Quotes About Institutions

Educational institutes can no longer be prizes in church politics or furnish berths for failure in other walks of life.

The test of political institutions is the condition of the country whose future they regulate.

We must therefore take account of this changeable nature of things and of human institutions and prepare for them with enlightened foresight.

All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

In practice the word democracy is seldom used rationally. It has become for most politicians a term of endearment for the institutions they prefer or of praise for any measures that they desire.

Just as with the Maghribis, the clan's ability to enforce contracts is a success on one level in making trade possible when no formal institutions are available. But on another level, the reliance on enforcement inside the clan retarded the development of formal laws and institutions that would have made available a much greater scope of trade—such as between clans.

Just as with the Maghribis, the clan's ability to enforce contracts is a success on one level in making trade possible when no formal institutions are available.

I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.

Government will not fail to employ education, to strengthen its hands, and perpetuate its institutions.

there are yet mixed in our institutions mediaeval theories of protection, regulation, and authority, and

This book is about the organization man. If the term is vague, it is because I can think of no other way to describe the people I am talking about…. They are the ones of our middle class who have left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization life, and it is they who are the mind and soul of our great self-perpetuating institutions.

I'm amused when financial planners and academics talk about methods that predict a 40-year success rate of, say, 95%. If you think about it, this implies that our political and financial institutions will remain intact for about the next millenium (40 years divided by a failure rate of 5% equals 800 years). Considering the history of human civilization, this is a pretty heroic assumption.

The highly decentralized nature of the medieval world of Indian Ocean trade produced a bubbling stew of Darwinian economic competition, in which those states whose political "mutations" were best suited to trade and commerce thrived, and those whose institutions were not withered.

We believe in a flexible union of free member states who share treaties and institutions and pursue together the ideal of co-operation, to represent and promote the values of European civilisation in the world, advance our shared interests by using our collective power to open markets, and to build a strong economic base across the whole of Europe.

Unless a society is expecting its own future choices to be better than its present ones, it will strive to make its present policies and institutions as immutable as possible.

most important distinction in the investment world does not separate individuals and institutions; the most important distinction divides those investors with the ability to make high quality active management decisions from those investors without active management expertise. Few institutions and even fewer individuals exhibit the ability and commit the resources to produce risk-adjusted excess returns.

Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society—its world view, its basic values, its social and political structures, its key institutions—rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time. —Peter Drucker

The real origin of the democratic spirit - and most likely, many democratic institutions - lies precisely in those spaces of improvisation just outside the control of governments and organized churches.

Banks are institutions to which the government has granted the power to create money—or

Scholars tend to demand clear and irrefutable evidence for the existence of democratic institutions of any sort in the distant past. It's striking how they never demand comparably rigorous proof for top-down structures of authority. These latter are usually treated as a default mode of history: the kind of social structures you would simply expect to see in the absence of evidence for anything else.

what we'll see is not only that indigenous Americans – confronted with strange foreigners – gradually developed their own, surprisingly consistent critique of European institutions, but that these critiques came to be taken very seriously in Europe itself.

Advertising," he wrote, "now compares with such long-standing institutions as the school and the church in the magnitude of its social influence. It dominates the media, it has vast power in the shaping of popular standards and it is really one of the very limited groups of institutions which exercise social control.

God forbid we should have great institutions. The thing is to have many small centres. The ideal is community.