Quotes About Societies

I think our societies - to certain extent, of course, and to different degrees, but almost with no exception - have always been struggling to come to terms with archaic traditions.

Migration powers economic growth, reduces inequalities, and connects diverse societies. Yet it is also a source of political tensions and human tragedies.

To be able to transform societies and economies to low-carbon ones was an amazing challenge. To influence and to facilitate such an important transformation in the world would be like witnessing something of industrial revolution proportions.

Gender equality has a transformative effect that is essential to fully functioning communities, societies, and economies.

Transforming our societies and our economies is an agenda that requires the participation of all. Gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls are key. Including and empowering women and girls to develop and implement climate solutions is the right thing to do. It is also the smart thing to do.

A culture of love and kinship has knitted Mississippi families together, and tied them to each other, for ages. It is what makes us special in a fast-paced and transient world. I will defend that culture against the erosion that frays societies.

There will always be individuals in non-Hindu societies who will recover the mystique of Sanatana Dharma through their efforts at self-discovery.

Truth is the foundation of all knowledge and the cement of all societies.

Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of someone's mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers

Then there is the speculative work of anthropologists like Helen Fisher, who claim to tell us about the origins of love or of infidelity or cooperation by reference to other societies, animal behavior, and the fossil record. How can she be wrong? These are untestable, unprovable stories.

Crucial decisions are made, today as thousands of years ago, in terms of the intuitive guesses and preferences of a few men in positions of authority...[it is] quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.

quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.

What I really lusted after was knowledge and understanding of the world. What had happened over the centuries? What was going on in the far reaches of this and other societies? What meaning, if any, did life have? Maybe that is why I became a social science professor and researcher. As such I cannot say I found the final answer to those sorts of questions.

Think how different human societies would be if they were based on love rather than justice. But no such societies have ever existed on earth.

Politics emerges as a mechanism for controlling violence, yet violence constantly remains as a background condition for certain types of political change. Societies can get stuck in a dysfunctional institutional equilibrium, in which existing stakeholders can veto necessary institutional change. Sometimes violence or the threat of violence is necessary to break out of the equilibrium.

Political liberty—that is, the ability of societies to rule themselves—does not depend only on the degree to which a society can mobilize opposition to centralized power and impose constitutional constraints on the state. It must also have a state that is strong enough to act when action is required.

What differed were conditions of climate and geography that, operating on the biology of otherwise indistinguishable individuals, produced systematic differences in political behavior. Slavery for him was not natural and needed to be explained in terms of the ability of certain societies to better organize themselves for war and conquest.

Modern liberal societies are heirs to the moral confusion left by the disappearance of a shared religious horizon.

As a result of their own experience in a country with historical social mobility, American policy makers are often blind to deeply embedded social stratifications that characterize other societies. The only successful political revolution in the western hemisphere that also resulted in a social revolution was that of Fidel Castro's Cuba in 1959, a revolution that the United States spent the next fifty-plus years trying to contain or reverse.

Clientelism is an efficient form of political mobilization in societies with low levels of income and education, and is therefore best understood as an early form of democracy.

Democracy in the developed world became secure and stable as industrialization produced middle-class societies, that is, societies in which a significant majority of the population thought of themselves as middle class.

Contemporary identity politics is driven by the quest for equal recognition by groups that have been marginalized by their societies. But that desire for equal recognition can easily slide over into a demand for recognition of the group's superiority.

Most people living in rich, stable developed countries have no idea how Denmark itself got to be Denmark—something that is true for many Danes as well. The struggle to create modern political institutions was so long and so painful that people living in industrialized countries now suffer from a historical amnesia regarding how their societies came to that point in the first place.

In societies where incomes and educational levels are low, it is often far easier to get supporters to the polls based on a promise of an individual benefit rather than a broad programmatic agenda.