Social Optics Quotes

Bureaucratic categories and organizational boxes do more than simply separate relevant from irrelevant information. They also produce the social optics that policymakers and bureaucrats use to see the world. Before policymakers can act, they first must come to create a definition and understanding of the situation, and that understanding is mediated by how the institution is organized to think. ...How organizations categorize and carve up the world has a profound impact on how policymakers see the world. ~ Michael Barnett

I get her to school, we do homework at night, and at this age, their social calendars are really quite hectic. She's not driving yet, so I end up chauffeuring her around. ~ Charlene Tilton

So-called Individualism is the social and economic laissez-faire: the exploitation of the masses by the classes by means of legal trickery, spiritual debasement and systematic indoctrination of the servile spirit, which process is known as 'education'. ~ Emma Goldman

Man is alone in the world, in tremendous eternal isolation. He has no object outside himself; lives for nothing else; he is far removed from being the slave of his wishes, of his abilities, of his necessities; he stands far above social ethics; he is alone. Thus he becomes one and all. ~ Otto Weininger

If you have free trade and free circulation of
capital and people but destroy the social state and all forms of progressive taxation, the temptations of defensive nationalism and identity politics will very likely grow stronger than ever in both Europe and the United States. Note, finally, that the less developed countries will be among the primary beneficiaries of a more just and transparent international tax system. ~ Thomas Piketty

Woman's sexuality is disruptive of the dully mechanical workaday world, in which efficiency means uniformity. The problems of woman's entrance into the career system spring from more than male chauvinism. She brings nature into the social realm, which may be too small to contain it. ~ Camille Paglia

One thing we know for sure is that the Web is a collaborative medium unlike any we've ever had before. We see people working together, playing together, interacting in social settings using these media. We hope that will emerge as the new tool for education. ~ Vint Cerf

The poor stay poor here because they do not save enough. ~ Abhijit V. Banerjee

No one is spared from it ~ Santosh Avvannavar

The techno-industrial system is exceptionally tough due to its so-called "democratic" structure and its resulting flexibility. Because dictatorial systems tend to be rigid, social tensions and resistance can be built up in them to the point where they damage and weaken the system and may lead to revolution. But in a "democratic" system, when social tension and resistance build up dangerously the system backs off enough, it compromises enough, to bring the tensions down to a safe level. ~ Theodore Kaczynski

One reason citizens, politicians and university donors sometimes lack confidence in the social sciences is that social scientists too often miss the chance to declare victory and move on to new frontiers. ~ Nicholas A. Christakis

We are citizens who love to fake life than dig deep into our reality to discover the truth and make amends and correct our own wrongdoings, because we are reluctant to learn from our past. ~ Nilantha Ilangamuwa

The way I look at a musical, you are commenting on the human condition no matter what you do. A musical may be light and frivolous, but by its very nature, it makes some kind of social comment. ~ Gene Kelly

Gallantly, ceaselessly, quietly, man must fight for inner liberty" to remain independent of the enslavement of the material world. "Inner liberty depends upon being exempt from domination of things as well as from domination of people. There are many who have acquired a high degree of political and social liberty, but only very few are not enslaved to things. This is our constant problem - how to live with people and remain free, how to live with things and remain independent. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel

Society and personality live in a continuing reciprocal relation with each other. The search for personal change without efforts to change the institutions within which we live and grow will, therefore, be met with only limited reward. ~ Lillian B. Rubin

And so the next morning I left my room and took my suitcases down in the elevator to the lobby, where I handed in the key. Every movement, every tiny social transaction seemed backlit, consecrated somehow, like the footsteps a prisoner counts off in his head as he is marched to the scaffold. Frank was waiting outside, leaning with his arms crossed against his rusty white van. Someone had drawn a penis in the dust on its side. "All right?" he said. "Capital," I said. "Capital. ~ Paul Murray

If the long arc of history bends toward social justice, it also bends toward environmental justice and ecological sanity. ~ David Jaber

The future of profit is purpose. ~ Simon Mainwaring

Satan delegates high-ranking members of the hierarchy of evil spirits to control nations, regions, cities, tribes, people groups, neighborhoods and other significant social networks of human beings throughout the world. Their major assignment is to prevent God from being glorified in their territory, which they do through directing the activity of lower-ranking demons. ~ C. Wagner

The struggle against war and its social source, capitalism, presupposes direct, active, unequivocal support to the oppressed colonial peoples in their struggles and wars against imperialism. A 'neutral' position is tantamount to support of imperialism. ~ Leon Trotsky

Recovering is a process of coming to experience a sense of self. More precisely, it is a process of learning to sense one's self, to attune to one's subjective physical, psychic, and social self- experience. These woman's core sense of shame and their difficulty tolerating painful emotions had led them to avoid turning their attention inward to their internal sense of things. In recovering, they "came to their senses" and learned to trust their sensed experience, in particular their sense of "enoughness"". ~ Sheila M. Reindl

A hugely complicated, centrally planned, social and economic system can only be kept on the rails for as long as people believe in it. ~ Paul Kriwaczek

What the world, social and political, concrete and mental, really needs is not new things, but the old things made new ... ~ Ethel M. Dell

I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to university go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene. It is the white-collar proletariat. They do not go to university to acquire culture but to get a job, and when they have got one, scamp it. They have no manners and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious . They are scum. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Sorting through what social conventions we ought to adopt for the Internet is a pretty tricky and complicated topic. I think we are just going to live through a lot of these issues until we discover what social norms make sense. ~ Vint Cerf

You cannot feed the hungry on statistics. ~ Heinrich Heine

If nаturе іntеndеd uѕ to tаlk mоrе than lіѕtеn, ѕhе would have gіvеn us twо mоuthѕ and оnе еаr. ~ Shane Johnston

But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another? ~ Walter Lippmann

These smugglers, many of them present in trafficking through my State of Arizona, create false Social Security cards, false green cards, visas and a variety of other fraudulent documents as an essential part of their smuggling activities. ~ John Shadegg

Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the 'unnamable Thing', the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies 'warded off in advance'. When it actually arrives, capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis. ~ Mark Fisher

Increased physical activity during the school day can help children's attention, classroom behavior, and achievement test scores. Meanwhile, the decline of play is closely linked to ADHD; behavioral problems; and stunted social, cognitive, and creative development. ~ Darell Hammond

By means of the banking system the distribution of capital as a special business, a social function, is taken out of the hands of the private capitalists and usurers. But at the same time, banking and credit become the most effective means of driving captialist production beyond its own limits and one of the most effective vehicles of crises and swindle. ~ Karl Marx

If they had a social gospel in the days of the prodigal son, somebody would have given him a bed and a sandwich and he never would have gone home. ~ Vance Havner

Facebook and Twitter and these other social sites bring every, I mean, 140 characters. I mean, I'm on Twitter and I have fun. But I don't think anybody learns anything about me as a person. ~ Sherman Alexie

No born Londoner (it is different with people of Scotch or Irish origin) now says 'bloody,' unless he is a man of some education. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social scale and ceased to be a swear word for the purposes of the working classes. The current London adjective, now tacked on to every noun, is
. No doubt in time
, like 'bloody,' will find its way into the drawing room and replaced by some other word. ~ George Orwell

In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs. ~ Simone Weil

Perhaps the most radical aspect of queer politics was its claim not only to transcend the homo/hetero boundary but to do so in such a way as to challenge the sexual regulation and repression of heterosexual desire, above all female desire. Queer politics, it was claimed, had a lot to teach those accustomed to the narrow confines of 'male' and 'female' heterosexual roles in relationships. The re-working of notions of monogamy and the send-up of marriage through queer weddings, the greater sexual adventurism, the rejection of the concept of gay men and lesbians as 'victims' in favour of assertiveness and redefinition, and the emphasis on the creation of more egalitarian relationships in the domestic, sexual and social spheres, were all cited as examples of how queer could contribute to a new sexual agenda of empowerment. ~ Richard Dunphy

Monogamy is not found in any social, group-living primate except - if the standard narrative is to be believed - us. ~ Christopher Ryan

Anarchism is no patent solution for all human problems, no Utopia of a perfect social order, as it has often been called, since on principle it rejects all absolute schemes and concepts. It does not believe in any absolute truth, or in definite final goals for human development, but in an unlimited perfectibility of social arrangements and human conditions which are always straining after higher forms of expression, and to which for this reason one can assign no definite terminus nor set any fixed goal. ~ Rudolf Rocker

But there was a sense of something tipping out of balance. The times seemed out of joint. There was too much decadence. Too much intensity. Too much change. Too much happiness juxtaposed with too much misery. Too much wealth next to too much poverty. The world was becoming faster and louder, and the social systems were becoming as chaotic and fragmented as jazz scores. So there was a craving, in some places, for simplicity, for order, for scapegoats and for bully-boy leaders, for nations to become like religions or cults. It happened every now and then.
It seemed, in the 1930s, that the whole course of humanity was at stake. As it very often does today. Too many people wanted to find an easy answer to complicated questions. It was a dangerous time to be human. To feel or to think or to care. ~ Matt Haig

I don't get intimidated. When I'm on set, I never really get intimidated by people. But in social situations, it's weird sometimes. You don't want to seem like you're kissing somebody's ass because they're a celebrity. ~ Jeremy Luke

Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way. ~ Salman Rushdie

Come on," said the Director. "You are all completely mad people who mess around with technology and weird social theory for fun until your brains shit themselves and you fall over. Any of you could have done this. ~ Warren Ellis