Quotes About Societies

They also carried on commerce with other nations. All this clearly shows, as Heer has remarked, that they had at this early age progressed considerably in civilisation; and this again implies a long continued previous period of less advanced civilisation, during which the domesticated animals, kept by different tribes in different districts, might have varied and given rise to distinct races.

It's absolutely true that Lovecraft knew stuff. Somewhere in grandpa's library he got his hands on the confused rambling inner doctrines of a dozen cults and secret societies. Most of these secrets were arrant nonsense on stilts—admixed with just enough knowledge to be deadly dangerous.

Historical memory is hijacked by those who carry out war. They seek, when the memory challenges the myth, to obliterate or hide the evidence that exposes the myth as a life. The destruction is pervasive, aided by an establishment, including the media, which apes the slogans and euphemisms parroted by the powerful. Because nearly everyone in wartime is complicit, it is difficult for societies to confront their own culpability and the life that led to it.

At age thirty, Engels accepted his father's offer to work in the family business in Manchester. This became the source of Engels' livelihood —and much of Marx's. The young Engels called it forced labor — a painfully ironic term in view of what the phrase was to come to mean in twentieth-century Communist societies. Engels complained, for example, that I've now got to be at the office no later than 10 in the morning.

Human societies have always defined themselves through narration, but nowadays corporations are telling man's stories for him.

Inequality is corrosive. It rots societies from within.

open societies will once again be urged to close in upon themselves, sacrificing freedom for 'security'.

decline, fear of strangers and an unfamiliar world—is corroding the trust and interdependence on which civil societies rest.

From the late 19th century until the 1970s, the advanced societies of the West were all becoming less unequal. Thanks to progressive taxation, government subsidies for the poor, the provision of social services and guarantees against acute misfortune, modern democracies were shedding extremes of wealth and poverty.

place of the male proletariat there were now posited the candidacies of 'blacks', 'students', 'women' and, a little later, homosexuals. Since none of these constituents, at home or abroad, was separately represented in the institutions of welfare societies, the new Left presented itself quite consciously as opposing not merely the injustices of the capitalist order but above all the 'repressive tolerance' of its most advanced forms: precisely

while Chinese leaders want to rejuvenate Chinese civilization, they have no missionary impulse to take over the world and make everyone Chinese. China's role and influence in the world will certainly grow along with the size of its economy. Yet, it will not use its influence to change the ideologies or political practices of other societies.

I am a 'macrohistorian' specializing in the processes of change in advanced societies, with a special interest in methodological questions

The first paragraph of The Federalist, No. 1 offers the following contrast: "It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.

The daily life of kids was a strange one, she thought. You got hauled to various locations, dumped there, hauled out again at the end of the day. During the dump time, you formed your own little societies that might have little or nothing to do with your pecking order in your home life. So weren't you constantly adjusting, readjusting, dealing with new rules, new authorities, more power, less? No wonder kids were so weird.

Humanity's always been weird at heart. Look at how societies form, rituals, practices, even rock n' roll. Humanity really is dark and twisted.

Our heroes are fighting to bring stability to the Middle East, and they have put pressure on all of the tyrannies of the Middle East. They have taken a stand against tyranny, against terrorists, and for the prospect of decent societies throughout that region.

War kills men, and men deplore the loss; but war also crushes bad principles and tyrants, and so saves societies.

The movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract.

To succeed as a predator, simple math explains that it is vital that the consumers do not outnumber the consumees. The older and larger the consumer, the greater the investment of energy, pound for pound. It takes a lot of seeds and grass to make enough mice and rabbits to make a wolf; a lot of little plants to make sufficient numbers of small fish to make a shark. As it turns out, it takes a lot of everything to power human societies.

American intelligence and military agencies have a huge footprint in terms of how the world works, but they're largely invisible. I'm interested in exploring those 'geographies' of secrecy from many different angles: political, legal, economic, spatial, etc., because I am fundamentally just interested in how the world works and how societies work.

I am fundamentally an anthropologist and a rationalist. What I say is that human societies are very different from what specialists call 'animal society' because the former have religion.

Humans are remarkable: the first species in almost four billion years of life on earth that dominates the biosphere. This gives us the power, in principle, to build societies in which everyone flourishes. But it also creates great dangers because it is not clear that we really understand how to use our potentially devastating powers.

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.