  Voltairine de Cleyre

  Class, Organization, Social

  "Direct Action". Voltairine de Cleyre's Address in Chicago, dwardmac.pitzer.edu. January 21, 1912.

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• Advertising, as a single entity capable of creating vast changes in our social structure, simply does not exist. Its impact is too diffuse, too omnidirectional.

  Prince William of Hesse-Kassel

  Business, Impact, Creating

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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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• 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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• Poverty calls us to sow hope.... Poverty is the flesh of the poor Jesus, in that child who is hungry, in the one who is sick, in those unjust social structures.

  Pope Francis

  Jesus, Children, Sick

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• Science is intimately integrated with the whole social structure and cultural tradition. They mutually support one other-only in certain types of society can science flourish, and conversely without a continuous and healthy development and application of science such a society cannot function properly.

  Talcott Parsons

  Health, Science, Support

  1951 The Social System, ch.8.

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• Technology and production can be great benefactors of man, but they are mindless instruments, and if undirected they careen along with a momentum of their own. In our country, they pulverize everything in their path - the landscape, the natural environment.

  Charles A. Reich

  Country, Technology, Men

  "The Greening of America". Book by Charles A. Reich, 1970.

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• Vampires Are Us: Understanding Our Love Affair with the Immortal Dark Side,” is now out! Quote: “Vampires let us play with death and the issue of mortality. They let us ponder what it would mean to be truly long lived. Would the long view allow us to see the world differently, imagine social structures differently? Would it increase or decrease our reverence for the planet? Vampires allow us to ask questions we usually bury.

  Margot Adler

  Mean, Dark, Views

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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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• Marriage is a core institution of societies throughout the world and throughout history. Its something that has provided permanence and stability for our very social structure.

  David Vitter

  Marriage, World, Social

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• We are limited by our agreements on possibility. Agreement is a common exclusion of alternate possibilities. Agreement is the cement of social structure. Two or three gathered together, agreeing on what they are after, may create a subset in which their goals can be achieved, even though folly in the eyes of the world. The world in this case means a set of expectancies agreed upon, a set excluding other possibilities.

  Joseph Chilton Pearce

  Mean, Eye, Agreement

  "The Crack in the Cosmic Egg: New Constructs of Mind and Reality". Book by Joseph Chilton Pearce, 1971.

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• Indias rigid social structure limits intergenerational economic mobility and fosters acceptance of vast wealth disparities.

  Steven Rattner

  Acceptance, Limits, India

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• On a personal level, Freaking Out is a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking, dress, and social etiquette in order to express creatively his relationship to his immediate environment and the social structure as a whole.

  Frank Zappa

  Thinking, Order, Levels

  Liner notes for the album "Freak Out!", June 27, 1966.

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