Social Construct Quotes & Sayings

They told me that nothing was a sin, just a poor life choice. Poor impulse control. That nothing is evil. Any concept of right versus wrong, according to them, is merely a cultural construct relative to one specific time and place. They said that if anything should force us to modify our personal behavior it should be our allegiance to a social contract, not some vague, externally imposed threat of flaming punishment. — Chuck Palahniuk

Discussing cultural relativism with cultural relativists is like playing tennis with some guy who says, Your ace is just a social construct. — Mark Steyn

By definition, of course, we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human. On this assumption we exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce his life chances. We construct a stigma-theory, an ideology to explain his inferiority and account for the danger he represents, sometimes rationalizing an animosity based on other differences, such as those of social class. — Erving Goffman

On one hand, the RGI [Race Grievance Industry] will declare that race is a social construct, but then use race to socially construct a paycheck. — Taleeb Starkes

Hardly any aspect of my life, from where I had lived to my education to my employment history to my friendships, had been free from the taint of racial inequity, from racism, from whiteness. My racial identity had shaped me from the womb forward. I had not been in control of my own narrative. It wasn't just race that was a social construct. So was I. — Tim Wise

Everyone who ever did anything revolutionary was just an eighteen-year-old kid once. George Washington, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela ... Social status is just a social construct, the primary function of which is to keep regular people oppressed and rebels in line. — Matthew Quick

Gender is a social construct, but everyone likes to cuddle. — Danielle Henderson

It just seems like right now we're in a place where people are being witch-hunted for expressing an opinion. Even if it's a lousy opinion or a shitty opinion, and comics I don't think can ever fall into the trap of any groups that want to censor what a person says or thinks or punish a person for expressing what they think. Anything you say about a social issue is going to offend half the country. I don't care how nicely you say it, I don't care how well you construct the joke, simply by stating the opinion, you are for something and anti something else. — Jim Norton

Race is real. Race is powerful. But race is also a social construct. This understanding of race begins to shed light on the conundrums of whiteness. In the United States constructions of race have never been morally neutral. Racial construction processes have always meant and continue to mean today that persons with phenotypes marking them as "white" receive better treatment, greater social access, and more institutional benefits than those with phenotypes that mark them "of color. — Jennifer Harvey

Spirituality is to Religion, what Love is to Marriage. Spirituality is an emotional state of the mind, just like Love, while Religion on the other hand, is a social construct, quite like Marriage. — Abhijit Naskar

Our main reasons for fearing males having sex with males is that you really had to construct a more powerful social role to keep men in their place than you did to keep women in their place. — Warren Farrell

If we were to construct a similar map for society, it would have to include each person's professional and personal interests and chart everyone she or he knew. It would make Milgram's experiment seem clumsy and obsolete by allowing us to find, in seconds, the shortest path to any person in the world. It would be a must-use tool for everyone from politicians to salespeople and epidemiologists. Of course, such a social search engine is impossible to build, since it would take at least a lifetime to interrogate all 6 billion people on the earth to learn about their friends and acquaintances. — Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

Sometimes it is claimed by those who argue that race is just a social construct that the human genome project shows that because people share roughly 99% of their genes in common, that there are no races. This is silly. — J. Philippe Rushton

Sociopathy and psychopathy are very different. Sociopathy includes a broad, heterogeneous category of individuals who act antisocially, the causes of which are believed to be social and environmental in nature. Psychopathy is a term grounded in biology and genetics and is truly agnostic to causes or etiology. In other words, genetics and the makeup of the brain, as well as environment, contribute to the construct of psychopathy. Although the term sociopathy is not used in modern academic circles to mean "psychopathy" anymore, some people continue to confuse the terms. — Kent A. Kiehl

Privacy is not a static construct. It is not an inherent property of any particular information or setting. It is a process by which people seek to have control over a social situation by managing impressions, information flows, and context. — Danah Boyd

There is no such things as race," said Morrison. "Racism is a construct; a social construct. And it has benefits. Money can be made off of it. People who don't like themselves can feel better because of it. It can describe certain kinds of behavior that are wrong or misleading. So [racism] has a social function. But race can only be defined as a human being — Toni Morrison

Human social life, I suggest, is the magma that erupts and builds up, so to speak, at the fault lines where natural human capacities meet and grind against and over natural human limitations ... . This meeting of powers and limitations produces a creative, dynamic tension and energy that generates and fuels the making of human social life and social structures ... . It is real human persons living through the tensions of natural existential contradictions who construct patterned social meanings, interactions, institutions, and structures. — Christian Smith

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race
scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct ... it has a social function, racism. — Toni Morrison

Our categories are important. We cannot organize a social life, a political movement, or our individual identities and desires without them. The fact that categories invariably leak and can never contain all the relevant "existing things" does not render them useless, only limited. Categories like "woman," "butch," "lesbian," or "transsexual" are all imperfect, historical, temporary, and arbitrary. We use them, and they use us. We use them to construct meaningful lives, and they mold us into historically specific forms of personhood. Instead of fighting for immaculate classifications and impenetrable boundaries, let us strive to maintain a community that understands diversity as a gift, sees anomalies as precious, and treats all basic principles with a hefty dose of skepticism. — Gayle Rubin

Knowledge is a social construct, a consensus among the members of a community of knowledgeable peers. — Kenneth A. Bruffee

Q: But isn't race "just skin deep"? Don't most scientists now agree that race is a social construct, not a biological reality? A: Biological evidence shows that race is not a social construct. Coroners in crime labs can identify race from a skeleton or even just the skull. They can identify race from blood, hair, or semen as well. To deny the existence of race is unscientific and unrealistic. Race is much more than "just skin deep. — J. Philippe Rushton

Individuals who speak languages other than English, who speak patois as well as standard English, find it a necessary aspect of self-affirmation not to feel compelled to chose one voice over another, not to claim one as more authentic but rather to construct social realities that celebrate, acknowledge and affirm differences, variety. — Bell Hooks

The Hell of Regret He who wins the race cannot run with the pack. And once you get out you can't come back, because caged lions don't mate with free ones! If ever you are going to win, you
must forsake the social construct of the cage and all the cage dwellers. — T.D. Jakes

Most of the people on the Cloud Ark were going to have to be women.
There were other reasons for it besides just making more babies. Research on the long-term effects of spaceflight suggested that women were less susceptible to radiation damage than men. They were smaller on average, requiring less space, less food, less air. And sociological studies pointed to the idea that they did better when crammed together in tight spaces for long periods of time. This was controversial, as it got into fraught topics of nature vs. nurture and whether gender identity was a social construct or a genetic program. — Neal Stephenson

I think architecture is one of the predominant orderings of social space. It can construct and contain our experiences. It defines our days and nights. It literally puts us in our place. — Barbara Kruger

We know beauty when we see it, and our reactions are remarkably consistent. Beauty is not just a social construct, and not every girl is beautiful just the way she is. — Virginia Postrel

gold is valuable as a currency or investment because we believe it is valuable (which is the same reason for valuing money itself). Gold's value as currency is an abstract social construct. — Paul Vigna

We often take for granted the notion that some people are insiders, while others are outsiders. But such a notion is a social contrivance, that, like virtually every public construct, is a legacy of a primordial and tribal mentality. — Jamake Highwater

Debt is a social and ideological construct, not a simple economic fact. — Noam Chomsky

In thinking about religion and society in the 21st century, we should broaden the conversation about faith from doctrinal debates to the larger question of how it might inspire us to strengthen the bonds of belonging that redeem us from our solitude, helping us to construct together a gracious and generous social order. — Jonathan Sacks

Americans invented adolescence. It is not a natural phenomenon. Adolescence is a social construct, created by an urban-industrial society that keeps its young at home far past puberty. Teenage angst is a luxury if a successful modern human conceit that isn't condoned by our superior species. — Sarah Beth Durst

Positions are just a social construct that mean nothing to the enlightened man. — Manuel Neuer

My mother used to tell me that when push comes to shove, you always know who to turn to. That being a family isn't a social construct but an instinct. — Jodi Picoult

If we fail to provide boys with pro-social models of the transition to adulthood, they may construct their own. In some cases, gang initiation rituals, street racing, and random violence may be the result. — Leonard Sax

Explaining the unknown should be left to science, questions of good and bad behavior can be answered by ethics, and inspiration is often found in the arts. There's no longer a need for the social construct of religion. — David G. McAfee

The moral that Plato wished to draw out is that no man can resist the temptation of being able to steal and kill at will. All men are corruptible. Morality is a social construct imposed from the outside. A man may appear to be moral in public to maintain his reputation for integrity and honesty, but once he possesses the power of invisibility, the use of such power would be irresistible. (Some believe that this morality tale was the inspiration for J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, in which a ring that grants the wearer invisibility is also a source of evil.) — Michio Kaku

The concept of virginity is a social construct. If you're wondering if my commercial value, self-respect, and/or quality of my immortal soul has been affected by things that have gone in or out of my vagina the answer is no. — Christy Leigh Stewart

... in the latter half of the twentieth century, postmodernism upended everything. Universal truths were no longer accepted. "Truth" (postmodernism loves quotation marks) was instead a social construct that depended heavily on cultural context. Nothing was either true or false, but was instead open to interpretation. — Gudjon Bergmann

For example, the call for equal rights has perverted into "let's all be the same." Male and female biological differences are discounted, because "male" and "female" are considered "outdated social constructs," and while that is partially true, the social construct stance becomes clear reductionism when it totally discounts clear differences in male and female biology (i.e., androgyny is not the same as equality). — Gudjon Bergmann

Let's admit that feminism came from liberalism and it was very positive. But then it went dark. Feminism replaced biology with social construct. Like you didn't achieve what you could get because it was your fault. They denied traits that are applied across all cultures. And that's where feminism went wrong is it denied biology and makes them look foolish. — Greg Gutfeld

Justice is a social construct. It's well known that the physical universe isn't fair. Nevertheless, it's difficult to decide which is more provoking: good people suffering or evil people prospering. — Susan Cartwright

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called 'sex' is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. — Judith Butler

Razzia: what is the time?" Razzia nodded. "Time is a social construct designed to derive order from chaos. — Derek Landy

The system of patriarchy is a historic construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end. Its time seems to have nearly run its course - it no longer serves the needs of men or women and in its inextricable linkage to militarism, hierarchy, and racism it threatens the very existence of life on earth. What will come after, what kind of structure will be the foundation for alternate forms of social organization we cannot yet know. We are living in an age of unprecedented transformation. We are in the process of becoming. — Gerda Lerner

Under Hudgins, Virginia law presumed blacks were slaves, denoting their status as objects even when, in fact, they were free.84 Judge Tucker undercut even the provisions in the statute that contemplated some mixed-race individuals as free, because they descended from either a white woman or a free black or mulatto female. Judges throughout the 19th century followed Judge Tucker's lead, creating presumptions of enslavement and other devices for limiting black freedom. These cases reinforced a subordinate role for blacks in American society, and in so doing, created a superior role for whites. This social construct of white privilege is unmistakably seen in the words of one South Carolina judge in 1836: "A — F. Michael Higginbotham

We have given teens more money, so they can construct their own social and material worlds more easily. We have given them more time to spend among themselves - and less time in the company of adults. We have given them e-mail and beepers and, most of all, cellular phones, so that they can fill in all the dead spots in their day - dead spots that might once have been filled with the voices of adults - with the voices of their peers. That is a world ruled by the logic of word of mouth, by the contagious messages that teens pass among themselves. Columbine is now the most prominent epidemic of isolation among teenagers. It will not be the last. — Malcolm Gladwell

If we are to talk in the language of social constructions, then the construction of the very concepts of the social and the biological must also be elucidated. — Denise Riley

Freedom to creat and construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine ... It is not enough that men are not slaves; if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death. — Erich Fromm

The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists ... Keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females, too, until the social construct known as the white race is destroyed. Not deconstructed, but destroyed. — Noel Ignatiev

If we're gonna progress as a people we are going to realise that, as one of my favourite poets says, the other is a lie. There are no other people. Race is a social construct. — Saul Williams

I really wanted to know what happens in a place that is trying to build socialism, that's trying to construct some form of social justice. That's trying to feed people, to make health care and education a right. — Assata Shakur