Institutional Purpose Quotes

We didn't create an institution to increase land value or asset value.

The first thing that an architect must do is to sense that every building you build is a world of its own, and that this world of its own serves an institution.

Like the vast majority of Americans, I've opposed same-sex marriage, but I've also opposed unjust discrimination against anyone, for racial or religious reasons, or for sexual preference. Americans are a tolerant, generous, and kind people. We all oppose bigotry and disparagement. But the debate over same-sex marriage is not a debate over tolerance. It is a debate about the purpose of the institution of marriage and it is a debate about activist judges who make up the law rather than interpret the law.

The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.

There is only one justification for universities, as distinguished from trade schools. They must be centers of criticism.

Administrators are another curious consequence of a bureaucracy which has forgotten its reason for being

The state exists for man, not man for the state. The same may be said of science. These are old phrases, coined by people who saw in human individuality the highest human value. I would hesitate to repeat them, were it not for the ever recurring danger that they may be forgotten, especially in these days of organization and stereotypes.

Gentlemen, let's get the thing straight once and for all. The policeman isn't there to create disorder. The policeman is there to preserve disorder.

But we are learning from the teaching and example of Jesus that life itself is a religion, that nothing is more sacred than a human being, that the end of all right institutions, whether the home or the church or an educational establishment, or a government, is the development of the human soul.

It is the goal of the American university to be the brains of the republic.

Nothing so good as a university education, nor worse than a university without its education.

Never did I think that the university was properly ministerial to the society around it. Rather I thought and think that society is ministerial to the university, and I bless a society that tolerates and supports an eternal childhood for some, a childhood whose playfulness can in turn be a blessing to society.

The Smithsonian’s own view of its mission was that it should “tell visitors immediately what we are about and how we’d like them to change.” In other words, the purpose of a taxpayer-supported institution is to express the ideologies of those who run it and to brainwash the visiting public with the vision of the anointed.

The United Nations was not set up to be a reformatory. It was assumed that you would be good before you got in and not that being in would make you good.

The church, inserted and active in human society and in history, does not exist in order to exercise political power or to govern the society.

We feel strongly that the spirit characteristic of America at its noblest, above all the pursuit of higher learning, cannot admit of any conditions as to personnel other than those designed to promote the objects for which this institution is established, and particularly with no regard whatever to accidents of race, creed, or sex.

The "non-profit" institution neither supplies goods or services not controls. Its "product" is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The non-profit institutions are human-change agents. Their "product" is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether.

Public school was never in business to produce Thoreau. It is in business to produce a man like Richard Nixon and, even more, a population like the one which could elect him.

Very nice sort of place, Oxford, I should think, for people that like that sort of place. They teach you to be a gentleman there. In the polytechnic they teach you to be an engineer or such like. See?

Educational institutes can no longer be prizes in church politics or furnish berths for failure in other walks of life.

Let men learn that a legislature is not 'our God upon earth,' though, by the authority they ascribe to it, and the things they expect from it, they would seem to think it is. Let them learn rather that it is an institution serving a purely temporary purpose, whose power, when not stolen, is at the best borrowed.

If you enter the World Bank office in Washington, D.C., you will see written on the left wall, 'The purpose of the World Bank is to fight poverty with passion.' I had it put up there because I wanted something that unites us as an institution.

We all want merit to mean something, and we all may be tempted to reduce that meaning to something measurable and concrete like an SAT score. The reality, though, is that who deserves entry into an institution depends on what the institution exists to do.

The corporation was originally conceived as a public institution whose purpose was to serve national interests and advance the public good.