Quotes About Social

The penalty of success is to be bored by people who used to snub you.

Those "others" are largely female. For in capitalist society, the organization of social reproduction rests on gender: it relies on gender roles and entrenches gender oppression.

For most Americans of the eighteenth century, it was assumed impossible for a servant to shed his lowly origins; the meaner sort, as one newspaper insisted, could never "wash out the stain of servility." There were fears that the meaner sort were treading too close on the heels of those above them.

In the larger scheme of things, the modern complaint against state intervention echoes the old English fear of social leveling, which was said to encourage the unproductive. In its later incarnation, government assistance is said to undermine the American dream. Wait. Undermine whose American dream?

Parody was one way Americans safely digested their class politics.

Poor settlers coming from England, Scotland, and other parts of Europe were granted fifty acres of land, free of charge, plus a home and a garden. Distinct from its neighbors to the north, Georgia experimented with a social order that neither exploited the lower classes nor favored the rich.

No social movement has ever progressed without emphasizing division, and doing that means stirring up hate.

The men came from every imaginable economic and social level of American life, "men who were better dressed in their uniforms than ever before in their lives," as Zelda wrote later, "and men from Princeton and Yale who smelled of Russian Leather and seemed very used to being alive…." The larger world that Zelda dreamed of was at her doorstep and accessible.

The Rosetta Stone of Christian social thought is the Trinity.

Today religion appeals almost solely to the needs of the private sphere—needs for personal meaning, social bonding, family sup-port, emotional nurturing, practical living, and so on. In this climate, almost inevitably, churches come to speak the language of psychological needs, focusing primarily on the therapeutic functions of religion. Whereas religion used to be connected to group identity and a sense of belonging, it is now almost solely a search for an authentic inner life.

What the dominant classes hold as true tends to shape social and political practice. If the elites hold a materialism that reduces humans to computers, then they will treat people like computers. Thinking will be reduced to computing: the neuroelectrophysiology of the brain. People will be judged solely by how well they perform their assigned functions. And when they stop functioning, they will be tossed in the garbage heap with the other electronic trash.

But what progressives fail to understand is that every social practice rests on certain assumptions of what the world is like—a worldview. When a society accepts the practice, it absorbs the worldview that justifies it.

To protect women's rights, we must be able to say what a woman is. If postmodernism is correct—that the body itself is a social construct—then it becomes impossible to argue for rights based on the sheer fact of being female. We cannot legally protect a category of people if we cannot identify that category.

The sense of being at home in the world through social connection with others is a deep and pervasive Stoic theme. Stoicism, whether ancient or modern, sees social supports and not just inner strength as critical to how we surmount rather than succumb to adversity.

The public cares little about science, except insofar as its conclusions can be made to intervene in behalf of some moral, religious or social controversy.

Yet in many cases, the social components were the dominant system drivers. It was often said, for example, that climate change was caused by increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. Scientists understood that those greenhouse gases were accumulating because of the activities of human beings—deforestation and fossil fuel combustion—yet they rarely said that the cause was people, and their patterns of conspicuous consumption.

diversity can result in a more rigorous intellectual outcome by fostering critical interrogations that reveal embedded social prejudice.

key attribute of the period was that power did not reside in the hands of those who understood the climate system, but rather in political, economic, and social institutions that had a strong

and that greater use of pesticides was the key to wiping out world hunger (although most social scientist disagree, pointing out that there is plenty of food in the world; the problem we face is one of unequal distribution.)

To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men's sexual--and hence social--confidence while undermining that of women.

In religion I do not see the mystery of the Incarnation, but the mystery of the social order. It associates with Heaven an idea of equality that keeps rich men from being massacred by the poor…Society is impossible without inequality, inequality intolerable without a code of morality, and a code of morality unacceptable without religion.

The poor man and the beggar are two quite different classes: one commands respect, the other arouses anger.

Religion is what keeps the poor man from murdering the rich.

Caste system is the most brilliantly administered scam in history.