Social Construction Quotes

Mother Nature made continents. Human beings made countries. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Healthy, adj.
There are times when I'm alone that I think, This is it. This is actually the natural state. All I need are my thoughts and my small acts of creation and my ability to go or do whatever I want to go or do. I am myself, and that is the point. Pairing is a social construction. It is by no means necessary for everyone to do it. Maybe I'm better like this. Maybe I could live my life in my own world, and then simply leave it when it's time to go. ~ David Levithan

Gender identity is our internal response to a social construction that attempts to make a connection between a person's biological makeup and their eventual role in society. ~ Sam Killermann

A significant driver of opposition to abortion is the social construction of the Ideal Woman. In a culture that rarely, if ever, allows women simply to be people, value is ascribed based on a woman's relation to something other than herself. A woman on her own is like a bit of driftwood floating in the ocean. She is a broken object with no purpose, waiting either to wash up on the shore and be put to use as part of something else, or to sink and be forgotten forever. ~ Clementine Ford

One could understand feminism generally as an attack on woman as she was under "patriarchy" (that concept is a social construction of feminism). The feminine mystique was her ideal; in regard to sex, it consisted of women's modesty and in the double standard of sexual conduct that comes with it, which treated women's misbehavior as more serious than men's. Instead of trying to establish a single standard by bringing men up to the higher standard of women, as with earlier feminism, today's feminism decided to demand that women be entitled to sink to the level of men. It bought into the sexual revolution of the late sixties and required that women be rewarded with the privileges of male conquest rather than, say, continue serving as camp followers of rock bands. The result has been the turn for the worse. ... What was there in feminine modesty that the feminists left behind?

In return for women's holding to a higher standard of sexual behavior, feminine modesty gave them protection while they considered whether they wanted to consent. It gave them time: Not so fast! Not the first date! I'm not ready for that! It gave them the pleasure of being courted along with the advantage of looking before you leap. To win over a woman, men had to strive to express their finer feelings, if they had any. Women could judge their character and choose accordingly. In sum, women had the right of choice, if I may borrow that slogan. All this and more was social construction, to be sure ~ Harvey Mansfield

I think the idea of the social construction of beauty - this idea that beauty is simply whatever culture or society says it is - is on the run. Of course, beauty does arise in a cultural context. No one ever denies that. But there's also a natural response people have to it. ~ Denis Dutton

This is why we apply the LCD Principle or Lowest Common Democracy. In short, this is social interaction based not on the best possible good, but on the least possible offense. Without saying so, the parties involved have entered into the following arrangement: What is the least we can all agree on and still get along? Of course, you can see this means no one is pleased. ~ Geoffrey Wood

The right to express one's views, practice one's faith, peacefully assemble with others to pursue political or social change - these are all rights to which all human beings are entitled, whether they choose to exercise them in a city square or an Internet chat room. And just as we have worked together since the last century to secure these rights in the material world, we must work together in this century to secure them in cyberspace. ~ Hillary Clinton

When the wilderness movement emerged, it emerged separate from the issue of social inequality and the economic problems of survival. It was a preservationist ecology movement created by an occupying culture. Clearly, a wilderness movement started by Native Americans would not have had the same roots. ~ Vandana Shiva

Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom. ~ Murray Bookchin

Change Your Inaccurate Expectations

Many social fears are caused by inaccurate expectations and "catastrophizing." One way to determine your expectations is to figure out exactly what you fear. For instance, if you are going to a friend's birthday party and you feel overly anxious, ask yourself "Why am I afraid?" "Because I am going to a party" isn't a good answer, because the party itself does not lead to anxiety. You need to determine what you expect will happen at the party to determine what is making you nervous. You might find that you believe no one will talk to you or that your friend will hate your gift. Once you identify concrete fears and expectations, you can work to change your maladaptive thinking patterns. ~ Heather Moehn

Tribes will be defined by social enclaves on the internet, rather than by geography or kinship, but the world will be more fragmented and less tolerant, since ones real-world surroundings will not have the homogeneity of ones online clan. ~ Jim Horning

People want to think of economics as a natural science, like physics, with the comforting reliability of simple-to-understand theories like F=MA. Unfortunately, it isn't. Economics is a social science, and the so-called theories are really social and moral constructs. ~ Nick Hanauer

I want to get away from the social vampires in Tucson. The people who have no lives of their own and meet me and know who I am and feel entitled to say negative things. I have good friends here, especially in the bands. But a lot of it is just like high school. ~ Neko Case

For my sins I recently went on a fact-finding tour of the North East ... They're no longer whineing and snivelling about social justice and the right to work. They've given up completely. ~ William Donaldson

Words are big. They define who you are. They are permanent. I don't think most people realize that. What you say is who you are. So try to be gentle on social media. Lift others up when you can, even if you don't agree with what they have to say. Don't always turn your words into weapons when you can just as easily make them doves. ~ Jann Arden

Psychologism is, I believe, correct only in so far as it insists upon what may be called 'methodological individualism' as opposed to 'methodological collectivism'; it rightly insists that the 'behaviour' and the 'actions' of collectives, such as states or social groups, must be reduced to the behaviour and to the actions of human individuals. But the belief that the choice of such an individualist method implies the choice of a psychological method is mistaken. ~ Karl Popper

As the great naturalist Charles Darwin saw clearly, individual and collective interests often coincide, as in the invisible hand narrative. But he also saw that in many other cases, interests at the two levels are squarely in conflict, and that in those cases, individual interests generally trump. That simple observation suggests that market failure is often the result not of insufficient competition (the traditional charge from social critics on the Left), but of the very logic of competition itself. ~ Bob Frank

I support voluntary personal retirement accounts for Social Security. It should be people's free choice. ~ Sharron Angle

I think people think their incomes have been flat lining for a long period of time. They feel that the next generation's opportunities are not going to be improvement. So and I also think that social media then allows insurgent movements to gain scale at speed. ~ Tony Blair

Whoever seeks to live by brain and pen alone is, at the beginning of such a career, treated as a sort of social pariah. ~ Marie Corelli

Honeybees depend not only on physical contact with the colony, but also require it's social companionship and support. Isolate a honeybee from her sisters and she will soon die. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

PR is everything and everywhere. PR is the King and the Slave, the Game Changer and the Boss, the revolution! Indeed, the Global PR Revolution! ~ Maxim Behar

Veblen argues that the existing social hierarchy is actively maintained by competitive consumption among all classes of society. Thus, consumerism, far from being something that is inflicted upon the working classes by the scheming bourgeoisi, is something that the working classes actively participate in maintaining - even though it is not in their collective interest to do so. If the working classes had wanted to buy out the capitalists, they could easily have done so by now, simply by saving a fraction of the wage increases that they have received over the years. But instead they have chosen to max out their spending on consumer goods. ~ Joseph Heath

Stopping at her house is a neighbor boy with evil on his mind, cause he's been peeking in Angie's room at night through her window blind. ~ Helen Reddy

You happily give Facebook terabytes of structured data about yourself, content with the implicit tradeoff that Facebook is going to give you a social service that makes your life better. ~ John Battelle

If I don't care what toothpaste you use, then why should I care who's in your bed? ~ Randolph Randy Camp

We need to preserve programs like Social Security and Medicare for our seniors of today and tomorrow. But we need to strengthen both Social Security and Medicare to make sure these programs are still available for future generations. ~ Joni Ernst

Consumption can be very harmful to the world. I'm not a big proponent of the idea that consumption makes you morally bad, but there are consequences to our acts, and those consequences are environmental degradation and the huge social inequalities that make our standard of living in the United States possible. ~ Judith Levine

UN studies conducted in more than forty developing countries show that the birth rate falls as women gain equality ... I believe income-earning opportunities that empower poor women ... will have more impact on curbing population growth that the current system of "encouraging" family planning practices through intimidation tactics.. Family planning should be left to the family. ~ Muhammad Yunus

'Twisted' is similar to 'Pretty Little Liars' in that it's about trying to find out who did it, but it's more about the human relationships between characters and the strain that things can put on them. It's also a little bit of a social commentary piece, because it covers very timely issues. ~ Avan Jogia

As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake. ~ Hannah Arendt

We've never thought too deeply about the roles things like forgetting or partisanship or inefficiency or ambiguity or hypocrisy play in our political or social life. It's been impossible to get rid of them, so we took them for granted, and we kind of thought, naively, that they're always the enemy. ~ Evgeny Morozov

The events of the last forty years have inflicted such a blow to the self confidence of Western civilization and to the belief in progress which was so strong during the nineteenth century, that men tend to go too far in the opposite direction: in fact the modern world is experiencing the same kind of danger which was so fatal to the ancient world--the crisis of which Gilbert Murray writes in his Four Stages of Greek Religion as "The Loss of Nerve."
There have been signs of this in Western literature for a long time past, and it has already had a serious effect on Western culture an education. This is the typical tragedy of the intelligentsia as shown in nineteenth century Russia and often in twentieth century Germany: the case of a society or class devoting enormous efforts to higher education and to the formation of an intellectual elite and then finding that the final result of the system is to breed a spirit of pessimism and nihilism and revolt. There was something seriously wrong about an educational system which cancelled itself out in this way, which picked out the ablest minds in a society and subjected them to an intensive process of competitive development which ended in a revolutionary or cynical reaction against the society that produced it. But behind these defects of an over-cerebralized and over-competitive method of education, there is the deeper cause in the loss of the common spiritual background which unifies education with social life. For the liberal ~ Christopher Henry Dawson

In this day and age, especially with all the media and television, social media, and the Internet, we are constantly being compared and comparing ourselves to others' lives and journeys. Keep your eyes on your own road. ~ Sanaa Lathan

Do you ever feel that same need? Your life is so very different from my own. The grandness of the world, the real world, the whole world, is a known thing for you. And you have no need of dispatches because you have seen so much of the American galaxy and its inhabitants - their homes, their hobbies - up close. I don't know what it means to grow up with a black president, social networks, omnipresent media, and black women everywhere in their natural hair. What I know is that when they loosed the killer of Michael Brown, you said, "I've got to go." And that cut me because, for all our differing worlds, at your age my feeling was exactly the same. And I recall that even then I had not yet begun to imagine the perils that tangle us. You still believe the injustice was Michael Brown. You have not yet grappled with your own myths and narratives and discovered the plunder everywhere around us.

Before I could discover, before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils that seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed. And yet the heat that springs from the constant danger, from a lifestyle of near-death experience, is thrilling. T ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Flattery is a challenge. The proper turning away from it, undercutting, diminishing it without offense or vehemence, is a social grace sweeter even than the swift determination to keep ahead in the race of hospitality. ~ Elizabeth Hardwick

As we saw in the Queen's Speech, anti-social behaviour - a phenomenon that I believe to be a genuine worry that is also being fed by a lot of scare stories - is the political theme of the moment. ~ Kamal Ahmed

Acting serves as the quintessential social lubricant and a device for protecting our interests and gaining advantage in every aspect of life. ~ Marlon Brando

Yours for the unshackled exercise of every faculty by every human being. ~ Lydia M. Child

There has to be a better, smarter way to authenticate who somebody is. Social Security numbers are floating out there everywhere. ~ Jason Chaffetz

Nevertheless, for the most part the intangible dangers of being observed by unintended audiences are considered secondary to the convenience of instantaneous access to this "virtual campfire" from the comfort of the home. While online social networking sites are often disparaged as poor replacements for human interaction that encourage superficial relationships, my ethnographic analysis reveals how some people, American youth in particular, are incorporating this medium into their everyday practices in more or less meaningful ways. Through elucidating both the dangers and possibilities of this medium, I seek to encourage people to create their own "virtual campfires" as a supplement to, rather than a replacement of, their offline lives. Through participation and sharing in meaningful ways- from conversation to creating art- we might begin to see these sites as vehicles for healing the widely-felt loss of community and the pervasive sense of alienation experienced by so many. ~ Jennifer Anne Ryan

Consumption is a social relationship, the dominant relationship in our society-one that makes it harder and harder for people to hold together, to create community. ~ Juliet B. Schor

Keeping books on social aid is capitalistic nonsense. I just use the money for the poor. I can't stop to count it. ~ Evita Peron

Alekhine's real genius is in the preparation and construction of a position, long before combinations or mating attacks come into consideration at all. ~ Max Euwe

The Tears of Dark Water is not really "about" Somali piracy. It is about the multi-dimensional fallout of Somalia's disintegration over the past two decades. Piracy offered me a narrative framework to explore not only how a hijacking and hostage crisis could end in tragedy but also how the breakdown of social order on land could inspire young Somalis to take to the ocean. ~ Corban Addison

Please note, I am not suggesting that illicit drugs are required to break down social barriers. ~ Thomas C. Foster

Books are a social substitute; you read people who, at one level, you'd like to hang out with. [David Foster Wallace]'s writing self
it's most pronounced in his essays
was the best friend you'd ever have, spotting everything, whispering jokes, sweeping you past what was irritating or boring or awful in humane style. ~ David Lipsky

Today more people believe in UFOs than believe that Social Security will take care of their retirement. ~ Scott Cook

I can read minds but I still don't understand women. Or men. Humans. I don't understand humans. ~ Tade Thompson

While paying attention to positive and negative feedback is very important, it is not enough. What also matters is acknowledging and responding to this feedback. This is how you nurture your relationship with your audience. ~ Cendrine Marrouat