Quotes About Societies

Western governments have generally tried to contain genocide by appeasing its architects. But the sad record of the last century shows that the walls the United States tries to build around genocidal societies almost inevitably shatter.

Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama; fathers and sons, martyred heroes, star-crossed lovers, the deaths of kings - stories that taught us of the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility.

Dobkin de Rios and Smith13 suggest that spiritual techniques for altering consciousness are typically repressed in state-level societies because they constitute a potential threat to the religious interpretations of those who hold social and religious power.

The threat to capitalism is no longer communism or fascism but a steady undermining of the trust modern societies need for growth and stability.

Societies progress by the free assertion of differing proposals, followed by criticism, followed by the genuine possibility of change in the light of criticism....The whole approach of an authoritarian society is anti-rational. A rational and scientific approach requires societies to be open and pluralistic."—Karl Popper

They used to teach us that evolution of intelligent beings wasn't possible, she said. Societies protect their weaker members. Civilizations tend to make wheel chairs and spectacles and hearing aids as soon as they have the tools for them. When a society makes war, the men generally have to pass a fitness test before they're allowed, to risk their lives. I suppose it helps win the war. She smiled. But it leaves precious little room for the survival of the fittest.

History is not the accumulation of events of every kind which happened in the past. It is the science of human societies.

Only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual.

Muslims in the West and those in other intellectually free societies will be in a position to contribute to Islamic thought more so than those who are based in repressive environments where censorship and restriction on freedom still dominate thinking. The future development of Islamic thought may depend to a certain extent on the degree of intellectual freedom in Muslim societies.

We see frequently societies of merchants in London, and other trading towns, purchase waste lands in our sugar colonies, which they expect to improve and cultivate with profit, by means of factors and agents, notwithstanding the great distance and the uncertain returns, from the defective administration of justice in those countries.

We can conclude from this that we are drawn to call something beautiful whenever we detect that it contains in a concentrated form those qualities in which we personally, or our societies more generally, are deficient. We respect a style which can move us away from what we fear and towards what we crave: a style which carries the correct dosage of our missing virtues.

Unfortunately for our esteem, societies of the West are not known for their conduciveness to the surrender of pretensions, to the acceptance of age or fat, let alone poverty and obscurity.

Inclusive, good-quality education is a foundation for dynamic and equitable societies.

What matters is that new forms of propertylessness will do away with the sexual greed that is characteristic of all having societies.

I think that Jews - because they are a distinct, gifted and successful group that differentiates itself from societies in which it lives - are vulnerable wherever the rule of law is not paramount.

Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!

Secularism and pluralism are two of the defining ethos of Western societies. The former decouples religion from governmental institutions whilst the latter seeks to protect the rights of all citizens to freely practice their creed.

It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art.

I cut my teeth as a journalist writing about societies that didn't have democracy.

violence exercised in self-defense, which all societies from the most primitive to the most cultured and civilized, accept as moral and legal. The principle of self-defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed, has never been condemned, even by Gandhi, who sanctioned it for those unable to master pure nonviolence.

The various inequalities that define the contemporary world—imposed through white supremacy, imperialism, capitalism—all are based on this central feature of patriarchy, an attempt to make the domination/subordination dynamic appear to be a natural, and hence inevitable, feature of human societies.

If two people stare at each other for more than a few seconds, it means they are about to either make love or fight. Something similar might be said about human societies. If two nearby societies are in contact for any length of time, they will either trade or fight. The first is non-zero-sum social integration, and the second ultimately brings it.

There is one fact that can be established: the only phenomenon which, always and in all parts of the world, seems to be linked with the appearance of writing … is the establishment of hierarchical societies, consisting of masters and slaves, and where one part of the population is made to work for the other part.5

Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.