Alexander Shakow Quotes

It would be difficult to exaggerate the degree to which we are influenced by those we influence.

Without culture, development falls apart.

Perhaps there is no such thing as unilateral power. After all, the man in power depends on receiving information all the time from outside. He responds to that information just as much as he causes things to happen... it is an interaction, and not a lineal situation.

Progress in a globally interdependent society relies more than ever on the unimpeded flow of information.

You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.

It is through the European that civilization arrives ... precisely because of their superiority, the civilized people our responsible for an evolving world.

Without creative personalities able to think and judge independently, the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.

… people should not be hindered from attaining development in accordance with their own culture.

Civilization develops man, and if he is, according to his whole character and destiny, made for development, civilization is his truly natural state …

The social goals are the most difficult to achieve in the development of any country.

Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.

Each nation grows after its own genius, and has a civilization of its own.

Today, the grandeur of a country is measured by the extent to which it defends and extends its citizens' rights through its impulse towards total equality, by its capacity to create energy that contributes towards cultural, social and economic growth. That is how a country becomes strong, by making its citizens more powerful.

The democratic political institutions of Western countries arose and matured as industrial capitalism matured. It was a time of historically unprecedented economic growth and the concomitant development of new social groupings and relationships. They arose in elite political cultures that were in the main ethnically homogeneous, even if, notably in the American case, the society at large was considerably less so.

If your neighbor's reality changes, yours will change as well.

We think we can play a small part in the evolution of culture.

A being connected with other beings cannot perform his own activities without taking the activities of others into account. For they are the indispensable conditions of the realization of his tendencies. When he moves he stirs them and reciprocally.

Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.

Defense is attack, attack is defense, each being the cause and result of the other.

In the modern world, the interests of a particular community can no longer be considered to lie within the confines of its own boundaries.

In order to have influence, you have to be influenced.

Most critics write critiques which are by the authors they write critiques about. That would not be so bad, but then most authorswrite works which are by the critics who write critiques about them.

Society is the product of relationship, of yours and mine together. If we change in our relationship, society changes.

There is no salvation for us but to adopt Civilization and lift ourselves down to its level.

All things arise in unison. Thereby we see their return.