31 Quotations Found

We argue with our biology, and the result of that argument is civilization.

Author: Charles Siebert | Subjects: Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology

Whenever a social system — a company, or in this case a larger group of mainstream institutions — is disrupted, and the leaders have not developed an inner capacity for curiosity, compassion, and courage, then you will tend to see a closing of the mind and the heart, and a fanatical expression of will. You will see the amplification of prejudice, an increase in public … [ Read more ]

Author: Otto Scharmer | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Sociology | Anthropology

If we do not remember our heroes, we will produce no heroes. If we do not record their sacrifices, their sacrifices would have been in vain. […] the greatest strength we have as people is our common memories of the past and our common hopes for the future. […] For without those memories, the next generation will not have the fighting spirit to carry on. … [ Read more ]

Author: George Yeo | Subjects: History, Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology

Fluidity of memory and a capacity to forget is perhaps the most haunting trait of our species. As history confirms, it allows us to come to terms with any degree of social, moral, or environmental degradation.

Author: Wade Davis | Source: Rolling Stone | Subjects: Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology

The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.

Author: Hannah Arendt | Subjects: Politics & Public Policy, Sociology | Anthropology

To watch the TV screen for any length of time is to learn some really frightening things about the American sense of reality. We are cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this … [ Read more ]

Author: James Baldwin | Subjects: America, International, Life & Society, Race Relations, Sociology | Anthropology

The preeminent function of social classification appears therefore to be social rule… Classification is nine-tenths of subjection. Indeed to rule over another successfully you have only to see to it that he keeps his place — his place as a male, her place as a female, his or her place as a junior, as a subject or servant or social “inferior” of any kind, as … [ Read more ]

Author: Elsie Clews Parsons | Subjects: Life & Society, Power, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology

In some ways the health of a society can be measured by how many avenues to self-importance it opens up.

Author: David Brooks | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology

A society can be measured not by the knowledge that it acquires, but by the values it brings to bear on that knowledge.

Author: Susanna Waterman | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology, Values

[M]y friends, will you not agree that any society which begins to be doubtful of itself; in which one man looks at another and says: “He may be a traitor,” in which that spirit has disappeared which says: “I will not accept that, I will not believe that—I will demand proof. I will not say of my brother that he may be a traitor,” but … [ Read more ]

Author: Learned Hand | Subjects: Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology

As the Czech sociologist Ernest Gellner argues in his classic, Nations and Nationalism, modern man is socialized by what Gellner calls a common “high culture.” The sociologist argues that we get community, cultural identity, from mainstream media. Without that high culture, without common frames of cultural references, without a common language, we slip back into the fractured village life of the pre-industrial world. Benedict Anderson, … [ Read more ]

Authors: Andrew Keen, Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology