Quotes About Societies

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.

Poverty is not the simple result of bad geography, bad culture, bad history. It's the result of us: of the ways that people choose to organize their societies.

The starting point for the new history, both in Europe and America, has been the record of births, marriages, and deaths, which most literate societies preserve in one form or another. In colonial America, surviving records of this kind - as of every other kind - are most abundant for New England.

Since our complex societies are highly susceptible to interferences and accidents, they certainly offer ideal opportunities for a prompt disruption of normal activities.

Societies are not sustainable without institutions.

Men cannot confront the naked truth of their own violence without the risk of abandoning themselves to it entirely. They have never had a very clear idea of this violence, and it is possible that the survival of all human societies of the past was dependent on this fundamental lack of understanding.

You are likely to see no general reformation till you procure family reformation. Some little obscure religion there may be in here and there one; but while it sticks in single persons, and is not promoted by these societies, it doth not prosper, nor promise much for future increase.

Let the Unions become engines for the working people to right their wrongs. Not benefit societies, or burial clubs. Let the Unions become civilian regiments to fight in the cause of the people.

The second precondition is developing a viable strategy before entering a Fourth Generation conflict. We have already noted that our strategic goals must be realistic; we cannot remake other societies and cultures in our own image. Here, we offer another warning, one related directly to fighting Fourth Generation war: our strategy must not be so misconceived that it provides a primary reason for others to fight us.

those tribes whose infants creep and crawl tend to have more complex societies, higher technology, and some form of written language. Most tribes that restrict their infants from crawling have no writing of their own and can be taught to read only with great difficulty.

You have to believe that it's through politics that societies can lead social and economic and political change.

Our country's cheerleaders are wedded to the notion of American exceptionalism. But when it comes to the machinations of power, we are all too similar to other societies and ones that have come before us. There is an implacable brutality to power that is familiar throughout the world and throughout history.

la de que las sociedades humanas podían disponerse según etapas de desarrollo, cada una con sus tecnologías y formas de organización características (cazadores-recolectores, agricultores, sociedad industrial urbana, etcétera).

Las sociedades —explicaba Mauss— viven de tomar prestado unas de otras, pero se definen a sí mismas más por sus rechazos a los préstamos que por su aceptación.»

If we gauge societies in light of the developmental maturity of their citizens, we see very little difference, even between extremes. One society may be, on average, slightly further along than another, but the reality is that no society has advanced beyond the stage where girls play dress-up and boys torture frogs.

The fact that societies are becoming increasingly multi-ethnic, multicultural, and multi-religious is good. Diversity is a strength, not a weakness.

Unlike settled, patriarchal societies such as classical Greece and Rome, where women stayed home to weave and mind children, the lives of nomadic steppe tribes centered on horses and archery.

I think a lot of things will be self-correcting, even in America. After all, human societies are essentially self-organizing emergent systems. The catch is, how much disorder will we have to endure while this re-self-organizing process occurs.

Already we're seeing graduates of U.S. higher education going back to their home countries and contributing to societies there, where in the past they would have stayed in the U.S. and built new companies here. We have to have immigration reform that allows talented foreigners to become Americans.

From time to time there emerged in the West voluntary communist societies. One of them was the Virginia Company in Jamestown (1607); another, New Harmony of Indiana, founded in 1825 by the British philanthropist Robert Owen. All such attempts broke down sooner or later, largely because of their inability to resolve the problem of "free riders," members who drew a full share of the community's harvest while doing little if any work.

In societies with no restaurants or supermarkets, the need for a wife can lead a man to desperate measures. Among the Inuit, where a woman contributed no food calories, her cooking and production of warm, dry hunting clothes were vital: a man cannot both hunt and cook. The pressure could drive widowers or bachelors to neighboring territories in an attempt to steal a woman, even if it meant killing her husband.

Hunter-gatherer women are therefore not normally treated badly, and many ethnographers have concluded that, in comparison to most societies, married women lead lives of high status and considerable autonomy.

those Muslim prison-states have all but collapsed (either on their own or by outside interference), unleashing a tide of refugees into debt-ridden and economically stagnant European societies.

ALL POST-COMMUNIST SOCIETIES ARE uprooted ones because Communism uprooted traditions, so nothing fits with anything else," explained the philosopher Patapievici.