Quotes About Institutions

Truth is rarely simple and seldom obvious, which is why mature institutions recognise the importance of conflict and disagreement. Christianity was born in conflict, and it has been characterised by conflict ever since. The Church's obsession with heresy is witness to this fact.

One of the most important elements in the evolution of human institutions is the emergence of the difficult customer within the system itself, the radical who starts to question its very being, the reformer who calls for changes in the way it runs.

The institutions that claim to represent God, when they are not ignored altogether, are treated like other human institutions that have to earn their right to a hearing by the value of what they say, and not by virtue of who is saying it. Today, authority has to earn respect by the intrinsic value of what it says, not by the force of its imposition.

That's how ideas and the institutions they generate come to be in the first place. It is in strings of words that we make ideas. The words, however, can say anything that the language permits, which, in our case, is quite a lot, so a string of words can just as easily express inanities as ideas. When inanities are expressed, we can discover them just by paying attention to the words.

Of all the institutions in their lives, only the Catholic Church has seemed aware of the fact that my mother and father are thinkers—persons aware of the experience of their lives. Other institutions—the nation's political parties, the industries of mass entertainment and communications, the companies that employed them—have all treated my parents with condescension.

Our religious institutions are not giving very many men access to credible encounters with the holy or even with their own wholeness. We largely give men mandates, signposts, scaffolding and appealing images that tend to create religious identity and boundaries, but from the outside.

All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency on them. There are shared and agreed-upon addictions in every culture and every institution. These are often the hardest to heal because they do not look like addictions because we have all agreed to be compulsive about the same things and blind to the same problems.

Our institutions and our expectations, including our churches, are almost entirely configured to encourage, support, reward, and validate the tasks of the first half of life.

The state arbitrarily set the mortgage interest rate at 8.5 percent—below the prime rate of 9 or so percent—so banks could make more money out of state. The bottom line for financial institutions is profit.

The only book Papa had ever read, apart from the Bible, was Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He believed that the even greater British Empire would go the same way unless noblemen fought to preserve its institutions, especially the Royal Navy, the Church of England, and the Conservative Party. He was right, Fitz had no doubt.

Among monks generally there was a long-standing movement for reform of old institutions that had slipped into idleness and self-indulgence.

Independently of its misdeeds, the mere power, - the bare existence of such a power, - is a thing irreconcilable with the nature and spirit of our institutions.

The abuse of political power is not as important as the loss of lives. Plus there is a process for curing the abuse of institutions.

I placed no trust in faiths, doctrines, ideologies, institutions. Thus I could stand only upon my own feet. But I was a Pole, molded by Polishness, living in Poland. And so I needed to look deeper for my 'self,' in the place where it was no longer Polish but simply human

In a democratic society there are rules -- written and un-written -- which must be followed if the free institutions of that society are to endure. They include the right to protest -- even against the freedoms which allow those protests. But they do not include the right to interfere with the rights of others without due process of law.

had been the case with the previous Temple, Jews who were unable or even unwilling to come from distant parts to Jerusalem practiced sacrifice in their own locales. Several hundred years later, in the third century, the first evidence emerges of institutions in which a new form of devotion—prayer—appears. These sites where prayer was practiced were called "synagogues" (Greek for assembly).

Perhaps," she went on, "the biggest lesson of all is that people need to learn to put their faith in God and not in the men who have built institutions around faith or even in the institutions themselves.

Weak democracies are vulnerable to coup d'états because their institutions cannot absorb a frontal assault.

Whitman was coming to think that he, above all, was the one chosen to agitate the country. He wrote in his 1856 notebook: "Agitation is the test of the goodness and solidness of all politics and laws and institutions.—If they cannot stand it, there is no genuine life in them, and shall die." He once declared, "I think agitation is the most important factor of all—the most deeply important. To stir, to question, to suspect, to examine, to denounce!

The social and technological process by which we establish facts becomes invisible to us because we naturalize it. Language-dependent and institutional facts come to seem like brute facts to us: this is true for social institutions, like money, but even more so for claims about the natural world which are, in truth, theory dependent: we have naturalized the idea that the heights of mountains should be measured from sea level, an idea that would have made no sense in the Middle Ages.

He was no respecter of institutions simply because they boasted antiquity. He believed, like all good radicals, that everything ought to be examined anew by each generation. What served society should be retained, and what did not should be discarded without sentiment or reserve.

No institution can become the cradle of leadership, until its teachers break their manacles of rugged dogmas.

MARRIAGE IS A UNIVERSAL HUMAN INSTITUTION. Virtually every known human society has some form of marriage. 1 While the norms of marriage in different cultures vary considerably, marriage always has something to do with creating a public (not private) sexual union between a man and woman so that socially valued children have both a mother and a father, and so that society has the next generation it needs.

Just as iGen'ers and Millennials are avoiding institutions such as religion and marriage, more and more of them are refusing to identify with the major political parties.