Quotes About Societies

in the past, respect for the wisdom of the elders was a central tenet of human societies ... whose elders served as keepers of the cultures' knowledge. But today, in technological countries such as ours, respect has faded into bare tolerance, as we demand that older people act, look, and talk young.

But, writing in the late 1940s, he found himself commending the 'traditionalism' of the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. It was Zapata, he wrote, who had freed 'Mexican reality from the constricting schemes of liberalism, and the abuses of the conservatives and neo-conservatives'. Such 'traditionalists', ranging from Gandhi to Rabindranath Tagore to Liang Qichao, had also emerged in many other non-Western societies in the first half of the twentieth century.

Humans were designed by evolution to live in societies, but they may not understand how societies work.

Florida is a blend of many societies... Each has a colorful and exciting history that they bring to our state.

Prosperity has strangled us," says Dr. Pierpaolo Donati, a leading Catholic intellectual and professor of sociology at the University of Bologna. "Comfort is now the only thing anybody believes in. The ethic of sacrifice for a family—one of the basic ideas of human societies—has become a historical notion. It is astonishing."22

the egalitarian lifestyles of hunter-gatherers exist because the individuals care a lot about status. Individuals in these societies end up roughly equal because everyone is struggling to ensure that nobody gets too much power over him or her. This is invisible-hand egalitarianism.

When experts insist that their societies are awash in misery, they are unknowingly illustrating one of the big findings in happiness research, which is that people underestimate how happy other people are—we tend to think of ourselves as lucky exceptions.

Change in the societies at the very bottom must come predominantly from within; we cannot impose it on them.

Launching a turnaround takes courage. I cannot measure that and so it is not going to be included in my analysis, but behind the moments of change there are always a few people within these societies who have decided to try to make a difference.

There is no analytic presumption that migration produces gains either for the societies that migrants join, or for those they leave; the only unambiguous gains are for the migrants themselves.

By eschewing shared belonging, and the benign patriotism that it can support, liberals have abandoned the only force capable of uniting our societies behind remedies. Inadvertently, recklessly, they have handed it to the charlatan extremes, which are gleefully twisting it to their own warped purposes.

The question that poses itself is exactly what one means by "democracy." Is it to be identified with self-conscious peoples ruling themselves, or does it entail the establishment and maintenance of "civic culture" by experts with "progressive" social views? Although these two opposed understandings have coexisted in the same societies, they are fundamentally incompatible.

Highly organized complex societies are delicate machines. It does not take much to bring them to ruin. 'For want of a nail…the kingdom was lost', as the old rhyme has it. Civilizations based on ideology are even more fragile than most. As we know from twentieth-century history, once people stop believing in the system, the end is near; no amount of coercion can keep it going indefinitely.

Philosophers hold liberty and justice to be universal and necessary concepts because they know of no societies other than those founded on private property.

Art should return to its roots, to cosmology, to rite, and to ceremony. The religious nature of art is its true meaning. Modern art's commitment to "emotion" and "feeling" or to abstract principles of design is, by Pleistocene standards, a sacrilegious act, just as narcotics belong not in a recreational but in a religious setting. In most small-scale societies there is regular dialogue on divinatory and dream experience that gets translated into art.

La jeunesse est un temps pendant lequel les conventions sont et doivent être mal comprises : ou aveuglément combattues, ou aveuglément obéies. On ne peut pas concevoir, dans les commencements de la vie réfléchie, que seules les décisions arbitraires permettent à l'homme de fonder quoi que ce soit : langage, sociétés, connaissances, œuvres d'art.

I think therapy is a rather misguided notion of capitalist societies whereby the self-indulgent examination of one's life supersedes the actual living of said life.