Quotes About Societies

Our desire to bring every good thing to our children is a force for good throughout the world. It's what propels societies forward.

...no matter how complex or affluent, human societies are nothing but subsystems of the biosphere, the Earth's thin veneer of life, which is ultimately run by bacteria, fungi and green plants.

According to a charming law of nature which is evident even in the most sophisticated societies, we live in complete ignorance of whatever we love.

Patriotism is as much a virtue as justice, and is as necessary for the support of societies as natural affection is for the support of families.

And, indeed, what little of beauty and peace is to be found in the societies of men is owing to the daily performance of small duties, not to big doings and fine talk.

Democracy will be transformative. It will help other societies realize the benefits of freedom. Nothing's as big as that, in terms of peace.

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

Have no fear, most of the Indigo children that are struggling are the children that have had a very difficult time trying to live up to societies Indigo myth that developed around them

People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.

to the American power elite one of the longest lasting and most essential foreign policy goals has been preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a good example of an alternative to the capitalist model. This was the essence of the Cold War. Cuba and Chile were two examples of several such societies in the socialist camp which the United States did its best to crush.

Islamul trebuie înÈ›eles ca un produs al societ??ilor în care s-a extins, dar È™i ca un produs al societ??ilor de origine

Dissanayake writes that art that engages the mind and hands, that is not just passive connoisseurship, can act as an antidote, for our contentious and alienated relationship to our own societies.

Diamond, J. (1998). Guns, germs, and steel: The fates of human societies. London: Vintage. Diamond, J. (2004). Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. New York: Viking

Choices whose outcomes matter even though they are neither deterministic nor completely random surround us all the time. So it is not surprising that in all human societies, entire professions have been based on the making of such predictions—think of astrologers, stockbrokers, professional gamblers, weather forecasters, or . . . politicians.

As with Hispaniola, Tenochtitlán, Cuzco, and elsewhere, the Spaniards' mammoth destruction of whole societies generally was a by-product of conquest and native enslavement, a genocidal means to an economic end, not an end in itself. And therein lies the central difference between the genocide committed by the Spanish and that of the Anglo-Americans: in British America extermination was the primary goal, and it was so precisely because it made economic sense.

Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and China depended on constant vigilance over, and maintenance and repair of, complex irrigation systems. It was argued that this required a huge all-powerful state: these ancient 'hydraulic societies' were necessarily not democratic.

That indigenous Americans lived in generally free societies, and that Europeans did not, was never really a matter of debate in these exchanges: both sides agreed this was the case.

It is much the same with the question of inequality. If we ask, not 'what are the origins of social inequality?' but 'what are the origins of the question about the origins of social inequality?' (in other words, how did it come about that, in 1754, the Académie de Dijon would think this an appropriate question to ask?), then we are immediately confronted with a long history of Europeans arguing with one another about the nature of faraway societies

One of the puzzling things about all the theories about the origins of money that we've been looking at so far is that they almost completely ignore the evidence of anthropology. Anthropologists do have a great deal of knowledge of how economies within stateless societies actually worked.

their decisions to stay with their erstwhile captors. Some emphasized the virtues of freedom they found in Native American societies, including sexual freedom, but also freedom from the expectation

Stateless societies tend also to be without markets.

There have even been attempts to calculate income levels and Gini coefficients for Palaeolithic mammoth hunters (they both turn out to be very low).1 It's almost as if we feel some need to come up with mathematical formulae justifying the expression, already popular in the days of Rousseau, that in such societies 'everyone was equal, because they were all equally poor.

In other words, despite the dogged liberal assumption—again, coming from Smith's legacy—that the existence of states and markets are somehow opposed, the historical record implies that exactly the opposite is the case. Stateless societies tend also to be without markets.

our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique.