Quotes About Institutions

If society asks more of us, and arranges its social institutions appropriately, it will get more.

We "design" human nature, by designing the institutions within which people live. So we must ask ourselves just what kind of a human nature we want to help design.

Religious institutions then become a kind of market for comfort, tranquility, spirituality, and ethical reflection, and we "religion consumers" shop in that market until we find what we like.

Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust and only secondarily on institutions such as courts of justice and police. —ALBERT EINSTEIN

A period of tranquil growth thus leads to rising expectations, and a tendency to increase leverage: as Minsky put it in his most famous sentence, 'Stability – or tranquility – in a world with a cyclical past and capitalist financial institutions is destabilizing' (1978, p. 10).

Because poverty is a symptom—of the absence of a workable economy built on credible political, social, and legal institutions.

Poverty is a symptom—of the absence of a workable economy built on credible political, social, and legal institutions.

it is the public sector I find more interesting, because governments and other non-market institutions have long suffered from the innovation malaise of top-heavy bureaucracies. Today, these institutions have an opportunity to fundamentally alter the way they cultivate and promote good ideas. The more the government thinks of itself as an open platform instead of a centralized bureaucracy, the better it will be for all of us, citizens and activists, and entrepreneurs alike.

The challenge, of course, is how to create environments that foster these serendipitous connections, on all the appropriate scales: in the private space of your own mind; within larger institutions; and across the information networks of society itself.

In 18th-century England this cronyism gave way to open economies in which anyone could sell anything to anyone, and their transactions were protected by the rule of law, property rights, enforceable contracts, and institutions like banks, corporations, and government agencies that run by fiduciary duties rather than personal connections.

Rather than trying to shape human nature, the Enlightenment hope for progress was concentrated on human institutions. Human-made systems like governments, laws, schools, markets, and international bodies are a natural target for the application of reason to human betterment.

El populismo autoritario puede verse como la resistencia de ciertos elementos de la naturaleza humana -tribalismo, autoritarismo, demonización, pensamiento de suma cero- en contra de las instituciones ilustradas que fueron diseñadas para sortearlos.

No one can fail to recognize the influence of the doctrine of the Noble Savage in contemporary consciousness. We see it in the current respect for all things natural (natural foods, natural medicines, natural childbirth) and the distrust of the man-made, the unfashionability of authoritarian styles of childrearing and education, and the understanding of social problems as repairable defects in our institutions rather than as tragedies inherent to the human condition.

Los regímenes revolucionarios, desde la Alemania nazi y la China maoísta hasta la Venezuela contemporánea, muestran que la gente tiene muchísimo que perder cuando los autoritarios carismáticos que responden a una -crisis- pisotean las normas y las instituciones democráticas y gobiernan sus países mediante la fuerza de sus personalidades.

Radical regimes from Nazi Germany and Maoist China to contemporary Venezuela and Turkey show that people have a tremendous amount to lose when charismatic authoritarians responding to a "crisis" trample over democratic norms and institutions and command their countries by the force of their personalities.

Democracies commit fewer democides because their form of governance, by definition, is committed to inclusive and nonviolent means of resolving conflicts. More important, the power of a democratic government is restricted by a tangle of institutional restraints, so a leader can't just mobilize armies and militias on a whim to fan out over the country and start killing massive numbers of citizens.

In 21st-century America, the control of Congress by a Republican Party that became synonymous with the extreme right has been pernicious, because it is so convinced of the righteousness of its cause and the evil of its rivals that it has undermined the institutions of democracy to get what it wants.

To appreciate this burden, one doesn't have to believe that we are cavemen out of time, only that evolution, with its speed limit measured in generations, could not possibly have adapted our brains to modern technology and institutions

What they argued was that we ought to be rational, by learning to repress the fallacies and dogmas that so readily seduce us, and that we can be rational, collectively if not individually, by implementing institutions and adhering to norms that constrain our faculties, including free speech, logical analysis, and empirical testing. And if you disagree, then why should we accept your claim that humans are incapable of rationality?

I do not understand why our society is providing public funding to institutions and educators whose stated, conscious and explicit aim is the demolition of the culture that supports them. Such people have a perfect right to their opinions and actions, if they remain lawful. But they have no reasonable claim to public funding.

I believe that government can, sometimes, be a force for good, as well as the necessary arbiter of a small set of necessary rules. Nonetheless, I do not understand why our society is providing public funding to institutions and educators whose stated, conscious and explicit aim is the demolition of the culture that supports them.

É a interação viva entre instituições sociais e realização criativa que mantém o mundo equilibrado sobre a linha estreita entre demasiada ordem e demasiado caos. É um imbróglio terrível; um autêntico fardo existencial.

The individual is molded by the social world. But social institutions are molded, too, by the requirements of the individuals who compose them.

Nonetheless, I do not understand why our society is providing public funding to institutions and educators whose stated, conscious and explicit aim is the demolition of the culture that supports them.