Social Circle Quotes & Sayings

That is the great danger of meritocracy: the people who reach the top of the system are precisely the people who have most completely identified with the system and its demands, creating a vicious circle preventing any actual change. It is no accident that conservatives tend to employ the rhetoric of social mobility so readily, as social climbers generally do not ask questions about the ladder. — Adam Kotsko

It makes sense that introverts are uniquely good at leading intiative-takers. Because of their inclination to listen to others and lack of interest in dominating social situations, introverts are more likely to hear and implement suggestions. Having benefited from the talents of their followers, they are then likely to motivate them to be even more proactive. Introverted leaders create a virtious circle of proactivity. — Susan Cain

My social circle is, in reality, not a circle. It is a pyramid. And at the top of the pyramid is a single person - Jacob - who is responsible for an overwhelming majority of the relationships that constitute my life. — Malcolm Gladwell

Strong personal relationships are characterised by an ability and willingness to do each other favors. Strive to put family first, then your social circle, and back off on efforts to be a social media superstar. — Mark Sisson

The gift moves towards the empty place. As it turns in its circle it turns towards him who has been empty-handed the longest, and if someone appears elsewhere whose need is greater it leaves its old channel and moves toward him. Our generosity may leave us empty, but our emptiness then pulls gently at the whole until the thing in motion returns to replenish us. Social nature abhors a vacuum. — Lewis Hyde

How often you are irresistibly drawn to a plain, unassuming woman, whose soft silvery tones render her positively attractive! In the social circle, how pleasant it is to hear a woman talk in that low key which always characterizes the true lady. In the sanctuary of home, how such a voice soothes the fretful child and cheers the weary husband! — Charles Lamb

We fought about it endlessly. He even went as far as to set up meetings with prominent girls in our social circle, attempting to make me a one woman man with a purposeful relationship. When I would bed these girls and leave them, Grandfather finally gave up. — Sadie Grubor

I don't particularly have a wide social circle. — Scott Rudin

Nonetheless, there is something mysterious about social networks. We live surrounded by them, but usually cannot see more than one step beyond the people we are directly connected to, if that. It is like being stuck in a traffic jam surrounded by cars and trucks. The traffic helicopter can see beyond our immediate surroundings and suggest routes that might extricate us. Network analysis is like that helicopter. It allows us to see beyond our immediate circle. — Charles Kadushin

Spray a bug with a toxin and it dies; spray a man, spray his brain, and he becomes an insect that clacks and vibrates about in a closed circle forever. A reflex machine, like an ant. Repeating his last instruction. — Philip K. Dick

Why does reading freak people out so much? Sure, I could be pretty anti-social when we were on the road, but if I was playing a Gameboy hour after hour, no one would be on my case. In my social circle, blowing up space monsters is socially acceptable in a way that American Pastoral isn't. — Nick Hornby

People can believe in their own progress and success. They can even believe in strangers success. But when it comes to success of anyone from their social circle, they think, it must be by fluke and the other person doesn't deserve it. — Shon Mehta

We must understand the role of human rights as empowering of individuals and communities. By protecting these rights, we can help prevent the many conflicts based on poverty, discrimination and exclusion (social, economic and political) that continue to plague humanity and destroy decades of development efforts. The vicious circle of human rights violations that lead to conflicts-which in turn lead to more violations-must be broken. I believe we can break it only by ensuring respect for all human rights. — Mary Robinson

Ty swept his arms around, encompassing everything around them, the vast campus above. "All this. The fucking shark that eats the world. — Dave Eggers

One of the pleasures of getting older and making a living the way you want to is that your social circle becomes rarified, and the people who enter have been vetted. — Adam Mansbach

I missed the currency of ideas. In London we had been part of a wide circle of solicitors' families, and social occasions had been mentally stimulating as well as entertaining. — Tracy Chevalier

... he was the most popular kid in school, and I was not. I sensed something in myself that made me feel disconnected from the cliques inhabited by my classmates. I knew if I put myself out there more, I could probably have just as wide a social circle as anyone else. But the overwhelming desire to be included and liked that operated the motors of most kids just wasn't in me. I was content to sit back and let the world come to me; if it did, great, and if not, well, that was okay too. — T.M. Goeglein

The profound realization, thanks to the practice of Stoicism, that acquiring the things that those in my social circle typically crave and work hard to afford will, in the long run, make zero difference in how happy I am and will in no way contribute to my having a good life. — William B. Irvine

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference - those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older - know that survival is not an academic skill ... For the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. They will never allow us to bring about genuine change. — Audre Lorde

If you eat healthily most of the time you can afford to indulge yourself occasionally, but if you eat nothing but junk, you'll end up not being able to run for a bus without huffing like a steam train. (The only drawback to being super-fit is that centring your life around your quinoa intake and yoga classes often results in an overdose of smugness which may cause your social circle to shrink.) — Rosie Blythe

It never ceases to amaze me how adaptable social geometry can be. Within a couple of days I went from being the centre of the circle to an indefinite point outside its circumference. — K.J. Parker

Mine will say; 'If you want to join my social circle, don't bang my friends. Shit gets REAL weird, REAL quick. — Skyla Madi

Furthermore, man is, by his instincts and his inherited dispositions, predestined to a social existence beyond the intimate family circle. Society must be conceived, therefore, as a part of nature, like a beaver's dam or the nests of birds. — Ernest Watson Burgess

Dialogue is an opportunity for people to communicate from outside the limitations of their points of view. When we enter a circle of dialogue, there are no labels, only human beings. — Oli Anderson

For everybody must now 'move in a circle', - to the prevalence of which rotatory motion, is perhaps to be attributed the giddiness and false steps of many. — Jane Austen

But my social circle had dwindled. Hell, all I had was a social dot - just me on a one man continuum. — Jeremy Robert Johnson

Two things I try to remember:

My cultural, social, and financial environments formulate my view of the world. My age, sex, race, where I was born, who raised me, and who my inner circle is formulate my view of the world. My education, my exposure to new and different things, or lack thereof, formulate my view of the world. My view of the world formulates my opinions. But, if there's a missing piece from my world view, I can't have an informed, intelligent opinion on it. So, for example, if I've never experienced the color purple, my only informed opinions can be on the other colors. Not purple. I can say, "I don't like purple," or "I like purple," but in either case, my opinion has no significance.

The second thing I try to remember is that just because someone has a different opinion than I do, and he tells me so, it doesn't mean I'm being persecuted. In actual fact, it might mean that I'm about to learn something big. — Patricia V. Davis

For boys, the family was the place from which one sprang and to which one returned for comfort and support, but the field of action was the larger world of wilderness, adventure, industry, labor, and politics. For girls, the family was to be the world, their field of action the domestic circle. He was to express himself in his work and, through it and social action, was to help transform his environment; her individual growth and choices were restricted to lead her to express herself through love, wifehood, and motherhood
through the support and nurture of others, who would act for her. — Gerda Lerner

Does it seem to you impossible to imagine anything more inextricable than the social contract, when you think of the frightful number of relations that it must regulate
something like squaring the circle, or finding perpetual motion? That is the reason why, wearied of the struggle, you fall back on absolutism and force. — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

["Manning Up"'s] essays definitely nuance the idea of transitioning into a "shared manhood" (much like feminists of color have complicated the idea of "shared womanhood"). Trans men don't all transition to just become "men," which was one of the projects' cornerstone concepts. They become black men, white men, queer men, straight men, working class men, affluent men, fatherly men, single men, spiritual men, etc. etc. All of these mean different things when filtered through social and intimate, familial lenses.

One major boon of the growth in transgender literature ... is that we get to tease out these complexities in lives that will be popularly portrayed as monolithic unless we provide counter-scripts."

- from a National Book Critics Circle interview with writer Rigoberto Gonzalez — Mitch Kellaway

Leo Tolstoy's A Confession is possibly the most important document of the last two centuries for understanding our current plight. The dogmas of modern unbelief had captured his elite circle of Russian intellectuals, artists, and members of the social upper crust, and the implications of it slowly destroyed the basis of his life. On those dogmas only two things are real: particles and progress. "Why do I live?" he asked. And the answer he got was, "In infinite space, in infinite time, infinitely small particles change their forms in infinite complexity, and when you have understood the laws of those mutations of form you will understand why you live on the earth". — Dallas Willard

The earliest phase of social formations found in historical as well as in contemporary social structures is this: a relatively small circle firmly closed against neighboring, strange, or in some way antagonistic circles. — Georg Simmel

Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom - that the current economic and political system is the only possible one - the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone's blueprint? It's not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance Florence conceived of something they called "capitalism," figured out the details of how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin. — David Graeber

I was trying to make the web more civil. I was trying to make it more elegant. I got rid of anonymity. I combined a thousand disparate elements into one unified system. But I didn't picture a world where Circle membership was mandatory, where all government and all life was channeled through one network. — Dave Eggers

Habit 7 is taking the time to sharpen the saw. By renewing the four dimensions of your nature - physical, spiritual, mental and social/emotional, you can work more quickly and effortlessly. To do this, we must be proactive. This is a Quadrant II (important, not urgent) activity that must be acted on. It's at the center of our Circle of Influence, so we must do it for ourselves. — Stephen Covey

That's been one of the best things about doing 'Game of Thrones.' My social circle in London has more or less doubled just by doing it because nearly everyone is based in London. And I hadn't long moved to London before doing it, so it's been really great in terms of meeting people to hang out with while I'm there. — Joe Dempsie

If there's not someone in your social circle who doesn't look like you, then shame on you. — Leigh Anne Tuohy

Alexis de Tocqueville warned that as the economy and government of America got bigger, citizens could become smaller: less practiced in the forms of everyday power, more dependent on vast distant social machines, more isolated and atomized--and therefore more susceptible to despotism.

He warned that if the "habits of the heart" fed by civic clubs and active self-government evaporated, citizens would regress to pure egoism. They would stop thinking about things greater than their immediate circle. Public life would disappear. And that would only accelerate their own disempowerment.

This is painfully close to a description of the United States since Trump and Europe since Brexit. And the only way to reverse this vicious cycle of retreat and atrophy is to reverse it: to find a sense of purpose that is greater than the self, and to exercise power with others and for others in democratic life. — Eric Liu

Nothing is more limiting than a closed circle of acquaintanceship where every avenue of conversation has been explored and social exchanges are fixed in a known routine. — A.J. Cronin

Comic artists have always been part of my social circle. I just like hanging out with artists, and I always see them at conventions or a store signing or something. "Hey, we should do something together." — Mark Millar

To get useful new ideas, we must go beyond our immediate circle and make contact with distant parts of the social system. — Richard Koch

Scripture is wrought with a clear message of Jesus' utter disregard for appearance and social rank. In Judean society, it was a major taboo for a man to even speak to a woman who was not his own wife or daughter; yet Jesus interacted regularly with foreign women, He taught women, ignored ritual impurity laws, and readily accepted women into His inner circle of followers. — Matt Litton

I believe it is woman's right to have a voice in all the laws and regulations by which she is to be governed; whether in Churchor State; and that the present arrangements of society, on these points, are a violation of human rights, a rank usurpation of power, a violent seizure and confiscation of what is sacredly and inalienably hers
and thus inflicting upon woman outrageous wrongs, working mischief incalculable in the social circle, and in its influence on the world producing only evil, and that continually. — Angelina Grimke

To bring a New Message, not only on Social Media,
requires silence and peace.
Amen,
Religious Leader Petra Cecilia Maria Hermans
Religion of Blue Circle
October 2, 2016 — Petra Hermans

Did was to locate a member of the current aristocracy, who thought it would be thrilling or exciting to work in Eternity. I placed her in this office and kept her under close observation to see if she were suitable for our purpose - " Harlan thought: Close observation! Yes! Again his anger focused itself on Finge rather than upon the woman. Finge was still speaking. "By all standards, she is suitable. We will now return her to her Time. Using her dwelling as a base, you will be able to study the social life of her circle. Do — Isaac Asimov

Keep in mind that to avoid loneliness, many people need both a social circle and an intimate attachment. Having just one of two may still leave you feeling lonely. — Gretchen Rubin

I didn't have that normal teenage period when you build up your friends in your area and you have a social circle. — Daniel Radcliffe

To acquire the full consciousness of self is to know oneself so different from others that no longer feels allied with men except by purely animal contacts: nevertheless, among souls of this degree, there is an ideal fraternity based on differences,
while society fraternity is based on resemblances.
The full consciousness of self can be called originality of soul, -and all this is said only to point out the group of rare beings to which Andre Gide belongs.
The misfortune of these beings, when they express themselves, is that they do it with such odd gestures that men fear to approach them; their life of social contacts must often revolve in the brief circle of ideal fraternities; or, when the mob consents to admit such souls, it is as curiosities or museum objects. Their glory is, finally, to be loved from afar & almost understood, as parchments are seen & read above sealed cases. — Remy De Gourmont

I was seeking within myself the human being I had so long lost sight of, hoping that my passion had only been distorted but had never been completely suppressed, by the social illusion, by the dominant ideal of "concealing emotions". I wished to shout: "I broke away from your cold and petrified world in which I was one of the wheels running noiselessly in the great machine, one of the idle wheels. I have plunged into an unknown abyss; and in this one hour of the plunge I have lived more fully than in all sheltered years in your circle. I do not belong to you anymore, I may be on the heights or in the depths, but never shall I return to the dead levels of your philistine comfort. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky