Social Sciences Quotes

The qualifications that I have to speak on world affairs are exactly the same ones Henry Kissinger has, and Walt Rostow has, or anybody in the Political Science Department, professional historians - none, none that you don't have. The only difference is, I don't pretend to have qualifications, nor do I pretend that qualifications are needed. I mean, if somebody were to ask me to give a talk on quantum physics, I'd refuse - because I don't understand enough. But world affairs are trivial: there's nothing in the social sciences or history or whatever that is beyond the intellectual capacities of an ordinary fifteen-year-old. You have to do a little work, you have to do some reading, you have to be able to think but there's nothing deep - if there are any theories around that require some special kind of training to understand, then they've been kept a carefully guarded secret. ~ Noam Chomsky

The social sciences, like much of biology but unlike most fields of the physical sciences, have to deal with structures of essential complexity, i.e. with structures whose characteristic properties can be exhibited only by models made up of relatively large numbers of variables. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

The American university inherits the missions of two very different institutions: the English college and the German research university. The first pattern prevailed before the Civil War. Curricula centered on the classics, and the purpose of education was understood to be the formation of character. With the emergence of a modern industrial society in the last decades of the nineteenth century, that kind of pedagogy was felt to be increasingly obsolete. Johns Hopkins was founded in 1876 as the first American university on the German model: a factory of knowledge that would focus in particular on the natural and social sciences, the disciplines essential to the new economy and the world to which it was giving rise. ~ William Deresiewicz

But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless - a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most, of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches' tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

History is the shank of the social sciences. ~ C. Wright Mills

The only debatable issue, it seems to me, is whether it is more ridiculous to turn to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the specialists in the great religions and philosophical systems for insights into fundamental human values. ~ Noam Chomsky

That was the first major social sciences conference at which social scientists from all cultures wanted to reach a consensus on whether we can continue to pursue a national course in the social sciences or whether we need a cosmopolitan path that also connects us in a new way. ~ Ulrich Beck

The social sciences offer equal promise for improving human welfare; our lives can be greatly improved through a deeper understanding of individual and collective behavior. But to realize this promise, the social sciences, like the natural sciences, need to match their institutional structures to today's intellectual challenges. ~ Nicholas A. Christakis

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

I think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information. ~ Irvine Welsh

Our biggest project is actually more in the social sciences, where we are studying mastery - how people get good at things - only we do it from an individuality perspective. ~ L. Todd Rose

[I]n the humanities and social sciences, and in fields like journalism and economics and so on ... people have to be trained to be managers, and controllers, and to accept things, and not to question too much. ~ Noam Chomsky

You cannot grant to universities the intellectual freedom that scholarship requires, it is argued, and also deny the moral freedom that enables students to adapt through their own "experiments in living." Freedom is indivisible, and without it knowledge cannot grow.
The problem with that argument is that, outside the natural sciences and a few solid humanities like philosophy and Egyptology, academic freedom is a thing of the past. What is expected of the student in many courses in the humanities and social sciences is ideological conformity, rather than critical appraisal, and censorship has become accepted as a legitimate part of the academic way of life. ~ Roger Scruton

Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns is an American masterpiece, a stupendous literary success that channels the social sciences as iconic biography in order to tell a vast story of a people's reinvention of itself and of a nation-the first complete history of the Great Black Migration from start to finish, north, east, west. ~ David Levering Lewis

Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There's more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it's awfully close to human. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

His office was on the third floor of the Humanities & Social Sciences Building, just down the hall from the interview room. On the office door was a Peanuts cartoon of Lucy in the psychiatrist's booth with the little DOCTOR is IN sign. Professor Mitchell, a man on the cutting edge of humor. ~ Rick Riordan

I was a student at SF State, and I honestly didn't know where I was headed. I thought maybe something in the social sciences. But I happened to be living with a group of people, and one person was a film student. I was always keen on and aware of what she was doing. ~ Lisa Cholodenko

What worries me is that the debate about gender differences still seems to polarize nature vs. nurture, with some in the social sciences and humanities wanting to assert that biology plays no role at all, apparently unaware of the scientific evidence to the contrary ~ Simon Baron-Cohen

I think it is now time for social scientists to step out of the shadow and to establish an advanced social sciences methodology that integrates science (third-person view) social transformation (second-person view) and the evolution of self (first-person view) into a coherent framework of consciousness-based action research ~ Otto Scharmer

Now let's see. The class reps on the council this year are therefore Eivind and Marianne!
I looked down at the desk in front of me.
One vote.
How was that possible?
And, to cap it off, the one vote was my own.
But I was the best student in the class! At least in Norwegian! And natural and social sciences! And in math I was the second best, or perhaps the third. But, altogether, who could be better than me?
OK, Eivind won. But one vote? How was that possible?
Hadn't anyone voted for me?
There had to be a mistake somewhere.
No one? ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

I started off thinking that maybe the social sciences ought to have the kinds of mathematics that the natural sciences had. That works a little bit in economics because they talk about costs, prices and quantities of goods. ~ Herbert A. Simon

In the nineteenth century, Emile Durkheim, the founder of sociology and an early pioneer of the social sciences, ran a thought experiment in one of his books: What if there were no crime? What if there emerged a society where everyone was perfectly respectful and nonviolent and everyone was equal? What if no one lied or hurt each other? What if corruption did not exist? What would happen? Would conflict cease? Would stress evaporate? Would everyone frolic in fields picking daises and singing the "Hallelujah" chorus from Handel's Messiah?
Durkheim said no, that in fact the opposite would happen. He suggested that the more comfortable and ethical a society became, the more that small indiscretions would become magnified in our minds. If everyone stopped killing each other, we wouldn't necessarily feel good about it. We'd just get equally upset about the more minor stuff.
Developmental psychology has long argued something similar: that protecting people from problems or adversity doesn't make them happier or more secure; it makes them more easily insecure. A young person who has been sheltered form dealing with any challenges or injustices growing up will come to find the slightest inconveniences of adult life intolerable, and will have the childish public meltdown to prove it. ~ Mark Manson

History is preoccupied with fundamental processes of change. If you are allergic to these processes, you abandon history and take cover in the social sciences. Today anthropology, sociology, etc, flourish. History is sick. But then our society too is sick ~ Edward Hallett Carr

The social sciences collectively know too little to waste time on foolish disciplinary squabbles. ~ Thomas Piketty

This condition in which women live is created out of, and defended by, a system of ideas represented by the world's religions, by psychoanalysis, by pornography, by sexology, by science and medicine and the social sciences. ~ Sheila Jeffreys

The next decade will perhaps raise us a step above despair to a cleaner, clearer wisdom and biology cannot fail to help in this. As we become increasingly aware of the ethical problems raised by science and technology, the frontiers between the biological and social sciences are clearly of critical importance-in population density and problems of hunger, psychological stress, pollution of the air and water and exhaustion of irreplaceable resources. ~ H. Bentley Glass

Like many academics, Howard was innocent of the world. He could identify thirty different ideological trends in the social sciences, but did not really know what a software engineer was. ~ Zadie Smith

Without being sure of something, we can not begin to think about everything elses ~ Kathryn Schulz

George Stigler Nobel laureate and a leader of Chicago School was asked why there were no Nobel Prizes awarded in the other social sciences, sociology, psychology, history, etc. "Don't worry", Stigler said, "they have already have a Nobel Prize in ... Literature" ~ Robert Kuttner

Early biologists were the social scientists of their times, because their racial descriptions of the human species contain explicit behavioral correlations. Racial attributes were cited to explain social conditions, which then became a natural state of affairs. In the process of their construction, races are deemed part of nature; they are alleged to have been "discovered," not constructed by an emphasis on particular anatomical attributes. This assumption of the naturalness of race is connected with the pursuit of an explanation of a particular social condition - inequality. Races, as unequal biological entities, must be said to have their peculiar cultures, psychologies, and unequal economic circumstances. ~ Yehudi O. Webster

The thing that distinguishes social systems from physical or even biological systems is their incomparable (and embarrassing) richness in special cases. Generalizations in the social sciences are mere pathways which lead through a riotous forest of individual trees, each a species unto itself. The social scientist who loses this sense of the essential individuality and uniqueness of each case is all too likely to make a solemn scientific ass of himself, especially if he thinks that his faceless generalizations are the equivalents of the rich vareity of the world. ~ Kenneth E. Boulding

The lie [of compulsory female heterosexuality] is many-layered. In Western tradition, one layer - the romantic - asserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal (e. g, Tristan and Isolde, Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening') it is still an organic imperative. In the tradition of the social sciences it asserts that primary love between the sexes is 'normal,' that women need men as social and economic protectors, for adult sexuality, and for psychological completion; that the heterosexually constituted family is the basic social unit; that women who do not attach their primary intensity to men must be, in functional terms, condemned to an even more devastating outsiderhood than their outsiderhood as women. ~ Adrienne Rich

I've always been torn between the pure and the social sciences. ~ Ian Goldin

History without the history of science, to alter slightly an apothegm of Lord Bacon, resembles a statue of Polyphemus without his eye-that very feature being left out which most marks the spirit and life of the person. My own thesis is complementary: science taught ... without a sense of history is robbed of those very qualities that make it worth teaching to the student of the humanities and the social sciences. ~ I. Bernard Cohen

In the state of Wisconsin it's mandated that teachers in the social sciences and hard sciences have to start giving environmental education by the first grade, through high school. ~ Gaylord Nelson

The social sciences are usually concerned with groups of persons rather than individual persons. The behavior of individuals, being free, is unpredictable. ~ Carroll Quigley

The theories of the social sciences do not consist of "laws" in the sense of empirical rules about the behavior of objects definable in physical terms. All that the theory of the social sciences attempts is to provide a technique of reasoning which assists us in connecting individual facts, but which, like logic or mathematics, is not about the facts. It can, therefore, and this is the second point, never be verified or falsified by reference to facts. ~ Friedrich Hayek

If you just go get one of these little fine arts degrees or writing program degrees, it never forces you to confront your responsibility as narrator, whereas any of the social sciences make you at look the interaction between the storyteller and story. Hurston understood that. But then she and I write out of despised cultures that on some level we feel we're defending. ~ Dorothy Allison

Difference for difference's sake, though, is not the point of anthropology. If it was, we would indeed be dazzled, even blinded. While anthropology wants to document difference - and often be a witness to it - it also wants to make sense of those differences. Anthropology seeks to explain. ~ Matthew Engelke

Unless social sciences can be as creative as natural science, our new tools are not likely to be of much use to us. ~ Edgar Douglas Adrian

The love of money is the root of all evil, therefore selfishness must be the seed. ~ M.D. Birmingham

What would be the nicest thing I could say about Newt Gingrich? He may be one of the great supporters of the humanities, because you have people who don't want to study the social sciences, because it's not profitable, and now Newt, as the highest-paid historian in American history, may be an encouragement to people to study history. ~ Barney Frank

The mimetic nature of desire accounts for the fragility of human relations. Our social sciences should give due consideration to a phenomenon that must be considered normal, but they persist in seeing conflict as something accidental, and consequently so unforeseeable that researchers cannot and must not take it into account in their study of culture. ~ Rene Girard

It was confidently believed that the scientific successes of the industrial revolution could be carried through into the social sciences, particularly with such movements as Marxism. Pseudoscience came with a collection of idealistic nerds who tried to create a tailor-made society, the epitome of which is the central planner. Economics was the most likely candidate for such use of science; you can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations, and nobody can catch you since there is no such thing as a controlled experiment. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The only possible conclusion the social sciences can draw is: some do, some don't. ~ Ernest Rutherford

If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily "socially constructed" notions, then all that is left is consensus
more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia. ~ Thomas Sowell

There is a noticeable general difference between the sciences and mathematics on the one hand, and the humanities and social sciences on the other. It's a first approximation, but one that is real. In the former, the factors of integrity tend to dominate more over the factors of ideology. It's not that scientists are more honest people. It's just that nature is a harsh taskmaster. You can lie or distort the story of the French Revolution as long as you like, and nothing will happen. Propose a false theory in chemistry, and it'll be refuted tomorrow. ~ Noam Chomsky

I will repeat the following until I am hoarse: it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Not that I wish by any means to deny, that the mental life of individuals and peoples is also in conformity with law, as is the object of philosophical, philological, historical, moral, and social sciences to establish. ~ Hermann Von Helmholtz

What I'm pushing for is an economic discipline that will be closer to other social sciences; in particular, we should be more pragmatic about the methods that we are using instead of pretending that we have our own scientific apparatus with very sophisticated mathematic models that distinguish us from sociologists and historians. ~ Thomas Piketty

Mathematical economics is old enough to be respectable, but not all economists respect it. It has powerful supporters and impressive testimonials, yet many capable economists deny that mathematics, except as a shorthand or expository device, can be applied to economic reasoning. There have even been rumors that mathematics is used in economics (and in other social sciences) either for the deliberate purpose of mystification or to confer dignity upon common places as French was once used in diplomatic communications. ~ James R Newman

If even in science there is no a way of judging a theory but by assessing the number, faith and vocal energy of its supporters, then this must be even more so in the social sciences: truth lies in power. ~ Imre Lakatos

on "idea technology"--Science creates ideas, science creates ways of understanding. And in the social sciences, ways of understanding ourselves. And they have an enormous influence on how we think, what we aspire to, and how we act. ......idea technology may be the most profoundly important technology that science gives us.......we do have to worry about the theories we have of human nature, because human nature will be changed by the theories we have that are designed to explain and help us understand human beings....it is only human nature to have a human nature that is very much the product of the society in which people live.
--TED The way we think about work is broken ~ Barry Schwartz

The social sciences are obsessed by epistemological questioning in a way that no science, no real science is. You never have a chemistry class that starts with the methodology of chemistry; you start by doing chemistry. And the problem is that since the social sciences don't know what it is to be scientific, because they know nothing about the real sciences, they imagine that they have to be listing endless numbers of criteria and precautions before doing anything. And they usually miss precisely what is interesting in natural sciences which is [LAUGHS] a laboratory situation and the experimental protocol! ~ Bruno Latour

The social sciences were for all those who had not yet decided what to do with their lives, and for all those whose premature frustrations led them into the sterile alleys of confrontation. ~ Peter Ustinov

When you look deeply into yourself you may be able to see that there is, in this moment, a quality of aliveness that is animating you that is not philosophical and is not abstract. It's independent of what you think about it, what you believe about it and what you feel about it. It's always there! it is animating your breath, It is coursing the spirit, it is what makes it possible for you to think and speak and see and hear.

This is the Invisible Touch. ~ Alexis Karpouzos

Among the social sciences, economists are the snobs. Economics, with its numbers and graphs and curves, at least has the coloration and paraphernalia of a hard science. It's not just putting on sandals and trekking out to take notes on some tribe. ~ Michael Kinsley

Of all the modern social sciences, anthropology is the one historically most closely tied to colonialism, since it was often the case that anthropologists and ethnologists advised colonial rulers on the manners and mores of the native people. ~ Edward W. Said

The appeal by twentieth-century pluralists to scientific method was also ideologically - and even messianically - driven. It ignored scientific data that interfered with environmentalist assumptions and misrepresented socialist faith as "scientific planning. ~ Paul Edward Gottfried

I wanted to be a car mechanic and I wanted to race cars and the idea of trying to make something out of my life wasn't really a priority. But the accident allowed me to apply myself at school. I got great grades. Eventually I got very excited about anthropology and about social sciences and psychology, and I was able to push my photography even further and eventually discovered film and film schools. ~ George Lucas

Women have been brought up with the false sense that they have all the options in the world. We don't understand that the culture really isn't offering us all of these options – there still are very strong pressures to conform. We have to step outside the culture to be able to make choices that will really give us what we want. But we lack the psychic mechanisms to do this, to really choose. ~ Dalma Heyn

Eliot's own reflections on the primitive mind as a model for nondualistic thinking and on the nature and consequences of different modes of consciousness were informed by an excellent education in the social sciences and philosophy. As a prelude to our guided tour of the text of The Waste Land, we now turn to a brief survey of some of his intellectual preoccupations in the decade before he wrote it, preoccupations which in our view are enormously helpful in understanding the form of the poem. Eliot entered Harvard as a freshman in 1906 and finished his doctoral dissertation in 1916, with one of the academic years spent at the Sorbonne and one at Oxford. At Harvard and Oxford, he had as teachers some of modern philosophy's most distinguished individuals, including George Santayana, Josiah Royce, Bertrand Russell, and Harold Joachim; and while at the Sorbonne, he attended the lectures of Henri Bergson, a philosophic star in Paris in 1910-11. Under the supervision of Royce, Eliot wrote his dissertation on the epistemology of F. H. Bradley, a major voice in the late-nineteenth-, early-twentieth-century crisis in philosophy. Eliot extended this period of concentration on philosophical problems by devoting much of his time between 1915 and the early twenties to book reviewing. His education and early book reviewing occurred during the period of epistemological disorientation described in our first chapter, the period of "betweenness" described by Heidegger and Ortega y Gasset, the ~ Jewel Spears Brooker

We do not see orphaned children as just another social problem, but we recognize that we were once orphans, received into a family by the adopting grace of God. Their story is our story too. We ~ Russell D. Moore

Bubble: A safe space where people that don't like to be confronted with the consequences of their actions live. Often known as the perfect environment for those that are too immature to assume responsibility for their lack of realistic perception, and instead focus their energy in maintaining an image of perfection to the outside world, while hiding their real thoughts, quite usually very sadistic and selfish. Bubbles can easily blast when a small portion of truth or justified anger hits one, so people that live inside a bubble are particularly sensitive to those that tell them things they can't comprehend, even, and in particular, when such things are correlated with their immoral social behavior. And as people that live inside a bubble need the bubble as much as they fear the outside world, they often blend unrelated words with their own nonsense to keep the danger of having a bubble exploded far from sight. This includes being an hypocrite when calling one ungrateful, offending someone while calling such individual aggressive, and using negative depreciation with arguments that fit their agenda of keeping themselves within ignorance while bringing others further to that paradox. People that live in the bubble believe anything they hear but always assume that their beliefs are independent, as the bubble stops them from seeing further and admitting something they can't see or accept. Therefore, until the moment in which everyone will be happy to have a microchip attached to ~ Robin Sacredfire

I oppose U.S. military intervention in Iraq. I believe that we should not send troops or engage in air strikes-our nation's military involvement needs to be over. The United States has already spent billions of dollars in Iraq while our nation has endured a crumbling infrastructure, cuts to our social programs, a lack of investment in job training and creation, and sadly, a failure to take care of our veterans. Let's focus our resources at home. Over 4000 men and women have sacrificed their lives for Iraq. That is enough. ~ Janice Hahn

For me, it [moviemaking] is about social relevance. I want to make a movie that has some type of relevance where as the audience can't help but relate it in some way, and to continue that conversation outside the theater. I want people saying "this happened to my father" or "this happened to me." That's what I want. ~ Ric Roman Waugh

Whereas children can learn from their interactions with their parents how to get along in one sort of social hierarchy
that of the family
it is from their interactions with peers that they can best learn how to survive among equals in a wide range of social situations. ~ Zick Rubin

I was like a social worker for lepers. My clients had a chunk of their body they wanted to give away; for a price I was there to receive it. ~ Tama Janowitz

Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals. ~ Lev S. Vygotsky

The amygdala, along with related areas ... , plays a crucial role in coordinating perceptions with memory and behavior. These regions are especially sensitive to social interactions. ~ Daniel J. Siegel

It's hard to stop people comparing their world with the world they imagine you to have. ~ Carla H. Krueger

Anyway, so you take your space and hook it into the spaces of others, and it becomes this massive network of hooked profiles and spaced out stuff that gives rise to all kinds of newish social phenomena based on the mathematics of exponential expansion and the science of complexity. ~ Zubin J. Shroff

The people who really thirst for life, who stand daily on the brink of every kind of death, who struggle desperately to distinguish some light in the seated mystery of human existence - these are the people to whom the Gospel of salvation is primarily and most especially addressed, and inevitably they all remain far removed from the rationalistically organized social conventionalism of established Christianity. ~ Christos Yannaras

The tourists had money and we needed it; they only asked in return to be lied to and deceived and told that single most important thing, that they were safe, that their sense of security - national, individual, spiritual - wasn't a bad joke being played on them by a bored and capricious destiny. To be told that there was no connection between then and now, that they didn't need to wear a black armband or have a bad conscience about their power and their wealth and everybody else's lack of it; to feel rotten that no-one could or would explain why the wealth of a few seemed so curiously dependent on the misery of the many. We kindly pretended that it was about buying and selling chairs, about them asking questions about price and heritage, and us replying in like manner.

But it wasn't about price and heritage, it wasn't about that at all.

The tourists had insistent, unspoken questions and we just had to answer as best we could, with forged furniture. They were really asking, 'Are we safe?' and we were really replying, 'No, but a barricade of useless goods may help block the view.' And because hubris is not just an ancient Greek word but a human sense so deep-seated we might better regard it as an unerring instinct, they were also wanting to know, 'If it is our fault, then will we suffer?' and we were really replying, 'Yes, and slowly, but a fake chair may make us both feel better about it. ~ Richard Flanagan

If we define society as a human community, then the transformation of individual attitudes and values represents meaningful social change. ~ Leslie Weisman

Americans know very little about social statistics, but I am not sure that it's important that Americans know about social statistics. ~ Milton Friedman

The Tories and the Lib Dems talk about social mobility, but, short of winning the lottery, the only way to guarantee young people from all backgrounds the opportunity to do better and to raise aspirations is through education. ~ Lucy Powell

People are reading. In fact, due to social media they are reading more than any time in history. Now we must find a way to get them to include books in all that reading. It starts with us writers doing a better job of writing. ~ Will Gibson

The techniques of artificial intelligence are to the mind what bureaucracy is to human social interaction. ~ Terry Winograd

Hidden all day in impenetrable black burkas, rich Saudi women transformed themselves by night into birds of paradise with their corsets, their see-through bras, their G-strings with multicolored lace and rhinestones. They were exactly the opposite of Western women, who spent their days dressed up and looking sexy to maintain their social status, then collapsed in exhaustion once they got home, abandoning all hope of seduction in favor of clothes that were loose and shapeless. ~ Michel Houellebecq

We should not allow ourselves to be deceived by our outward show of 'civilized' manners and 'cultured' social behavior into believing that self-concern, desirous attachment, aversion, and indifference are steadily losing their hold over us. ~ Stephen Batchelor

Sex is an attachment behavior, reinforcing the social bond between adults. Sometimes it takes the form of passionate, joyful sex between people who are falling in love with each other. Sometimes it takes the form of desperate, grasping sex between people whose attachment is threatened. ~ Emily Nagoski

Even if people do wrong, we're social animals, so what can we do about stopping them doing the same things in future? Saying people are 'bad' or 'evil' is just an unwillingness to engage; an unwillingness to try to empathise. That sanctimonious attitude doesn't help anyone. ~ Denise Mina

The world needs more social innovations. ~ Anne Wojcicki

Crime is incurable, save by that gradual process of adaptation to the social state which humanity is undergoing. Crime is the continual breaking out of the old unadapted nature
the index of a character unfitted to its conditions
and only as fast as the unfitness diminishes can crime diminish. ~ Herbert Spencer

All have the ability to perceive and live in dimensional synthesis, yet they spend time with the sciences trying to separate these realms, splitting the worlds into minutia, seeking the god particle. They are searching high and low, 'out there', for the source of it all, but no matter how many accelerators they build, no matter how far they go, they will never find the source 'out there' because the source is within ~ Juliana Loomer

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress. ~ George Henry Lewes

Workers are not being exploited. But if their share of growth doesn't increase, this could be a potential cause of social tension worldwide. ~ Kenneth Rogoff

Earthmen may even rule at Trantor for a generation, but their children will become Trantorians, and in their turn will look down upon the remnant on Earth. ~ Isaac Asimov

All of this would explain why revolutionary moments always seem to be followed by an outpouring of social, artistic, and intellectual creativity. Normally unequal structures of imaginative identification are disrupted; everyone is experimenting with trying to see the world from unfamiliar points of view; everyone feels not only the right, but usually the immediate practical need to re-create and reimagine everything around them. ~ David Graeber

THERE was a curious social situation in Black Hawk. All the young men felt the attraction of the fine, well-set-up country girls who had come to town to earn a living, and, in nearly every case, to help the father struggle out of debt, or to make it possible for the younger children of the family to go to school. ~ Willa Cather

What do you gain if you ban employees from, say, visiting a social-networking site or watching YouTube while at work? You gain nothing. That time doesn't magically convert to work. They'll just find some other diversion. ~ Jason Fried

Cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits are unacceptable, and they shouldn't be put on the table by Democrats for any reason. ~ Russ Feingold

Young people are not raw material to be employed by the political class on behalf of whatever fashionable political, military, or social cause catches its fancy. In a free society, their lives are not the playthings of government. ~ Ron Paul

Of course genes can't pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life. ~ Steven Pinker

The dominant, almost general, idea of revolution - particularly the Socialist idea - is that revolution is a violent change of social conditions through which one social class, the working class, becomes dominant over another class, the capitalist class. It is the conception of a purely physical change, and as such it involves only political scene shifting and institutional rearrangements ~ Emma Goldman

The implicit social contract is that upper-class girls will keep their virtue, while young men will find satisfaction in the brothels. And the brothels will be staffed with slave girls trafficked from Nepal or Bangladesh or poor Indian villages. As long as the girls are uneducated, low-caste peasants like Meena, society will look the other way - just as many antebellum Americans turned away from the horrors of slavery because the people being lashed looked different from them. ~ Nicholas D. Kristof

Most of us are shrinking in the face of psycho-social and physical poisons, of the toxins of our world. But compassion, the generation of compassion, actually mobilizes our immunity. ~ Joan Halifax

I don't want traffic behavior, I want social behavior. ~ Hans Monderman

It was Day Three, Freshman Year, and I was a little bit lost in the school library,looking for a bathroom that wasn't full of blindingly shiny sophomores checking their lip gloss.
Day Three.Already pretty clear on the fact that I would be using secondary bathrooms for at least the next three years,until being a senior could pass for confidence.For the moment, I knew no one,and was too shy to talk to anyone. So that first sight of Edward: pale hair that looked like he'd just run his hands through it, paint-smeared white shirt,a half smile that was half wicked,and I was hooked.
Since, "Hi,I'm Ella.You look like someone I'd like to spend the rest of my life with," would have been totally insane, I opted for sitting quietly and staring.Until the bell rang and I had to rush to French class,completely forgetting to pee.
Edward Willing.Once I knew his name, the rest was easy.After all,we're living in the age of information. Wikipedia, iPhones, 4G ntworks, social networking that you can do from a thousand miles away.The upshot being that at any given time over the next two years, I could sit twenty feet from him in the library, not saying a word, and learn a lot about him.ENough, anyway, for me to become completely convinced that the Love at First Sight hadn't been a fluke.
It's pretty simple.Edward matched four and a half of my If My Prince Does, In Fact, Come Someday,It Would Be Great If He Could Meet These Five Criteria.
1. Interested in art. For me, it's ~ Melissa Jensen