Quotessence
Home / Topics / Society Quotes

Society Quotes

Browse 5174 quotes about Society.

Related topics

Society Quotes

“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”

“Internationalism is a community theory of society which is founded on economic, spiritual, and biological facts. It maintains that respect for a healthy development of human society and of world civilization requires that mankind be organized internationally. Nationalities should form the constitutive links in a great world alliance, and must be guaranteed an independent life in the realm of the spiritual and for locally delimited tasks, while economic and political objectives must be guided internationally in a spirit of peaceful cooperation for the promotion of mankind's common interests.”

“Once a new social stage appears in a culture, it will spread its instructional codes and life-priority messages throughout that culture's surface-level expressions: religion, economic and political arrangements, psychological and anthro-pological theories, and views of human nature, our future destiny, globalization, and even architectural patterns and sports preferences. We all live in flow states; there is always new wine, always old wineskins. We, indeed, find ourselves pursuing a neverending quest.”

“Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.”

“G. Stanley Hall, a creature of his times, believed strongly that adolescence was determined – a fixed feature of human development that could be explained and accounted for in scientific fashion. To make his case, he relied on Haeckel's faulty recapitulation idea, Lombroso's faulty phrenology-inspired theories of crime, a plethora of anecdotes and one-sided interpretations of data. Given the issues, theories, standards and data-handling methods of his day, he did a superb job. But when you take away the shoddy theories, put the anecdotes in their place, and look for alternate explanations of the data, the bronze statue tumbles hard. I have no doubt that many of the street teens of Hall's time were suffering or insufferable, but it's a serious mistake to develop a timeless, universal theory of human nature around the peculiarities of the people of one's own time and place.”