Quotes About Social

Humans are social primates, and socialising with the rest of our species requires a fair amount of routine self-censorship and outright lying, which we dignify with names such as 'tact', 'courtesy' and 'politeness'.

It is a rule of life in the power elite that there is no such thing as a purely social act.

People who confuse social behavior with manners naturally think of it as something that can be donned and doffed, a fashion that can be copied. But social behavior is nerve and bone, not clothes, and is never just a copy, however derivative it may look.

The key incident for me was that I never had any friends. And I realized that in order to have friends and impress people, I had to do something extraordinary.

After all, the ideal of bourgeois politics is the absence of politics, since capital is nothing other than the consistent displacement of social decision-making into the marketplace

At the time of the Russian emancipation, about 20 percent of the Russian population lived in serfdom. In the United States at this time, about 10 percent of the population lived in slavery.

Most importantly for me, historical accuracy also meant this could not be a story of only straight, white, nondisabled men. Crips, queers, women and other genders, and people of colour are an integral part of the history of Britain—we are embedded at every level of society, present during every change, and part of every problem and its solution. We are here now; we were there then. So we are in this story.

Good manners, in the end, are nothing but the way in which respect is expressed. Since respect, in its turn, is a feeling inspired by the presence of an admitted superior, wherever hierarchies are absent—real or fictitious, but revered—good manners die out. Rudeness is a democratic product.

Discipline is not so much a social necessity as an aesthetic obligation.

Religion did not arise out of the need to assure social solidarity, nor were cathedrals built to encourage tourism. Religion is socially effective not when it adopts socio-political solutions, but when it succeeds in having society be spontaneously influenced by purely religious attitudes

La condición suficiente y necesaria del despotismo es la desaparición de toda especie de autoridad social no conferida por el Estado.

The sinister uniformity that threatens us will not be imposed by a doctrine, but by a uniform economic and social conditioning.

An aristocratic society is one where the desire for personal perfection is the animating spirit of the social institutions.

That Christianity may not solve social problems is no reason to commit apostasy except for those who forget that it never promised to solve them.

Ni cristianismo ni paganismo, enseñan éticas altruistas. Tanto la moral cristiana, como la moral pagana, son individualismos éticos, que imponen deberes sociales, tan solo como medios de nuestra perfección terrestre o de nuestra salvación enigmática.

The history of art is the history of its materials, its techniques, its themes, its social conditions, its psychological motives, or its set of intellectual problems, but never the history of beauty. A value has no history.

If liberty is to last, it should be the goal of social organization and not the starting point.

Die marxistische Soziologie ist die aristotelische Physik der Sozialwissenschaften.

Weder Christentum noch Heidentum lehren eine altruistische Ethik. Die christliche wie die heidnische Moral sind ethische Individualismen, die soziale Pflichten einzig als Mittel zu unserer irdischen Vervollkommnung oder zu unserer geheimnisvollen Rettung auferlegen.

Change of fashion is the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich.

L'homme, dans l'état actuel de la société, me paraît plus corrompu par sa raison que par ses passions. Ses passions (j'entendes ici celles qui appartiennent à l'homme primitif) ont conservé, dans l'ordre social, le peu de nature qu'on y retrouve encore.

The devil take those who first invented balls!" was his reflection. "Who derives any real pleasure from them? In this province there exist want and scarcity everywhere: yet folk go in for balls! How absurd, too, were those overdressed women! One of them must have had a thousand roubles on her back, and all acquired at the expense of the overtaxed peasant, or, worse still, at that of the conscience of her neighbour.

In fact, when you think about it, if a word from the street occurs in a book it is not the writer who is guilty, but the readers, and primarily those readers belonging to the upper classes: for they are the ones who will never utter a single decent Russian word; their speech is so abundantly stuffed with every manner of French, German, and English words that you want to block your ears...

Such is the Russian man: strong is his passion for knowing someone at least one rank above himself, and a nodding acquaintance with a count or prince is better to him than any close relations with friends.