societal structures Quotes

Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it.

We've got paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technologies.

To understand how people organize social systems, we have to discover the principles that we create to make some societies intelligible.

However diligent she may be, however dedicated, no mother can escape the larger influences of culture, biology, fate . . . until we can actually live in a society where mothers and children genuinely matter, ours is an essentially powerless responsibility. Mothers carry out most of the work orders, but most of the rules governing our lives are shaped by outside influences.

Societies exist under three forms sufficiently distinguishable. 1. Without government, as among our Indians. 2. Under governments wherein the will of every one has a just influence, as is the case in England in a slight degree, and in our states, in a great one. 3. Under governments of force: as is the case in all other monarchies and in most of the other republics. To have an idea of the curse of existence under these last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep.

When I pick a story, I'm very much aware of the larger issues that it's illuminating. But one of the things that I, as a writer, feel strongly about is that nobody is representative. That's just narrative nonsense. People may be part of a larger story or structure or institution, but they're still people. Making them representative loses sight of that. Which is why a lot of writing about low-income people makes them into saints, perfect in their suffering.

To put it in a few words, the true malice of man appears only in the state and in the church, as institutions of gathering together, of recapitulation, of totalization.

If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government.

Human nature will never part with power. Look for an example of a voluntary relinquishment of power from one end of the globe to another - you will find none.

The young cult of sociology, needing a language, invented one. There are many dead languages, but the sociologists' is the only language that was dead at birth.

Anarchism and anthropology go well together because anthropologists know that a society without a state is possible because so many exist.

We live in a society in the West, where, when men do violent things, they do them under orders. They are soldiers carrying out orders or mafia men carrying out killings for bosses. But the way things happen in the Middle East is not the same as in the West.

The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies.

Feminism, when it truly achieves its goals, will crack through the most basic structures of our society.

People rise and fall on the basis of the makings of institutions.

A leader has to know how the system functions - not just the system of government but the whole social and economic system, including business, the unions, and the universities.

It is a game, the whole ball of wax is a game - your life, my life, politics, economy, hunger.

Around the world there are certain marital systems, certain physical systems, political systems, social systems, and all those things are kind of turned on their head but represented in various ways within "The Lobster."

There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions.

There are no institutions in America: there are only fashions.

I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn't that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story.

With sociology one can do anything and call it work