2099 Quotations Found

Prejudice can be detected, discounted, and refined, but so long as finite men must compress into a short schooling preparation for dealing with a vast civilization, they must carry pictures of it around with them, and have prejudices. The quality of their thinking and doing will depend on whether those prejudices are friendly, friendly to other people, to other ideas, whether they evoke love of … [ Read more ]

Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Prejudice and Stereotype, Psychology | Behavior

A pattern of stereotypes is not neutral. It is not merely a way of substituting order for the great blooming, buzzing confusion of reality. It is not merely a short cut. It is all these things and something more. It is the guarantee of our self-respect; it is the projection upon the world of our own sense of our own value, our own position and … [ Read more ]

Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Prejudice and Stereotype, Psychology | Behavior

The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society.

They are an ordered, more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves. They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world … [ Read more ]

Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Perception | Observation, Prejudice and Stereotype, Psychology | Behavior

The great tragedy of human society […] is that those in power are reluctant to hold stereotypes lightly and modify them gladly, because stereotypes are how they stake out their place in the world and maintain the world-order that is the source of their power.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Power, Prejudice and Stereotype

We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception. They mark out certain objects as familiar or strange, emphasizing the difference, so that the slightly familiar is seen as very familiar, and the somewhat strange as sharply alien… Were … [ Read more ]

Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Perception | Observation, Prejudice and Stereotype, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

Those whom we love and admire most are the men and women whose consciousness is peopled thickly with persons rather than with types, who know us rather than the classification into which we might fit. For even without phrasing it to ourselves, we feel intuitively that all classification is in relation to some purpose not necessarily our own; that between two human beings no association … [ Read more ]

Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Prejudice and Stereotype, Relationships

For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.

Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society, Prejudice and Stereotype, Thought | Inquiry

Each thing we preconceive blinds us to what actually is — a tendency that, when it rises to the level of social perception in the form of stereotypes, metastasizes into a status quo that makes the powerful all the more powerful and the power-poor all the poorer.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Power, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us.

Author: Stephen Covey | Subjects: Freedom | Liberty, Personal Improvement

Naturalisation, as it is called in political terms, or, more comprehensively, assimilation is a complex process of classification which has of course more than one end. […] Making citizens is an outlet for the energy of many groups of the native born. When the outlet is denied them, when foreigners are considered too disparate for assimilation to become possible or when immigrants have resisted assimilation … [ Read more ]

Author: Elsie Clews Parsons | Subject: Immigration

Self-control is a means to controlling other people. So is self-classification. The feeling of having our class back of us gives us self-assurance… we enhance our sense of power. Similarly, by declassifying or demoting others or by suspending their regular classification, so to speak, we get a pleasurable sense of our own power.

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

Classification, [Elsie Clews] Parsons observes, is not just what we do with others but what we do with ourselves in our struggle for belonging and self-inclusion — a struggle that sometimes metastasizes into a tendency toward punitive exclusion directed at those we place outside the boundaries of our self-elected classifications.

Authors: Elsie Clews Parsons, Maria Popova | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

Conspicuous consumption, conspicuous waste is in all classes a manifestation of the will to power.

Author: Elsie Clews Parsons | Subjects: Concepts, Consumerism, Economics | Economy, Life & Society, Power

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

Society has discovered discrimination as the great social weapon by which one may kill men without any bloodshed.

Author: Hannah Arendt | Subject: Life & Society

We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.

Author: Epictetus | Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Wisdom

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as … [ Read more ]

Author: George Bernard Shaw | Subjects: Happiness, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

I am convinced that the luckiest of geographic circumstances and the best of laws cannot maintain a constitution in despite of mores, whereas the latter can turn even the most unfavorable circumstances and the worst laws to advantage. The importance of mores is a universal trust to which study and experience continually bring us back.

Author: Alexis de Tocqueville | Subject: Politics & Public Policy

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.

Author: Albert Camus | Subject: Good & Evil

To the extent that people do embrace false beliefs, it’s usually as a convenient pretext for views they already hold, actions they already intend, or because a particular falsehood is useful or at least harmless.

Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry