Human Institutions Quotes

Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions.

The biggest risks posed by nuclear power come not from the technology but from the human institutions that govern how we use it.

By bringing out into the public domain how human institutions actually behave, we can understand frankly, to a degree, for the first time the civilization that we actually have.

The most successful supporters of tyranny are without doubt those general declaimers who attribute the distresses of the poor, and almost all evils to which society is subject, to human institutions and the iniquity of governments.

Like other human institutions, courts and juries are not perfect. One cannot have a system of criminal punishment without accepting the possibility that someone will be punished mistakenly.

My view is laissez-faire as far as Russia is concerned. They should have full freedom to develop the Socialist cause in their own country, but I strongly object to their ideas in our country. The Communists treat human beings like machines and I am opposed to this machine-like view of human institutions.

The eager and often inconsiderate appeals of reformers and revolutionists are indispensable to counterbalance the inertia and fossilism marking so large a part of human institutions.

Nature will not let us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds andwars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the abolition-convention, or the temperance-meeting, or the transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says to us, "so hot? my little Sir.

Science, like nothing else among the institutions of mankind, grows like a weed every year. Art is subject to arbitrary fashion, religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself, law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.

Every human institution (justice included) will stretch a little, if you only pull it the right way.

Marriage is one of the most sacred human institutions. I asked our Senators, as many South Dakotans have done, to protect marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

In justly balancing the powers of the Federal and State authorities difficulties nearly insurmountable arose at the outset and subsequent collisions were deemed inevitable. Amid these it was scarcely believed possible that a scheme of government so complex in construction could remain uninjured. From time to time embarrassments have certainly occurred; but how just is the confidence of future safety imparted by the knowledge that each in succession has been happily removed! Overlooking partial and temporary evils as inseparable from the practical operation of all human institutions, and looking only to the general result, every patriot has reason to be satisfied.

Everyone recognizes a distinction between knowledge and wisdom. . . Wisdom is a kind of knowledge. It is knowledge of the nature, career, and consequences of human values. Since these cannot be separated from the human organism and the social scene, the moral ways of man cannot be understood without knowledge of the ways of things and institutions.

... inventions and purely human institutions.

The most universal challenge that we face is the transition from seeing our human institutions as machines to seeing them as embodiments of nature.

Technology advances at exponential rates, and human institutions and societies do not. They adapt at much slower rates. Those gaps get wider and wider.

To understand my feelings — and my conception of the role of Secretary General — the nature of my religious and cultural background must first be understood. I should therefore like to outline not only my beliefs but also my conception of human institutions and of the human situation itself.

There is every reason to believe that our system will soon attain the highest degree of perfection of which human institutions are capable.

If, as some say, evil lies in the hearts and not the institutions of men, then there's hardly a distinction worth making between, say, Hitler's Germany and Rebecca's Sunnybrook Farm.

Like the other great revolutions, an environmental revolution will require sacrifices and lead to enormous gains. It, too, will change the face of the land and human institutions, hierarchies, self-definitions, cultures. It will take centuries. If it happens. There is no guarantee, of course.

An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old.

I conclude that it is a fundamental mistake to think that salvation, justice, or virtue come through merely human institutions.

We admit that we will never reach our ideal in this life, a distinctive the church claims that most other human institutions try to deny.

I don't understand the notion that modern farming is anything do to with nature. It's a pretty gross interference with nature. I think it ought to be governed by the standards of how it affects the individual animals, just as we'd want to deal with institutions that deal with humans by how they affect individual humans.

Once you realize there's less logic in human institutions than you once thought, you see the narrative potential in just about everything around you. Sometimes, in fact, it seems as if the human world runs on inefficiency and erratic behavior.