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Once we have resolved only to see those who will treat us morally and virtuously, reasonably and truthfully, without treating conventions, vanities and ceremonials as anything other than props of polite society, we will have to live more or less on our own.
-Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort
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We can imagine a society in which no one could survive as a social being because it does not correspond to biologically determined perceptions and human social needs. For historical reasons, existing societies might have such properties, leading to various forms of pathology.
-Noam Chomsky
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Institutions -- government, churches, industries, and the like -- have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.
-Charles Horton Cooley
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Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.
-Charles Horton Cooley
Life and the Student
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The circumstances of human society are too complicated to be submitted to the rigor of mathematical calculation.
-Marquis De Custine
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You can tell all you need to about a society from how it treats animals and beaches.
-Frank DeFord
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The good society was, like the good self, a diverse yet harmonious, growing yet unified whole, a fully participatory democracy in which the powers and capacities of the individuals that comprised it were harmonized by their cooperative activities into a community that permitted the full and free expression of individuality.
-John Dewey
John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca:Cornell University Pres, 1991) p.164.
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The incipient institution needs some stabilizing principle to stop its premature demise. That stabilizing principle is the naturalization of social classifications. There needs to be an analogy by which the formal structure of a crucial set of social relations is found in the physical world, or in the supernatural world, or in eternity, anywhere, so long as it is not seen as a socially contrived arrangement. When the analogy is applied back and forth from one set of social relations to another, and from these back to nature, its recurring formal structure becomes easily recognized and endowed with self-validating truth... For discourse to be possible at all, the basic categories have to be agreed on. Nothing else but institutions can define sameness. Similarity is an institution.
-Mary Douglas
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Man's characteristic privilege is that the bond he accepts is not physical but moral; that is, social. He is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience superior to his own, the superiority of which he feels. Because the greater, better part of his existence transcends the body, he escapes the body's yoke, but is subject to that of society.
-Emile Durkheim
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As long as we have an unjust society, like we do now, we will never have a loving society. If you don
-Jane Elliot
speech at Wait Chapel, August 23, 1988
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An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Society is a hospital of incurables.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Society always consists in the greatest part, of young and foolish persons.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggression.
-Sigmund Freud
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Every society by its own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feelings, and perceiving, develops a system of categories which determines the forms of awareness.
-Erich Fromm
Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, 1970
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To be social is to be forgiving.
-Robert Frost
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In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
-John Kenneth Galbraith
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Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.
-Mahatma Gandhi
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Whenever you take a step forward, you are bound to disturb something. You disturb the air as you go forward, you disturb the dust, the ground. You trample upon things. When a whole society moves forward, this trampling is on a much bigger scale; and each thing that you disturb, each vested interest which you want to remove, stands as an obstacle.
-Mahatma Gandhi
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The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
-John W. Gardner
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Compare society to a boat. Her progress through the water will not depend upon the exertion of her crew, but upon the exertion devoted to propelling her. This will be lessened by any expenditure of force in fighting among themselves, or in pulling in different directions.
-Henry George
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I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.
-Judge Learned Hand
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Books about Society
