Social Failures Quotes

Progress in general seems to hold little interest for people who call themselves 'progressives.' What arouses them are denunciations of social failures and accusations of wrong-doing. ~ Thomas Sowell

I think one of the biggest political failures, and the biggest social failures, over the past few years has been the failure of empathy; not being able to look at the other person down the street. ~ Colum McCann

Changing Your Opinion
Think back to the low self-esteem statements you identified with, bearing in mind that, no matter how you came by your low opinion of yourself, you can change it. As Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "No one can make you feel inferior without your permission." You own your self-image, and you can feel about yourself whatever you choose to feel. Throughout this book, there are exercises to help you change how you feel about yourself. And in the next chapter, we'll look at some ways to set social goals. For now, try repeating what Mrs. Roosevelt said: "No one can make you feel inferior without your permission." Give yourself credit for seeking help with your social problems. You care about yourself, and that counts for a lot.
Social anxiety and low self-esteem go hand in hand. In fact, many people simplify so-called "shyness" as a self-esteem problem. The reality is, however, that poor self-esteem is a by-product of social anxiety. It is the social anxiety that comes first, not the other way around! Social failures cause anxiety, which causes avoidance, which causes low self-esteem. As a person's confidence dwindles, the fears become greater, until eventually the individual simply stops trying. With fewer and fewer opportunities for social interaction, there are also fewer opportunities to receive positive feedback. This combination of factors perpetuates low self-esteem, which cannot be replaced with a healthy self-image until the avoidant behavior c ~ Jonathan Berent

For police themselves, the consequence of [911 policing] has been the emergence of a siege mentality...the alienation of officers from the communities they police interferes with the effective exercise of their basic authority, forcing police to rely inordinately on the use of force. As strangers, police feel compelled to draw upon 'preemptively coercive means such as intimidation and threats' if not the direct application of force...not only is such coercion antithetical to policing a democracy, it may create the very resistance it is intended to forestall, and lead to self-fulfilling prophecies and a downward spiral in which police become more aggressive and youths embittered and resistant. ~ George Kelling

The fundamental imbalance that is behind all of the other social diseases is patriarchy. ~ Ani DiFranco

We have a choice in our response to failure. We can condemn or we can learn. All of us fail, but this doesn't mean that we are failures. We need to understand that failing can be a step toward maturity, not a permanent blot on our self-esteem...We don't have to allow failure to prevent us from being used by God. ~ Robert S. McGee

Power distance: the degree to which members of a society expect power to be unequally shared. Uncertainty avoidance: a society's reliance on social norms and procedures to alleviate the unpredictability of future events. Assertiveness: the extent to which a society encourages people to be tough, confrontational, assertive, and competitive rather than modest and tender. Humane orientation: the degree to which a society encourages and rewards individuals for being fair, altruistic, generous, caring, and kind to others. Future orientation: the extent to which a society encourages and rewards future-oriented behaviors such as planning, investing in the future, and delaying gratification. national culture The values and attitudes shared ~ Stephen P. Robbins

There's good art and there's bad art. A lot of action films are bad art, but Paul Greengrass showed us with the Bourne films that it's possible to make an action film with a political, social conscience. ~ Joe Wright

Plague might be a social incompetent, but he was unquestionably a genius. ~ Stieg Larsson

Girls tend to attribute their failures to factors such as lack of ability, while boys tend to attribute failure to specific factors, including teachers' attitudes. Moreover, girls avoid situations in which failure is likely, whereas boys approach such situations as a challenge, indicating that failure differentially affects self-esteem. ~ Michael Lewis

That's the worst thing about teaching, that our actions either have no force at all or have force beyond all intention, and not only our actions but our failures to act, gestures and words held back or unspoken, all we might have done and failed to do; and, more than this, that the consequences echo across years and silence, we can never really know what we've done. ~ Garth Greenwell

One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with the time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances. ~ Thomas Sowell

The corporations are worried about their reputational damage and a lot of the social media inflicts that, but it's hard to measure it. ~ Ralph Nader

Ordinary parties, he thought, were subtle games of sexual and social badminton ... ~ Annie Proulx

Pray you never become Miss Grey with her £50,000 and love comes to you without social rules and people's need for approval. ~ Shannon L. Alder

Now if you're using Twitter or other social networks, and you didn't realize this was a space with a lot of Brazilians in it, you're like most of us. Because what happens on a social network is you interact with the people that you have chosen to interact with. ~ Ethan Zuckerman

His chief failing was a habit of cracking heavy pedantic jokes; he was unable to let a good idea drop, and remarked several times during the course of the film that the heroine looked like she ought to be playing the horse. The comment had some truth in it, in that the heroine did have an equine cast of feature, but he made it too often, and with too little variation; however, she was willing to forgive him, in view of his evident tolerance of her social errors, such as an inability to say whether or not she wanted an ice cream. ~ Margaret Drabble

IQ is a general measure of socially acceptable categorization and reasoning skills. IQ tests were designed in behaviorism's heyday, when there was little interest in cognitive structure. [...] In other societies, a normal distribution of some general measure of social intelligence might look very different; some "normal" members of our society could well produce a score that's a standard deviation from "normal" members of another society on that other society's test. ~ Scott Atran

The intellectual project of decolonizing has to set out ways to proceed through a colonizing world. It needs a radical compassion that reaches out, that seeks collaboration, and that is open to possibilities that can only be imagined as other things fall into place. Decolonizing Methodologies is not a method for revolution in a political sense but provokes some revolutionary thinking about the roles that knowledge, knowledge production, knowledge hierarchies and knowledge institutions play in decolonization and social transformation. ~ Zed Books

Turn off all notifications on your phone, except the most important ones. And check your social media only once or twice a day, not every minute. If you can do this, then perhaps there is a possibility, that society will not completely lose its sanity and health after all. ~ Abhijit Naskar

As I have pointed out, it is the Christian tradition that is the most fundamental element in Western culture. It lies at the base not only of Western religion, but also of Western morals and Western social idealism. ~ Christopher Dawson

I'm a spiritual musician, I think there has been enough political musicians and I think everything that can be said has been said about political, social things, you know, and there's still some more to be said but not much. ~ Ziggy Marley

Raising Black children - female and male - in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive. ~ Audre Lorde

In real life I always seem to have a hard time winding up a conversation or asking somebody to leave, and sometimes the moment becomes so delicate and fraught with social complexity that I'll get overwhelmed trying to sort out all the different possible ways of saying it and all the different implications of each option and will just sort of blank out and do it totally straight
'I want to terminate the conversation and not have you be in my apartment anymore'
which evidently makes me look either as if I'm very rude and abrupt or as if I'm semi-autistic and have no sense of how to wind up a conversation gracefully ... I've actually lost friends this way. ~ David Foster Wallace

One day you retire, and you get a social life. ~ Jennifer Love Hewitt

Ghettos have their own characteristics and consequences :
be they physical. social, intellectual or mental, those who live in them always nurture projection of themselves or world around them that are more imaginary than true.
In the ghettos of the intellect and idealistic theories, there are a lot of intertolerant and racist people who do not realize that they are. ~ Tariq Ramadan

And this is the mission of the church
not civilization, but salvation
not better laws, purer legislation, social elevation, human equality and liberty, but first, the "kingdom of God and His righteousness;" regenerated hearts, and all other things will follow. ~ Abbott Eliot Kittredge

Social media is just useless garbage until one random, serendipitous, meaningful connection happens and suddenly the whole world shifts. ~ Dan Blank

Whichever group is in ascension at a given moment is, historically speaking, both unlikely to acknowledge the existence of abuses or bias, and also to justify the bias on any grounds they can - social, biological, what have you. ~ Elizabeth Bear

The essence of the Revolution is to abolish the attainment of unqualified power of man over man either by vote-getting, money-pressure or crude terror. The Revolution repudiates profit or terror altogether as methods of human intercourse. It turns the attention of men and women back from a frantic and futile struggle for the means of power, a struggle against our primary social instincts, to an innate urgency to make and to a beneficial competition for preeminence in social service. It recalls man to a clean and creative life from the entanglements and perversion of secondary issues into which he has fallen. It replaces property and official authority by the compelling prestige of sound achievement. Eminent service remains the only source of influence left in the world . . . ~ H.G.Wells

Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principles, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them.
But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists' hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred. ~ Theodore J. Kaczynski

Currently, 94 out of 100 of us pay the Social Security tax all year round. ~ Nick Clooney

Under crowded conditions the friendly social interactions between members of a group become reduced, and the destructive and aggressive patterns show a marked rise in frequency and intensity. ~ Desmond Morris

In the 21st century when few of us stay in the same job all our lives, I would like to think there was flexibility so teachers could become social workers, or foster carers become teachers. ~ Estelle Morris

The dark side of social media is that, within seconds, anything can be blown out of proportion and taken out of context. And it's very difficult not to get swept up in it all. ~ Nicola Formichetti

The Social Register is a nice address book for some people, but that's about it. ~ Dina Merrill

I have social anxiety. It's easier up on stage because there's security in being there. When I'm off stage I'm trying not to be a manic freak. I'm quite shy. ~ Sia Furler

In his history of solitude, Anthony Storr writes about the importance of being able to feel at peace in one's own company. But many find that, trained by the Net, they cannot find solitude even at a lake or beach or on a hike. Stillness makes them anxious. I see the beginnings of a backlash as some young people become disillusioned with social media. There is,. too, the renewed interest in yoga, Eastern religions, meditating, and slowness. ~ Sherry Turkle

Gossip never has to be true. It only has to be interesting. ~ Lisa Kleypas

I believe it to be a fact that the colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them. ~ James Weldon Johnson

The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform. ~ George Steiner

It's good to keep in mind that prominence is always a mix of hard work, eloquence in your practice, good timing and fortuitous social relations. Everything can't be personalized. ~ Barbara Kruger

Most teens aren't addicted to social media; if anything, they're addicted to each other. ~ Danah Boyd

There are ways you can find people to help you market your company on the Internet. If you have the right people helping you, you can get the word out. Newspaper and TV ads are expensive. If you can get the word out through social media, that's a big advantage. ~ Michael Franzese