Institutions Quotes

We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.

… loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.

We have institutions, but they don’t work. We have laws, but they must be enforced.

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

… my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous.

Politics is about making institutions work somewhat better, helping people’s lives at the margins

Of all our institutions public education is the most important. Everything depends on it, the present and the future.

There can be no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic societies and political institutions. The failure of these institutions to function and the instability of these regimes in Muslim countries, manifest in frequent changes and coups d'état, is most often the consequence of their a priori opposition to Islam, as the fundamental and foremost feeling of the people in those countries.

Education proceeds ultimately from the patterns furnished by institutions, customs, and laws.

A succinct summary of the tragic vision was given by historians Will and Ariel Durant: Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

The social order and its development must constantly yield to the good of the person, since the order of things must be subordinate to the order of persons and not the other way around....

The sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international law and international institutions.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it …

China is a country ruled by men more than laws.

The desire for a democratic political system does not by itself create the capacity for establishing one.

Innovation never comes from the established institutions.

Institutions may crumble and governments fall, but it is only that they may renew a better youth, and mount upwards like the eagle.

There are persons who constantly clamor. They complain of oppression, speculation, and pernicious influence of wealth. They cry out loudly against all banks and corporations, and a means by which small capitalists become united in order to produce important and beneficial results. They carry on mad hostility against all established institutions. They would choke the fountain of industry and dry all streams.

Africa does not need more exhortations. She needs support in strengthening her structures. She needs concrete resources with which to pursue her course of action.

Trust has shifted from institutions to individuals.

Where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.

A Spaniard will seek to persuade you that the bull-ring is an institution got up chiefly for the benefit of the bull.

Those social behaviors which automatically preclude the building of a democratic world must go - every social limitation of human beings in terms of heredity, whether it be of race, or sex, or class. Every social institution which teaches human beings to cringe to those above and step on those below must be replaced by institutions which teach people to look each other straight in the face.

Trump was so different - in a bad way - that I thought the best thing I could do was to resist him. And that's because he was attacking the institutions of our democracy, from the First Amendment and the free press to the judiciary. He was stifling internal dissent, and then he was making false and misleading statements routinely. And to me, that's what takes us down the road to authoritarianism and that's why I decided to start resisting him.