Social Existence Quotes

Why shouldn't I be interested in politics? That is to say, what blindness, what deafness, what density of ideology would have to weigh me down to prevent me from being interested in what is probably the most crucial subject to our existence, that is to say the society in which we live, the economic relations within which it functions, and the system of power which defines the regular forms and the regular permissions and prohibitions of our conduct. The essence of our life consists, after all, of the political functioning of the society in which we find ourselves.

Monogamy does not only go with the western Caucasian race, the Europeans and their descendants, beyond Christianity, it goes beyond Common Law. It is one of the primordial elements out of which all law proceeds, or which the law steps in to recognize and to protect. Wedlock…stands in this respect on a level with property…Wedlock, or monogamic marriage, is one of the “categories” of our social thoughts and conceptions, and therefore, of our social existence. It is one of the elementary distinctions – historical and actual – between European and Asiatic humanity…It is one of the pre-existing conditions of our existence as civilized white men…Strike it out, and you destroy our very being; and when we say our we mean our race – a race which has its great and broad destiny, a solemn aim in the great career of civilization.

Ideology... is indispensable in any society if men are to be formed, transformed and equipped to respond to the demands of their conditions of existence.

In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.

The condition of our survival in any but the meagerest existence is our willingness to accommodate ourselves to the conflicting interests of others, to learn to live in a social world.

What's the meaning of life? Other people.

Nepotism is the bedrock of social existence.

Being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with; its possibility is a proof for the latter.

Humanity in its basic form is co-humanity.

It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity, sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole, rather than being confined to the domestic sphere.

Nothing is more evident, I venture to think, as a result of two or three thousand years of social philosophizing, than that society must live and thrive by way of the native impulses of individual human beings.

If "freedom" means, first of all, the responsibility of every individual for the rational determination of his own personal, professional and social existence, then there is no greater fear than that of the establishment of general freedom.

Once let good faith be abandoned, and all social existence would perish.

As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence.

They say that none of us exists, except in the imagination of his fellows, other than as an intangible, invisible mentality.

All mentally well-balanced persons know that we are not governed by the true principals of social justice when we make the main aim of our social existence the gaining of money.

Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being.

The university's business is the conservation of useless knowledge; and what the university itself apparently fails to see is that this enterprise is not only noble but indispensable as well, that society can not exist unless it goes on.

Man owes his strength in the struggle for existence to the fact that he is a social animal.

I do think it's important that we experiment with new vocabularies. That new words help us conceptualize our social existence in a different way.

Money is to my social existence what health is to my body.

We belong to that order of mammals, the primates, distinguished by its propensity for repeated single litters, intense parental care, long life-spans, late sexual maturity, and a complex and extensive social existence... Our protracted biological and psychological helplessness, which extends well into the third year of life, intensifies the bond between infant and parents, making possible a sense of generational continuity. In contrast to other primates these bonds are not obliterated after sexual maturity.

We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence.

Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.

Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.