Social Evolution Quotes

The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past

No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

Cultural change always precedes political change.

Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

Communities have changed. Our society is changing. Sometimes I feel like our law enforcement, the public services, they don't have enough resources to keep up with the changes that we see in our society.

Since the Renaissance, a concept called 'progress' has been baked into our society. Progress - founded on an accumulation of knowledge through experience (and in the case of science, through experiment). To build on the past rather than endlessly relive it. That's what separates us from the beasts.

Don't judge the past by the standards of today. It won't work. They're incompatible.

The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions.

The capitalist world could not help giving birth to the socialist, but now the socialist world should not seek to destroy by force the ground from which it grew. Under the present conditions this would be tantamount to the suicide of mankind. Socialism should ennoble that ground by its example and other indirect forms of pressure and then merge with it.

When I contemplate the immense advances in sciences and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation, and have no doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been as we than our fathers were, and they than the burners of witches

No society can make a perpetual constitution or even a perpetual law.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

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

Human society can only adapt to social change at a certain rate.

For how many thousands of years now have we humans been what we insist on calling "civilized?" And yet, in total contradiction, we also persist in the savage belief that we must occasionally, at least, settle our arguments by killing one another.

All great truths begin as blasphemy. Every single revolutionary idea that has ever been visited upon the human experience began as an idea which was rejected.

There is as yet no civilized society, but only a society in the process of becoming civilized. There is as yet no civilized nation, but only nations in the process of becoming civilized. From this standpoint, we can now speak of a collective task of humankind. The task of humanity is to build a genuine civilization.

People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people - and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

A man's liberal and conservative phases seem to follow each other in a succession of waves from the time he is born. Children are radicals. Youths are conservatives, with a dash of criminal negligence. Men in their prime are liberals (as long as their digestion keeps pace with their intellect). The middle aged run to shelter: they insure their life, draft a will, accumulate mementos and occasional tables, and hope for security. And then comes old age, which repeats childhood - a time full of humors and sadness, but often full of courage and even prophecy.

… evolving standards of decency … mark the progress of a maturing society

Institutions don't change the world in fundamental ways. The way the world changes is heart to heart to heart by individuals, not by institutions.