Social Vision Quotes

Too often, politicians fail to relate what they advocate to the kind of society they want to build, or they dress up policy in rhetoric which belies their actual intention. Meanwhile Joe Public is left wondering what on earth this bunch are all about and how their vision of a good society differs from that of the other lot.

I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.

Another feature of the prevailing vision is that the anointed must try to change the fundamental character of their fellow human beings, to make them more like themselves. Thus phrases about “raising the consciousness” of others, making them “aware,” or hoping that they will “grow.” In other words, the anointed must not only design a different social world from that which exists, they must people that world with different creatures, custom-made for the purpose.

The woman's bill of rights is, unhappily, long overdue. It should have run along with the rights of man in the eighteenth century. Its drag as to time of official proclamation is a drag as to social vision. And even if equal rights were now written into the law of our land, it would be so inadequate today as a means to food, clothing and shelter for woman at large that what they would still be enjoying would be equality in disaster rather than in realistic privilege.

Today, despite free speech and the mass media, the prevailing social vision is dangerously close to sealing itself off from any discordant feedback from reality.

There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer

A person may be totally unimaginative and have the social vision of a mole, and we still call him a decent man.

The real radical is that person who has a vision of equality and is willing to do those things that will bring reality closer to that vision. . .

If people call me Christian, not from the standpoint of religion but from the standpoint of social vision, I declare that I am a Christian.

This constitution recognises the need for social dialogue involving labour and management; it involves trade unions in the decision-making process; it has a social vision founded on social dialogue.