Quotes About Societies

In a lot of Indian societies, spirituality has been lost, I think it's still the best way of looking at the world for Indians - better than any organized religion in this country.

Marriage is a core institution of societies throughout the world and throughout history. Its something that has provided permanence and stability for our very social structure.

The original of all great and lasting societies consisted not in the mutual good will men had toward each other, but in the mutual fear they had of each other.

What better preparation for a history which seeks to bring societies to life and to understand that life than to have really lived, commanded men, suffered with them and shared their joys.

From an evolution standpoint, what was the point of having people around who were not inclined to have offspring? There must be some good, and fairly subtle, reason for it. The only thing he could work out was that it was groups of people—societies—rather than individual creatures, who were now trying to out-reproduce and/or kill each other, and that, in a society, there was plenty of room for someone who didn't have kids as long as he was up to something useful.

He nodded. "When the shutter opened to capture that first perfect image of the eclipse, magic ceased to function across all human societies.

interaction of these few civilizations with one another, as much as with their own environments, has been among the most important drivers of historical change.10 The striking thing about these interactions is that authentic civilizations seem to remain true unto themselves for very long periods, despite outside influences. As Fernand Braudel put it: 'Civilization is in fact the longest story of all . . . A civilization . . . can persist through a series of economies or societies.

Historians are interested in ideas not only because they influence societies, but because they reveal the societies that give rise to them.

All societies that have tried to keep themselves 'pure,' from the Confucian Chinese through to the Castilian Spanish to the post-Wilhelmine Germans, have collapsed into barbarism, insularity and superstition. And swiftly enough for us to be certain that the fall was no more connected to the genes than was the rise. There is no gene for I.Q., and there is no genetic or evolutionary timing that is short enough to explain histories or societies.

The study of history is part of man's awareness of himself and the nature and place of his society in the world at large; it is valuable not so much because he can find in the past rough parallels to the present, but because he can find societies and events and ides that are sharply

What is the hidden influence behind the press, behind all the sub-versive movements going on around us? Are there several Powers at work? Or is there one Power, one invisible group directing all the rest—the circle of the real Initiates? —Nesta Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, London, Boswell, 1924, p. 348

these games as a way to study model societies and social interactions.

Despite all their faults, campaigns are based on the fact that every vote counts, and therefore every person counts. As freestanding societies, they are more open than academia, more idealistic than corporations, more unifying than religions, and more accessible than government itself.

For my part, I am not so sure at bottom that man is, as he says, the king of nature; he is far more its devastating tyrant. I believe he has many things to learn from animal societies, older than his own and of infinite variety.

The Greeks who rhapsodized about democracy in their rhetoric rarely created democratic institutions. A few cities such as Athens occasionally attempted a system vaguely akin to democracy for a few years. These cities functioned as slave societies and were certainly not egalitarian or democratic in the Indian sense.

Capitalist societies can always heave a sigh of relief and say to themselves: communism is finished since the collapse of the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century and not only is it finished, but it did not take place, it was only a ghost They do no more than disavow the undeniable itself. a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come-back.

I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies. I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from the works of Plato and Socrates, the behaviour of the three Thomases, Aquinas, More and Jefferson — the austere analyses of Immanuel Kant and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. [The World Is My Home (1991)]

MOST NATIONS HAVE AT ONE TIME OR OTHER BOTH condoned and practiced slavery. Greece and Rome founded their societies on it. India and Japan handled this state of affairs by creating untouchable classes which continue to this day. Arabia clung to formal slavery longer than most, while black countries like Ethiopia and Burundi were notorious. In the New World each colonial power devised a system precisely suited to its peculiar needs and in conformance with its national customs. The

Credo che il periodo che intercorre tra la prima apparizione degli stati e la loro egemonia sui popoli non statali, per i barbari abbia rappresentato una sorta di «età dell'oro» nel senso che, sotto molti aspetti, era «meglio» essere un barbaro a causa dell'esistenza degli stati, a patto che questi stati non fossero troppo forti.

Uncertainty and fears of social decline and exclusion have reached the middle class in many societies.

Capacity of human societies both to absorb and to discard cultures is much underestimated.

I have a fascination for extra-judicial societies and underground cultures, and in situations where justice can only be found outside the law, and how these societies have evolved over the centuries.

There's always going to be a fight between mainstream and underground because the mainstream is a very small bubble, and the underground scene is a very small bubble, and they both see themselves as secret societies. But I never saw it that way. I always thought music was open to all things.

Epidemics, like disasters, have a way of revealing underlying truths about the societies they impact.