Social Policy Quotes

Student loans have been helpful to many. But they offer neither incentive nor assistance to those students who, by reason of family or other obligations, are unable or unwilling to go deeper into debt ... It is, moreover, only prudent economic and social policy for the public to share part of the costs of the long period of higher education for those whose development is essential to our national economic and social well-being. All of us share in the benefits - all should share in the costs. ~ John F. Kennedy

I'm interested in current affairs and social policy as a whole, but I don't watch politics for sport. ~ Anna Chlumsky

Ending feudalism, ending slavery, enacting labor laws, winning universal suffrage, ending Jim Crow laws, overcoming much of the mindset and practice of patriarchy as it was entrenched in the '50s and '60s, bringing gay rights and liberation into the light of social policy and practice. Putting ecology on the political map. The left has a long lineage. ~ Michael Albert

If the government wants to do social policy, it should not be done in a quasi-public company. If you have a mortgage guarantee company which is done by the U.S. government, it should be guaranteed by the originators, i.e., the shareholder. ~ Jamie Dimon

By establishing a social policy that keeps physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia illegal but recognizes exceptions, we would adopt the correct moral view: the onus of proving that everything had been tried and that the motivation and rationale were convincing would rest on those who wanted to end a life. ~ Ezekiel Emanuel

Once becoming a mother, a woman might be radicalized in her feminism. She had a greater stake in saving the earth from male politicians. She had a greater stake in education and health, in the environment, in all social policy. She finally understood the way our society makes children and mothers the lowers of priorities.
...
I was hardly mellowed by the maternal transformation. If anything, my feminism grew more fierce. ~ Erica Jong

The right combination is between a free economy and social policy that addresses the needs of society and creates equal opportunity. ~ Benjamin Netanyahu

One cannot dispute the fact that giving poor black adolescents job skills, if it is self-evident that they do not possess the academic skills to go to college, is a good thing in itself. But the business leaders who put emphasis on filling entry-level job slots are too frequently the people who, by prior lobbying and voting patterns and their impact upon social policy, have made it all but certain that few of these urban kids would get the education in their early years that would have made them look like college prospects by their secondary years. First we circumscribe their destinies and then we look at the diminished product and we say, "Let's be pragmatic and do with them what we can. ~ Jonathan Kozol

In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn't mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

[beware that] many of what are called social problems are differences between the theories of intellectuals and the realities of the world - differences which many intellectuals interpret to mean that it is the real world that is wrong and needs changing. ~ Thomas Sowell

There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people. ~ Toni Morrison

A handful of works in history have had a direct impact on social policy: one or two works of Dickens, some of Zola, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and, in modern drama, Larry Kramer's 'The Normal Heart.' ~ Tony Kushner

First of all, nobody gave us anything. It makes me furious when I hear that they gave us suffrage. Excuse me? It took 72 years of unrelenting, unbroken organizing grassroots effort to get women's suffrage. It took 113 years to get rid of child labor by law. It took similarly long periods of organized effort to accomplish any advance in social policy. ~ Gerda Lerner

It's as though not even that most basic level of imaginative thought had been admitted into consciousness to cause the slightest disturbance. A century of destruction unlike any other in its extremity befalls and blights the human race - scores of millions of ordinary people condemned to suffer deprivation upon deprivation, atrocity upon atrocity, evil upon evil, half the world or more subjected to pathological sadism as social policy, whole societies organized and fettered by the fear of violent persecution, the degradation of individual life engineered on a scale unknown throughout human history, nations broken and enslaved by ideological criminals who rob them of everything, entire populations so demoralized as to be unable to get out of bed in the morning with the minutest desire to face the day ... all the terrible touchstones presented by this century, and here they are up in arms about Faunia Farley. ~ Philip Roth

When two working people decide to marry, their federal income tax is usually increased. As soon as one spouse earns at least 20 percent of a married couple's total income, the couple pays a 'marriage tax.' ... The United States is the only major industrialized nation in the free world in which the tax cost of the second [married] earner's entry into the work force is higher than that of the first. On one hand, our government's social policy is to help working women earn equal salaries to those of men, but on the other we have a tax structure that penalizes them when they do so. ~ Millicent Fenwick

Infectious disease exists at this intersection between real science, medicine, public health, social policy, and human conflict. There's a tendency of people to try and make a group out of those who have the disease. It makes people who don't have the disease feel safer. ~ Andrea Barrett

When it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s. ~ Barack Obama

I think the team that successfully puts together an economic and social policy framework for global full employment in decent working conditions based on local development, that would command the support of all stakeholders and all international organizations concerned, should be awarded the [Nobel] prize. I am sure they would get it not just for economics, but also for peace in the world. ~ Juan Somavia

Naturalism attempts to fortify itself against God by altogether shutting Him out of public life, social policy, the courts, and eliminating all biblical influence in morality and ethics. ~ John F. MacArthur Jr.

The most troubling aspect of social policy towards the poor in late 20th century America is or how much it costs, but what it has bought. ~ Charles A. Murray

The United States over the last thirty years has seen a growing gap - indeed, a deepening gulf - between rich and poor. The gap is significantly greater than in any other developed nation. Moreover, the growing gulf between rich and poor is the result of social and economic policy, not because some classes of people worked harder and others slacked off over the last thirty years (all of us, according to most studies, are working harder). The differences among countries generate the same conclusion: social policy, not simply individual effort, is responsible for the distribution of wealth. Our recent social policy may not have been intended to produce this result, but it has. The consequence is increased suffering and desperation among the poor and potentially grave consequences for the society as a whole.

Moreover, many people in the middle, who are most often struggling financially, support the individualistic ideology underlying our social policy - namely, the notions that we each have worked hard for what we have and ought to be able to keep all of it, that government is bad (or at least inefficient and wasteful - and hungry for our tax dollars), and that things will be better for all of us if we let the wealthiest people in our country make and keep as much money as possible. Many of us seem not to realize that the people who benefit the most from our politics and economics of individualism are the wealthiest 10 percent, especially the top 1 percent. People wil ~ Marcus J. Borg

In technology, we spend so much time experimenting, fine-tuning, getting the absolute cheapest way to do something - so why aren't we doing that with social policy? ~ Esther Duflo

We need new proactive policies that focus directly on how authorities in the public and private sphere can blend economic and social policies with an enabling environment for private initiative to create market opportunities for Decent Work. ~ Juan Somavia

Narrow behaviourist thinking
permeates political and social policy and medical practice, the
childrearing advice dispensed by "parenting experts" and academic
discourse. We keep trying to change people's behaviours without a full
understanding of how and why those behaviours arise. "Inner causes
are not the proper domain of psychology," writes Roy Wise, an expert
on the psychology of addiction, and a prominent investigator in the
National Institute on Drug Abuse in the U.S.A.3 This statement seems
astonishing, coming from a psychologist. In reality, there can be no
understanding of human beings, let alone of addicted human beings,
without looking at "inner causes," tricky as those causes can be to pin
down at times. Behaviours, especially compulsive behaviours, are
often the active representations of emotional states and of special
kinds of brain functioning.
As we have seen, the dominant emotional states and the brain
patterns of human beings are shaped by their early environment.
Throughout their lifetimes, they are in dynamic interaction with various
social and emotional milieus. If we are to help addicts, we must strive
to change not them but their environments. These are the only things
we can change. Transformation of the addict must come from within
and the best we can do is to encourage it. Fortunately, there is much
that we can do. ~ Gabor Mate

When I applied to graduate school many years ago, I wrote an essay expressing my puzzlement at how a country that could put a man on the moon could still have people sleeping on the streets. Part of that problem is political will; we could take a lot of people off the streets tomorrow if we made it a national priority. But I have also come to realize that NASA had it easy. Rockets conform to the unchanging laws of physics. We know where the moon will be at a given time; we know precisely how fast a spacecraft will enter or exist the earth's orbit. If we get the equations right, the rocket will land where it is supposed to--always. Human beings are more complex than that. A recovering drug addict does not behave as predictably as a rocket in orbit. We don't have a formula for persuading a sixteen-year-old not to drop out of school. But we do have a powerful tool: We know that people seek to make themselves better off, however they may define that. Our best hope for improving the human condition is to understand why we act the way we do and then plan accordingly. Programs, organizations, and systems work better when they get the incentives right. It is like rowing downstream. ~ Charles Wheelan

I mean, you know, this idea that somebody we disagree with on economic or social policy or something we have to turn into some kind of ogre or demon, I think, is a mistake. I mean, it's like telling the American people or half the American people that don't agree with you they're all fools. That's just not true. ~ William J. Clinton

After all, despite the economic advantage to firms that employed child labor, it was in the social interest, as a national policy, to abolish it - removing that advantage for all firms. ~ Barry Commoner

If state, party and social policy will not be based on morality, then mankind has no future to speak of. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Supreme Court is not elected, and it is therefore not a proper arbiter of social policy. ~ Lamar S. Smith

If you don't have 30 years to devote to social policy, don't get involved. ~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Crucial to this is what conservatives see as the essence of America - the Ladder of Success myth. As long as free enterprise flourishes and anyone with enough self-discipline and imagination can become an entrepreneur, the Morality of Reward and Punishment will hold and all will be well. The logic of conservatism locates so-called "social" problems within people, not within society. For this reason, it would make no sense to conservatives to use class and social forces as forms of explanation and justification for social policy. Nature ~ George Lakoff

Social Security mess is another failed progressive policy. ~ Jim DeMint

This idea of doing it all is the enemy of equality, not the path to do it. It's impossible to do two full-time jobs, and an impossible definition of success is just another way of making women feel like failures ... Any definition of success has to include social policies that honor families and men who raise babies as much as women do. ~ Gloria Steinem

The great flaw of all these administrative techniques is that, in the name of equality and democracy, they function as a vast "antipolitics machine", sweeping vast realms of legitimate public debate out of the public sphere and into the arms of technical, administrative committees. They stand in the way of potentially bracing and instructive debates about social policy, the meaning of intelligence, the selection of elites, the value of equity and diversity, and the purpose of economic growth and development. They are, in short, the means by which technical and administrative elites attempt to convince a skeptical public--while excluding the public from debate--that they play no favorites, take no obscure discretionary action, and have no biases but are merely taking transparent technical calculations. ~ James C. Scott

The Earth itself is stepping in to aid in the agenda of cultural transformation. There are too many doorways in nature that lead to heaven, there are too many paths to the mystery for any institution or social policy to be able to thwart the intent of the human species to evolve. ~ Terence McKenna

The truth is that the angels of anxiety - those overpowering forces for change in politics, economics, science, morals, and social policy - were at the same time agents for self-confidence. ~ Peter Gay

In public schooling, social policy has been turned back almost one hundred years. ~ Jonathan Kozol

So when the only domestic social policy is tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthiest Americans, we say, 'Where is faith being put into action here?' ~ Jim Wallis

On the one hand the world is getting more integrated and we should not dismiss social values as "Western" when they are actually modern values. On the other hand, individual countries have their own history and their own evolution. Trade unions, for example, don't play the same role in China as they do in Europe or the US. ~ Zhang Xin

Social prejudice is a strong force, but no match for simple competence when skill is in urgent demand and short supply. ~ Diana Gabaldon

We need the conflagration of Love to change the world, we need the fire of love to illuminate the society. The cold, insipid and complicated codes don't change anything, don't transform anything. All the best social projects and the best political principles are useless if they are not written with the fire of Love. The real revolution is the result of transformation, only the storms of Love can transform the individual and the society. ~ Samael Aun Weor

critical pedagogy illuminates how classroom learning embodies selective values, is entangled with relations of power, entails judgments about what knowledge counts, legitimates specific social relations, defines agency in particular ways, and always presupposes a particular notion of the future. ~ Henry A. Giroux

The clash between the individual gospel and the social gospel leaves me cold. An individual gospel is a soul without a body, and a social gospel without an individual gospel is a body without a soul. One is a ghost and the other is a corpse. Put the two together and you have a living person.66 ~ Jayakumar Christian

Of all the various kinds of sexual intercourse, this has the least to recommend it. As an amusement, it is too fleeting; as an occupation, it is too wearing; as a public exhibition, there is no money in it. It is unsuited to the drawing room, and in the most cultured society it has long been banished from the social board. It has at last, in our day of progress and improvement, been degraded to brotherhood with flatulence. Among the best bred, these two arts are now indulged in only private
though by consent of the whole company, when only males are present, it is still permissible, in good society, to remove the embargo on the fundamental sigh. ~ Mark Twain

Research by James Poterba at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology finds that the wealth of the U.S.'s elderly is highly skewed. About half of retirees have little or no financial wealth when they retire and depend almost entirely on Social Security for their income. ~ Greg Ip

It takes a lot of punishment to be able to do anything to change the social order. ~ Cesar Chavez

All have some artificial badge which the world, and themselves among the first, learn to consider as a genuine characteristic. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Good politics starts with empathy, proceeds to analysis, then sets out values and establishes the vision, before getting to the nitty-gritty of policy solutions. ~ David Miliband

In a digitally connected world a byte of data can boost or bite your brand ~ Bernard Kelvin Clive

For almost twenty years, abortion policy in America has been controlled by the courts. ~ Robert Casey

My creed on the subject of slavery is short. Slavery per se is not sin. It is a social condition ordained from the beginning of the world for the wisest purposes, benevolent and disciplinary, by Divine Wisdom. ~ Samuel Morse

I know of no serious proposals that would change the way Social Security operates for today's seniors. ~ Mac Thornberry

Well, I've already got ten thousand set aside. That's a good start. If you think about it when we get home, give me your Social and next time I drop by the bank, I'll open an account in your name, okay? ~ Donna Tartt

I do ballads that say what every man wants to say and that every woman wants to hear, or I do songs about social issues. ~ Kenny Rogers

My advice for achieving success is to make a career choice that reflects your passion. Then work your craft a little bit each day-even if someone's not paying you to do It. Try to balance your social life with your educational (or professional) life, and have patience. ~ Giancarlo Esposito

He'd know about the role of mirror neurons in the brain, special cells in the premotor cortex that fire right before a person reaches for a rock, steps forward, turns away, begins to smile.Amazingly, the same neurons fire whether we do something or watch someone else do the same thing, and both summon similar feelings. Learning form our own mishaps isn't as safe as learning from someone else's, which helps us decipher the world of intentions, making our social whirl possible. The brain evolved clever ways to spy or eavesdrop on risk, to fathom another's joy or pain quickly, as detailed sensations, without resorting to words. We feel what we see, we experience others as self. ~ Diane Ackerman

I guess the most interesting thing about Gabriel was that he didn't seem to care at all what people were thinking about him. He walked down the hallway at school with his head down not because he wanted to avoid being seen or dissuade social predators or anything , but simply because he didn't see any reason to lift up his head. ~ John Corey Whaley

How many times do we hear: 'Come on, you Christians, be a little bit more normal, like other people, be reasonable!' This is real snake charmer's talk: 'Come on, just be like this, okay? A little bit more normal, don't be so rigid ... ' But behind it is this: 'Don't come here with your stories, that God became man!' The Incarnation of the Word, that is the scandal behind all of this! We can do all the social work we want, and they will say: 'How great the Church is, it does such good social work. But if we say that we are doing it because those people are the flesh of Christ, then comes the scandal. And that is the truth, that is the revelation of Jesus: that presence of Jesus incarnate. ~ Pope Francis

America is a remarkable place in that social attitudes change almost imperceptibly, and then you wake up the next day and they've changed. But they've been changing all the time. ~ Condoleezza Rice

Every discipline develops standards of professional competence to which its workers are subject ... Every scientific community is a society in the small, so to speak, with its own agencies of social control. ~ Abraham Kaplan

The way that identity has been commercialised through movies and TV, and now through social networking, means we're all sort of working to a script, a collective idea of what needs to happen next. ~ Linda Papadopoulos

The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self. Reading deeply in the Canon will not make one a better or a worse person, a more useful or more harmful citizen. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality. W ~ Harold Bloom

We would like a stable policy framework, and whatever incentives and tax structures are there should be made known to investors upfront. There should be credibility, clarity and continuity in both policy formulation and its implementation. ~ Narendra Modi

The Kony campaign us an example of how powerful 'slacktivisim' can be, and demonstrates that, with enough worldwide awareness and social pressure, movements like this one have the power to make politicians move. It also makes the ignorant less so. No-one knew who Kony was before the campaign. The atrocities were happening, and it wasn't even a blip on the social consciousness radar. It's encouraging that there's a way to spread information like this so quickly. ~ Charlie Caruso

I believe we need affordable child care. I believe we need flexibility. I believe we need institutional reform and public policy reform. ~ Sheryl Sandberg

Obviously people want social calm, but if you do not let clever and ingenious people to participate, obviously there must be some dormant volcano that will erupt, sooner or later. ~ Lech Walesa

Young girls today were more sensible, more sophisticated. Nowadays they worried more about their exam results and did their best to ensure they would have a decent career. For them, going out with boys was simply a game, a distraction based as much as on narcissism as on sexual pleasure. Later, they would try to make a good marriage, basing their decision on a range of social and professional criteria as well as shared interests and tastes. Of course, in doing this, they cut themselves from any possibility of happiness - a condition indissociable from traditional and transient emotions which are incompatible with the practice of reason - but in doing so they hoped to escape the moral and emotional suffering which had so tortured their forebears. ~ Michel Houellebecq

There is too great a tendency (perhaps encouraged by popular journalism) to deal with the dramatic moments, forgetting that these are not always the most significant moments ... To find the significant rather than the dramatic features of industrial controversy, of a disagreement in regard to policy on board of directors or between managers, is essential to integrative business policies. ~ Mary Parker Follett

If your happy and you know it a smiley face will surely show it : ) Netiquette by NetworkEtiquette.net ~ David Chiles

A good organizer is a social arsonist who goes around setting people on fire. ~ Fred Ross

There's obviously a correlation between an economically empowered woman and the investments she makes. That leads to her social and moral conscience for bettering her community. ~ Andrea Jung

Among the friends of Union, there is great diversity of sentiment and of policy in regard to slavery and the African race among us. ~ Abraham Lincoln

I'm a big believer that good policy is good politics. And so, when it comes to making decisions on policy issues, what I endeavor to do is simply speak the truth. ~ Ted Cruz

I really don't have tremendous political ambition. I have policy ambition. ~ Paul Ryan

Another man whose social life has ruined him. ~ Dashiell Hammett

I think the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life. When there are many writers all employing the same idiom, all looking out on more or less the same social scene, the individual writer will have to be more than ever careful that he isn't just doing badly what has already been done to completion. The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Social topics may hit too close to home for people, but then again, if you pull a heartstring, then that's what country music is. It's not just songs about getting drunk and leaving your girl. ~ Kenny Chesney

This World Youth movement claims to represent and affect the politico-social activities of a grand total of forty million adherents - under the age of thirty ... It may play an important and increasing role in the consolidation of a new world order. ~ H.G.Wells

From its earliest days, NASA had followed a policy of maximum, though prudent, disclosure. We had to do everything openly - and soon under intensive, live TV coverage. ~ Gene Kranz

But happiness is a difficult thing-it is, as Aristotle posited in The Nicomachean Ethics, an activity, is is about good social behavior, about being a solid citizen. Happiness is about community, intimacy, relationships, rootedness, closeness, family, stability, a sense of place, a feeling of love. And in this country, where people move from state to state and city to city so much, where rootlessness is almost a virtue ("anywhere I hang my hat ... is someone else's home"), where family units regularly implode and leave behind fragments of divorce, where the long loneliness of life finds its antidote not in a hardy, ancient culture (as it would in Europe), not in some blood-deep tribal rites (as it would in the few still-hale Third World nations), but in our vast repository of pop culture, of consumer goods, of cotton candy for all-in this America, happiness is hard. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

Incentives aren't the only thing that matter for economic growth. Opportunity is also crucial, and extreme inequality deprives many people of the opportunity to fulfill their potential, and government programs that reduce inequality can make the nation as a whole richer by reducing that waste. ~ Paul Krugman

Whether his policy was right or wrong, he built up the glory of the nation. ~ Sam Houston

I don't think I've had any great success in predicting politics or social change, nor have I really tried. ~ Paul Krugman

Most of us have no sympathy with the rich idler who spends his life in pleasure without ever doing any work. But even he fulfills a function in the life of the social organism. He sets an example of luxury that awakens in the multitude a consciousness of new needs and gives industry the incentive to fulfill them. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

By the time I turned 12, I was a 5-foot 10-inch social disaster. Towering over my friends was the bane of my adolescence. ~ Sheri L. Dew

People want to visit places that satisfy their social needs. ~ Charles Duhigg