Social Relationships Quotes

In the actual state of social relationships, the forms ("formes", Fr.) of politeness are necessary as a subsitute to benevolence. ~ African Spir

Simple people with less education, sophistication, social ties, and professional obligations seem in general to have somewhat less difficulty in facing this final crisis than people of affluence who lose a great deal more in terms of material luxuries, comfort, and number of interpersonal relationships. It appears that people who have gone through a life of suffering, hard work, and labor, who have raised their children and been gratified in their work, have shown greater ease in accepting death with peace and dignity compared to those who have been ambitiously controlling their environment, accumulating material goods, and a great number of social relationships but few meaningful interpersonal relationships which would have been available at the end of life. ~ Elisabeth Kubler Ross

For most of us, Facebook friends and Instagram followers are supplements to -- not surrogates for -- our social lives. As meaningful as the friendships we establish online can be, most of us are unsatisfied with virtual ties that never develop into face-to-face relationships. Building real connections requires a shared physical environment -- a social infrastructure. ~ Eric Klinenberg

Pigeons are gentle and smart and have complex social relationships. Their hearing and vision are both excellent. ~ Ingrid Newkirk

...we cannot fail to recognise the influence which the progressive control over natural forces exerts on the social relationships between men, since men always place their newly won powers at the service of their aggressiveness, and use them against one another. ~ Sigmund Freud

Sin defies God, utterly corrupts each individual, corrodes all social relationships, and issues in death. ~ D. A. Carson

Since social relationships are always ambiguous, since my thought is only a unit, since my thoughts create rifts as much as they unite, since my words establish contacts by being spoken and create isolation by remaining unspoken, since an immense moat separates the subjective certitude that I have for myself from the objective reality that I represent to others, since I never stop finding myself guilty even though I feel I am innocent ... ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

A society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated life is in so far democratic. Such a society must have a type of education which gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder. ~ John Dewey

We may regard totalitarianism as a process of the annihilation of individuality, but, in more fundamental terms, it is the annihilation, first, of those social relationships within which individuality develops. It is not the extermination of individuals that is ultimately desired by totalitarian rulers, for individuals in the largest number are needed by the new order. What is desired is the extermination of those social relationships which, by their autonomous existence, must always constitute a barrier to the achievement of the absolute political community. The individual alone is powerless. Individual will and memory, apart from the reinforcement of associative tradition, are weak and ephemeral. How well the totalitarian rulers know it. (…) To destroy or diminish the reality of the smaller areas of society, to abolish or restrict the range of cultural alternatives offered individuals by economic endeavor, religion, and kinship, is to destroy in time the roots of the will to resist despotism in its large forms. ~ Robert A. Nisbet

My research suggests that men and women may speak different languages that they assume are the same, using similar words to encode disparate experiences of self and social relationships. Because these languages share an overlapping moral vocabulary, they contain a propensity for systematic mistranslation ... ~ Carol Gilligan

Individuals inherit a particular space within an interlocking set of social relationships; lacking that space, they are nobody, or at best a stranger or an outcast. To know oneself as such a social person is however not to occupy a static and fixed position. It is to find oneself placed at a certain point on a journey with set goals; to move through life is to make progress - or to fail to make progress - toward a given end. ~ Alasdair MacIntyre

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

A promise is a gift and a gift is a symbol of a social relationship. The donor is aware that it creates a link and the recipient identifies it as a mutual bond. A gift, however, is tangible and a promise is not. Eventually, a promise can be expounded as misunderstood, or misheard or it is simply over and done. If misheard, the social bond is to be put into question. If forgotten, it can be reminded but this is embarrassing. If elapsed, it is one of those broken promises that infest countless relationships. ( "Promised me a breeze of freedom" ) ~ Erik Pevernagie

Many people, observing religious conflict in the contemporary world, have become hostile to religion as such and regard it as a source of violence and intolerance.5 In a world of overlapping and plural religious environments, this can clearly be the case. But they fail to put religion in its broader historical context, where it was a critical factor in permitting broad social cooperation that transcended kin and friends as a source of social relationships. Moreover, secular ideologies like Marxism-Leninism or nationalism that have displaced religious beliefs in many contemporary societies can be and have been no less destructive due to the passionate beliefs that they engender. ~ Francis Fukuyama

Sociologists argue that in contemporary Western society the marketplace has become so dominant that the consumer model increasingly characterizes most relationships that historically were covenantal, including marriage. Today we stay connected to people only as long as they are meeting our particular needs at an acceptable cost to us. When we cease to make a profit - that is, when the relationship appears to require more love and affirmation from us than we are getting back - then we "cut our loses" and drop the relationship. This has also been called "commodification," a process by which social relationships are reduced to economic exchange relationships, and so the very idea of "covenant" is disappearing in our culture. Covenant is therefore a concept increasingly foreign to us, and yet the Bible says it is the essence of marriage. ~ Timothy Keller

The sperm whales' network of female-based family unit resembled, to a remarkable extent, the community the whalemen had left back home on Nantucket. In both societies the males were itinerants. In their dedication to killing sperm whales the Nantucketers had developed a system of social relationships that mimicked those of their prey. ~ Nathaniel Philbrick

It is astonishing that critical scholarship has asked forever about the identification of these store-house cities, but without ever asking about the skewed exploitative social relationships between owner and laborers that the project exhibits. The store-house cities are an ancient parallel to the great banks and insurance houses where surplus wealth is kept among us. That surplus wealth, produced by the cheap labor of peasants, must now be protected from the peasants by law and by military force. ~ Walter Brueggemann

We are social creatures, and the importance of this is clearly seen when one compares the satisfaction people feel in relationships with their overall satisfaction with life. The most important social relationships are close relationships in which you experience things together with others, and experience being understood; where you share thoughts and feelings, and both give and receive support. In one word: hygge. ~ Meik Wiking

The fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil. Man is thus reduced to a series of social relationships, and the concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decision disappears, the very subject whose decisions build the social order. From this mistaken conception of the person there arise both a distortion of law, which defines the sphere of the exercise of freedom, and an opposition to private property. A person who is deprived of something he can call "his own," and of the possibility of earning a living through his own initiative, comes to depend on the social machine and on those who control it. This makes it much more difficult for him to recognize his dignity as a person, and hinders progress towards the building up of an authentic human community. ~ Pope John Paul II

The cheese and wine party has the form of friendship without the warmth and devotion. It is a device either for getting rid of social obligations hurriedly en mass, or for making overtures towards more serious social relationships, as in the etiquette of whoring. ~ Brooks Atkinson

the best predictor of whether we are happy or not is our social relationships. ~ Meik Wiking

The wholesale corruption of social relationships, even the most intimate, is an essential part of Shakespeare's chilling exposure of authoritarian politics. ~ William Shakespeare

These sites have torn down the geographical divide that once prevented long distance social relationships from forming, allowing instant communication and connections to take place and a virtual second life to take hold for its users. ~ Mike Fitzpatrick

When you don't have many friends and you don't have a social life you're kind of left looking at things, not doing things. There's a weird freedom in not having people treat you like you're part of society or where you have to fulfill social relationships. ~ Tim Burton

Only by externalization, by entering into social relationships, can we develop the interiority of our own person. ~ Jurgen Habermas

Without such trust and safety, social relationships tend to become strategic rather than cooperative, increasingly full of skepticism and even anxiety and fear about others' intentions. (p. 27) ~ Donald Rothberg

For thousands of years, human beings have been obsessed with beauty, truth, love, honor, altruism, courage, social relationships, art, and God. They all go together as subjective experiences, and it's a straw man to set God up as the delusion. If he is, then so is truth itself or beauty itself. ~ Deepak Chopra

If people who have to work together in an enterprise trust one another it is because they are all operating to a common set of ethical norms ... such a society will be better able to innovate ... since the high degree of trust will permit a wide variety of social relationships to emerge ... ~ Francis Fukuyama

The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class. The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships. Coming from the class-ridden society of the nation-state, whose cracks had been cemented with nationalistic sentiment, it is only natural that these masses, in the first helplessness of their new experience, have tended toward an especially violent nationalism, to which mass leaders have yielded against their own instincts and purposes for purely demagogic reasons. ~ Hannah Arendt

Our social relationships are limited, most of the time, to gossip and criticizing people's behavior. This observation slowly pushed me to isolate from the so-called social life. My days pass by in solitude. ~ Ingmar Bergman

If we are a people rich in social relationships, we are rich indeed. Whenever we develop significant friendships with those who are not like us culturally, we become broader, wiser persons. ~ Richard J. Foster

...Dialogue is an activity that represents a state of relations going well beyond tolerance...You can coexist with people without ever having to speak meaningfully with them. What holds society together is not just people who will tolerate others, but people who will actually go beyond that, to provide the glue that nourishes social relationships. ~ Gustav Niebuhr

Class is more than income - it has to do with knowing where you stand in a web of social relationships. ~ Neal Stephenson

We are (most of us) embedded in an exceedingly complex network of social relationships, many of which are vital to our well-being. Every day we confront issues relating to the needs and wants of others and must continually make accommodations. And in addressing these conflicting interests, the operative norm is - or should be - fairness, a balancing of the interests and needs of other parties, other 'stakeholders.' ~ Peter Corning

One third of managers are victims of "Information Fatigue Syndrome." 49 percent said they are unable to handle the vast amounts of information received. 33 percent of managers were suffering ill health as a direct result of information overload. 62 percent admitted their business and social relationships suffer. 66 percent reported tension with colleagues and diminished job satisfaction. 43 percent think that important decisions are delayed and their abilities to make decisions are affected as a result of having too much information. (Reuters's "Dying for Business" report) ~ Jeff Davidson

I have heard stories from the depths of human lives where men and women were wrestling with the elemental problems of misery and sin--stories that put upon a man's heart a burden of vicarious sorrow, even though he does but listen to them. Here was real human need crying out after the living God revealed in Christ. Consider all the multitudes of men who so need God, and then think of Christian churches making of themselves a cockpit of controversy when there is not a single thing at stake in the business. So much of it does not matter! And there is one thing that does matter--more than anything else in all the world--that men in their personal lives and in their social relationships should know Jesus Christ. ~ Harry Emerson Fosdick

Call it dating if you like, but I didn't want her to be under the impression that it was anything serious. Not at that point in any case, it was more to be an experiment in human social relationships, one which might or might not lead to sex and or marriage. ~ Andrew James Pritchard

Pennebaker began his studies in the 1980s when he asked students to write about traumatic, stressful or emotional events for twenty minutes over three consecutive days. His results found improvements in both physical and psychological health. People were happier and healthier when they wrote, including reduced visits to doctors, positive effects on blood pressure, improved liver and immune system functioning and less use of pain medication. Writing also had beneficial effects on emotional health and enhanced social relationships. ~ Patricia McAdoo

A new world of complex relationships and feelings opens up when the peer group takes its place alongside the family as the emotional focus of the child's life. Early peer relationships contribute significantly to the child's ability to participate in a group (and in that sense, society), deal with competition and disappointment, enjoy the intimacy of friendships, and intuitively understand social relationships as they play out at school, in the neighborhood, and later in the workplace and adult family. ~ Stanley Greenspan

We use eating as a medium for social relationships: satisfaction of the most individual of needs becomes a means of creating community. ~ Margaret Visser

The things women find rewarding about work are, by and large, the same things that men find rewarding and include both the inherent nature of the work and the social relationships. ~ Grace Baruch

Turns out, there was one - and only one - characteristic that distinguished the happiest 10 percent from everybody else: the strength of their social relationships. My empirical study of well-being among 1,600 Harvard undergraduates found a similar result - social support was a far greater predictor of happiness than any other factor, more than GPA, family income, SAT scores, age, gender, or race. In fact, the correlation between social support and happiness was 0.7. This may not sound like a big number, but for researchers it's huge - most psychology findings are considered significant when they hit 0.3. The point is, the more social support you have, the happier you are. And as we know, the happier you are, the more advantages you accrue in nearly every domain of life. ~ Shawn Achor

Scientists do not simply read nature to find truths to apply in the social world. Instead, they use truths taken from our social relationships to structure, read, and interpret the natural ~ Anne Fausto-Sterling

Oh, I simply can't think. When I really want to depress myself, I think of all the brilliant men I know, married to their stupid wives. Enough to break your heart, it really is ~ Doris Lessing

If you improve your health or your relationships or your professional knowledge only 1% each day, after one month this will amount to a 30% increase. After one year this will amount to a 365% increase. By devoting yourself to continuous improvement and excellence in minor ways each day, your life really can transform. ~ Robin S. Sharma

Don't tell me what I want to hear. Tell me the truth. It may hurt, but it definitely won't hurt more than the feeling that I was told something out of pity, not out of honesty. If you mean it, say it. If you don't, keep your words until the right person is standing in front of you. If words are said too many times, they become cheap, and I only deserve to hear what is valuable ~ Najwa Zebian

Our enemies are nearer the truth in their opinion of us than we are ourselves. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

One thing that feeds into the way you experience the social world is your mood - and one thing that affects your mood is the weather. ~ Leonard Mlodinow

I want to seduce the audience. If they can go along for a ride they wouldn't ordinarily take, or don't even know they're taking, then they might see highly charged political issues in a new and unexpected way ... The theatre is now so afraid to face its social demons that we've given that responsibility over to film. But it will always be harder to deal with certain issues in the theatre. The live event - being watched by people as we watch - makes it seem all the more dangerous. ~ Paula Vogel

The woman leads a twofold existence indeed, the depth of her social ostracism being equally only by her stoic endurance. To live in harmony with the society of man, to conform with men's demands, she resigns herself to a self-effacement that is demeaning, she sacrifices herself. ~ Thomas Sankara

As a means of alleviating poverty, Christian charity was worse than useless, as could be seen in the Papal states, which abounded in it. But it was popular not only among the traditionalist rich, who cherished it as a safeguard against the evil of equal rights... but also among the traditionalist poor, who were profoundly convinced that they had a right to crumbs from the rich man's table. ~ Eric J. Hobsbawm

I was thinking about comedy and how comedy in many ways opens us up to ideas and really being influenced by Richard Pryor and sort of the way he would use comedy to really speak about larger social issues. ~ Terry Gross

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lie; secrets and deceit will ultimately undermine a relationship's stability, durability, and longevity. Friedrich ~ Rachel Abbott

A careful reading of the Old and New Testaments shows that idolatry is nothing like the crude picture that springs to mind of a sculpture in some distant country. The idea is highly sophisticated, drawing together the complexities of motivation in individual psychology, the social environment, and also the unseen world. Idols are not just on pagan altars, but in well-educated human hearts and minds ~ Richard Keyes

One of the ironies of a conference dedicated to all things digital and virtual is that the best ways to connect with people are surprisingly old-school. Social media tools can improve the odds of a serendipitous encounter at SXSW, but old-fashioned hustle, palm-pressing and - above all - creativity go a long way. ~ Ryan Holmes

The role of the opposition leader differs from that of the chancellor. If this government is to be successful, I have to take the emotional state of all partners into account. Besides, the Social Democrats didn't exactly present me with the motto "Let us dare to have more freedom" on a silver platter. ~ Angela Merkel

Adeline was really rather charming, she always had a man in her life, but it never worked out: either they were nice but she didn't find them very exciting; or they were exciting but she didn't find them particularly nice, or they were neither nice nor exciting and she wondered why she was with them at all. She found a way of making the exciting men nicer and that was by leaving them. But then, they weren't exciting anymore either. ~ Francois Lelord

Love is blind to those who don't believe. ~ Anthony Williams-Bradford II

You are my home; it is in your loving gaze that I find the comfort, acceptance, and the sense of belonging. ~ Steve Maraboli

Whenever two people come together and their behavior affects one another, you have etiquette. ~ Emily Post

There's so much pressure put on relationships to deliver the satisfaction of life. And to me, that is just not the answer. I feel like it should be something in addition to what you love or be a part of that. ~ James Franco

I think crime fiction is a great way to talk about social issues, whether 'To Kill A Mockingbird' or 'The Lovely Bones;' violence is a way to open up that information you want to get out to the reader. ~ Karin Slaughter

Man is known to be a selfish, as well as a social being. ~ James Madison

I define "politics" as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create - not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions. ~ Adrienne Rich

First, liberals discover social and economic problems. Not a difficult task: the human race has always had such problems and will continue to, short of the Garden of Eden. Liberals, however, usually need scores of millions in foundation grants and taxpayer-financed commissions to come up with the startling revelations of disease, poverty, ignorance, homelessness, et al. Having identified "problems" to the accompaniment of much coordinated fanfare, the liberals proceed to invoke "solutions," to be supplied, of course, by the federal government, which we all know and love as the Great Problem-Solving Machine. ~ Anonymous

I missed the moment when time collapsed and memory was erased, replaced by finicky social experiments, lost in the blur of intoxication, sucked through multi-colored bendy-straws ~ Alex Gaskarth

Everything we experience in life is designed to shape our characters. ~ Delma Pryce

Disorder is inherent in stability. Civilized man doesn't understand stability. He's confused it with rigidity. Our political and economic and social leaders drool about stability constantly. It's their favorite word, next to 'power.'

'Gotta stabilize the political situation in Southeast Asia, gotta stabilize oil production and consumption, gotta stabilize student opposition to the government' and so forth.

Stabilization to them means order, uniformity, control. And that's a half-witted and potentially genocidal misconception. No matter how thoroughly they control a system, disorder invariably leaks into it. Then the managers panic, rush to plug the leak and endeavor to tighten the controls. Therefore, totalitarianism grows in viciousness and scope. And the blind pity is, rigidity isn't the same as stability at all.

True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed. ~ Tom Robbins

Divorce is not always a doorway to happiness. The same can be said about marriage. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The realization that men and women cannot be friends unless they're also sleeping together. I have enough friends, I don't really need any more. ~ Caspar Vega

You just play what a writer writes, in terms of what a character chooses to do and how a character chooses to deal with their various relationships. ~ Kevin Spacey

Friendships and relationships better prosper among equals. ~ Girdhar Joshi

And when you try to live there, to live in a place where you're betraying yourself over and over, not only do you grow to resent the hell out of it, and resent the hell out of whomever you're betraying and censoring yourself for, but the very idea of your self begins slowly and inexorably to erode. Until you realize one day out of the clear blue that you have no idea who your self is, anymore. ~ Ron Currie Jr.

Hideous psychic fallout they'd all endured both in active marijuana-dependency and then in marijuana-detox: the social isolation, anxious lassitude, and the hyperself-consciousness that then reinforced the withdrawal and anxiety - the increasing emotional abstraction, poverty of affect, and then total emotional catalepsy - the obsessive analyzing, finally the paralytic stasis that results from obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the couch ... ~ David Foster Wallace

I think any new technology that helps connect and create social cohesion is great. But at the end of the day, you and I are analog creatures. We have to take 'oohs and aahs' and convert them to 0s and 1s and then convert them back to 'oohs and aahs.' Narratives that work in social networks are the exchange of stories that are told well. ~ Peter Guber

Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. ~ George Eliot

It helps when young people know that their family thinks they're great and loves them, no matter what. It helps to have frequent, positive interactions with family members in order to figure out what's fun and safe to do with peers, especially when parents aren't looking. It also helps to pay attention to other people's social customs and sensory preferences, not just our own. This all takes resolve and work - and the reward of a satisfying social life is worth all the effort. ~ Carol Kranowitz

But if you can't love your-self, you can never love others. And if you never overcome your lack of self- love, you will carry that problem into all your relationships. Plagued by rejection, you will experience conflict with others, you will struggle to set meaningful goals, and you will feel a vague uncertainty about what truly matters. ~ Ken Freeman

Consider Social Security. The young have always contributed to the support of the old. Earlier, the young helped their own parents out of a sense of love and duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else's parents out of compulsion and fear. The voluntary transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken those bonds. ~ Milton Friedman