Social Structures Quotes

One must denounce the economic, financial, and social mechanisms and structures that are manipulated by the rich and powerful for their own benefit at the expense of the poor

History is the record of human society or world civilization, of the changes that take place in the nature of that society … of all the transformations that society undergoes by its very nature.

Social conservatives say who drives the bus.

Science of Society

I have a certain pool of subject matter that I like to write about, things that interest me: politics, religion, ecology, and relationships between men and women. And that's usually what I focus on.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.

Life, it is true, can be grasped in all its confused futility merely by opening one's eyes and sitting passively, a spectator on the stands of history - but to understand the social processes and conflicts, the interplay between individual and group, even the physicality of human experience, we have need of small-scale models.

I recognized that … there was a science of society as well as botany.

Life is politics.

It is our task to inquire into the causes that have brought about the observed differentiation, and to investigate the sequence of events that have led to the establishment of the multifarious forms of human life.

In the end, the character of a civilization is encased in its structures.

Politics is applied biology.

Poverty is not the simple result of bad geography, bad culture, bad history. It's the result of us: of the ways that people choose to organize their societies.

I think if you look at the themes that are presented in the film, some are inherently social, and I think that any film which deals with the family is dealing with the smallest social unit in our society - and in a sense it is a question of scope.

Private property is a very fundamental and very long-term institution.

The patriarchy is alive and well in Egypt and the wider Arab world. Just because we got rid of the father of the nation in Egypt or Tunisia, Mubarak or Ben Ali, and in a number of other countries, does not mean that the father of the family does not still hold sway.

Power rests on the ability to satisfy human needs.

Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand.

The result [of more rapidly adopting technology] is likely to be more unemployment in the short term and perhaps greater inequality—a recipe for social instability. Economists are right to remind us that workers who are displaced by machine intelligence need not be condemned to long-term idleness. Given the infinite variety of human desires, there is always more work to be done. But society will need to facilitate social structures that help employees face a lifetime of job changes.

We don't live in a capitalist totality. Capitalism couldn't survive as a totality anyway. We live in this complex system and we already live communism and anarchism in a million forms everyday.

The structure of society throughout the world has been created by individuals

I started out in anthropology, so to me how society works, how people put themselves together and make things work, has always been a big interest.

Monogamy, or restrictions by law to one wife, is no part of the economy of Heaven among men. Such a system was commenced by the founders of the Roman empire. That empire was founded on the banks of the Tiber by wandering brigands. When these robbers founded the city of Rome, it was evident to them that their success in attaining a balance of power with their neighbors, depended upon introducing females into their body politic, so they stole them from the Sabines, who were near neighbors. The scarcity of women gave existence to laws restricting one wife to one man. Rome became the mistress of the world, and introduced this order of monogamy wherever her sway was acknowledged. Thus this monogamic order of marriage, so esteemed by modern Christians as a holy sacrament and divine institution, is nothing but a system established by a set of robbers.

There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions. But there is no such thing as institutional conditions without any individual actions and no such thing as individual action without institutional conditions. So there is always personal responsibility.

Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.