Portal:Society/Quote archive

Former quotes at Society Wikiportal

2011

March

'"When society requires to be rebuilt, there is no use in attempting to rebuild it on the old plan." – John Stuart Mill, Dissertations and Discussions (1859)

2005

December

"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." – George Santayana

2006

January

"The merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far." – HP Lovecraft

"Power is not of a man. Wealth does not center in the person of the wealthy. Celebrity is not inherent in any personality. To be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions." C. Wright Mills, (1916–1962), U.S. sociologist. The Power Elite, ch. 1 (1956).

May

"The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations."

Noam Chomsky, (1928–), U.S. intellectual.

Z Magazine (May 1998).

"I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand, "I have a problem, it is the government's job to cope with it!" or, "I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first."

Margaret Thatcher, (1925–2013), former United Kingdom Prime Minister.

Womans Own, September 1987.

September

It is the retention by twentieth-century, Atom-Age men of the Neolithic point of view that says: You stay in your village and I will stay in mine. If your sheep eat our grass we will kill you, or we may kill you anyhow to get all the grass for our own sheep. Anyone who tries to make us change our ways is a witch and we will kill him. Keep out of our village.

Carleton S. Coon, The Story of Man (1954).

December

Society has its own nature, and consequently, its requirements are quite different from those of our nature as individuals: the interests of the whole are not necessarily those of the part. Therefore, society cannot be formed or maintained without our being required to make perpetual and costly sacrifices. Because society surpasses us, it obliges us to surpass ourselves; and to surpass itself, a being must, to some degree, depart from its nature—a departure that does not take place without causing more or less painful tensions.

Emile Durkheim, The Dualism of Human Nature (1914).

2007

June

"Democracy doesn't mean much if people have to confront concentrated systems of economic power as isolated individuals. Democracy means something if people can organize to gain information, to have thoughts for that matter, to make plans, to enter into the political system in some active way, to put forth programs and so on. If organizations of that kind exist, then democracy can exist too. Otherwise it's a matter of pushing a lever every couple of years; it's like having the choice between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola."

—Noam Chomsky, Intervention in Vietnam and Central America: Parallels and Differences (1985)

2008

“ A person who cannot live in society, or does not need to because he is self-sufficient, is either a beast or a god. ” — Aristotle, Politics

“ No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. ” — Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)