Social Institution Quotes

A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.

I think marriage is a beautiful thing. I'm still a supporter of it.

Homosexual marriage is counterfeit marriage.

Society is built on marriage ... marriage and its consequences.

[Marriage is] something more than a mere contract. It is rather to be deemed an institution of society, founded upon consent and contract of the parties.

I do not agree that the court can or should redefine marriage.

There is not only no free state which would now establish it, but there is no slave state, which, if it had had the free alternative as we now have, would have founded slavery.

The institution of marriage in all societies is a pattern within which the strains put by civilization on males and females alike must be resolved, a pattern within which men must learn, in return for a variety of elaborate rewards, new forms in which sexual spontaneity is still possible, and women must learn to discipline their receptivity to a thousand other considerations.

There are many disgusting elements in Slavery which are not present in Polygamy, while the single disgusting element of Polygamy is more than present in Slavery. By the license of Polygamy, one man may have many wives, all bound to him by the marriage tie, and in other respects protected by law.

School's a weird thing. I'm not sure it works.

Since the dawn of time, traditional marriage - the union between one man and one woman - has been the building block of civilization, and at no point in our nation's history has that foundation been under more severe attack than now.

I do believe in the traditional definition of marriage.

Well, marriage doesn't function in the way it used to in terms of deciding our fate, but it's in our heads, and it determines a lot of our actions. Like, right now, if you think about gay marriage - and they just started having the first gay marriages in New York - it shows what a potent idea marriage remains for people.

Something as curious as the monarchy won't survive unless you take account of people's attitudes. After all, if people don't want it, they won't have it.

… the idea that children have rights they can claim against their parents, rather than obligations, seems to strike at the heart of the most valued social institution of all, the family.

No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.

Marriage and the creation of families has been an integral part of our society since its creation; it should not be defined without the kind of involvement by the people which a constitutional process would require.

There is a real sense of anger among many people who are married that the government, any government, thinks it has the ability to change the definition of an institution like marriage.

Marriage has been defined by every legislature that has ever sat in the United States from every State, now 50 States, the same way, but now we have unelected judges altering and changing that fundamental institution.

I think of modern marriage as a car strangely fashioned out of an old abandoned horse carriage, built upon the framework of a mule cart. All the original engineering is still there, underneath it all.

I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends. I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

Traditional marriage between a man and a woman has been a cornerstone of our society for generations. If we are going to change that, it ought to be done by the will of the people.

Our Nation must defend the sanctity of marriage.

For more than fifty years the question of slavery has been more or less a subject of discord and contention; and, more recently, in some shape or other, it has been continually coming up in the councils of the nation, in the State Legislatures of the non-slaveholding States, before the people of the North, as an issue in elections, local and federal, and before the people of the South as an offset to its agitation at the North, to be considered with reference to its vindication as one of the essential elements of our society, its maintenance as an institution for the public good, and the protection of our rights, originating in it and under it, as the great God-given guaranty of the freedom of the white man through the thralldom of the black -- the accomplishment of the destiny of the African and Anglo-Saxon races by an observance and enforcement of the relations between them designed and decreed by divinity.

Public schools have become the established church of secular society