Quotes About Social

Trophy heads served much the same social purpose for primitive warriors as medals, decorations, or marks of fallen enemy aircraft do for modern ones.

Morality is a very real and extremely potent human postulate projected onto the world. It includes broadly shared common denominators, evolutionarily engraved in human nature by the logic and adaptive pressures of social life and social cooperation. It consists of a bundle of attitudes and precepts that serve this logic, which takes different and sometimes incommensurable forms between people and between different cultural traditions.

Rather than being discovered or revealed, morality is a historically developing human creation in the service of social needs.

It is not accidental that the most unsympathetic characters in Austen's novels are those who are incapable of genuine dialogue with others. They rant. They lecture. They scold. This incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy.

I searched modern fiction and poetry for clues to how we confronted and evaded reality, how we articulated our experience and turned to language not to revel ourselves but to hide. I was as sure then as I am now that by looking at contemporary Iranian fiction I could gain access to a real understanding of political and social events. (p289)

A] great novel will allow you to transcend the social, racial and political limitations imposed by the vicissitudes of life and to find a deep fraternity based on empathy.

In The Tragic Muse, James explains that his goal in writing is to produce "art as a human complication and social stumbling block

His critics, like H. G. Wells, blamed him for his mandarin attitude towards life, which prevented him from any involvement with the social and political issues of the day.

What is a family? Is it just a genetic chain, parents and offspring, people like me? Or is it a social construct, an economic unit, optimal for child rearing and divisions of labor? Or is it something else entirely: a store of shared memories, say? An ambit of love? A reach across the void?

Maintaining this social compact, though, required trust. It required that we see ourselves as bound together

In almost every successful social movement of the last century, from Gandhi's campaign against British rule to the Solidarity movement in Poland to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, democracy was the result of a local awakening.

year by year—through Vietnam, riots, feminism, and Nixon's southern strategy; through busing, Roe v. Wade, urban crime, and white flight; through affirmative action, the Moral Majority

arrebataba a la gente su iniciativa y erosionaba su amor propio. Cualquier estrategia para reducir la pobreza intergeneracional debe centrarse en el trabajo, no en la asistencia social, no sólo porque el trabajo da independencia e ingresos sino también porque el trabajo aporta orden, estructura, dignidad y oportunidades de crecimiento a la vida de las personas.

A literate society depends on three things: culture, communication, and choice. One could add that culture is also faith and morality, that communication is also social interaction and equality, and that choice is both individualism and political action.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Se suele hablar de la arraigada creencia en la oportunidad y en la movilidad social para explicar la alta tolerancia de los estadounidenses ante la desigualdad. La mayoría de los estadounidenses encuestados cree que en el futuro ganará más que la media (a pesar de que eso sea una imposibilidad matemática).

For most people, throughout most of the twentieth century, medical care necessarily involved an encounter with a social superior—a white male from a relatively privileged background.

1997 there were only thirty-six such units for every one hundred families

I think most of humankind would agree, the hard part of high school is the people.

War so conspicuously benefits rich men and kills the poor ones.

Like many human beings, he took the least sign of conversation as his cue to make noise.

The only useful generalization I'd hazard about rural politics is that they tend to break on the line of "insider" vs. "outsider." When my country neighbors sit down with a new social group, the first question they ask one another is not "What do you do?" but rather, "Who are your people?

All the richest men in Mexico were once lifted from the cradle by servants. But they all drink from the same water jar that fills the master's glass, and they use the same chamber pot, still warm from the piss of the patrón. In Mexico nobody ever thought to keep those streams flowing separately.

attract more friends, and extend life. Humor heals.