Social Engineering Quotes & Sayings

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

When the maker's (or fixer's) activity is immediately situated within a community of use, it can be enlivened by this kind of direct perception. Then the social character of his work isn't separate from its internal or "engineering" standards; the work is improved through relationships with others. It may even be the case that what those standards are, what perfection consists of, is something that comes to light only through these iterated exchanges with others who use the product, as well as other craftsmen in the same trade. Through work that had this social character, some shared conception of the good is lit up, and becomes concrete. — Matthew B. Crawford

Enlightened social engineering is required to face situations that demand global action now. Education is a long-term solution. Parents and the general public must be reached also Otherwise, children and youth enrolled in globally oriented programs may find themselves in conflict with values assumed in the home. And then the educational institution frequently comes under scrutiny and must pull back. — John Goodlad

The common law does not proceed by legislation, or by imposing directives and decrees on a reluctant population. It proceeds by resolving conflicts, and discovering the rules that are implicit in those conflicts and in the behaviour that gives rise to them. Common law is discovered law, and its principles are not imposed from above but extracted from below, by judges whose aim is to do justice in the individual case, rather than to reform the conduct of mankind. Its rights are not stated but implied, and they encapsulate a vision of individual freedom rather than a politics of collective conformity. The rights dreamed up in the European Courts, by judges who do not pay the cost of imposing them, are experiments in social engineering, rather than recognitions of individual sovereignty, and this is in no matter more evident than in those clauses that have imposed the mores of the elite on a reluctant residue of Christian believers, and which are now ubiquitous in our statutory law. — Roger Scruton

Social engineering is using manipulation, influence and deception to get a person, a trusted insider within an organization, to comply with a request, and the request is usually to release information or to perform some sort of action item that benefits that attacker. — Kevin Mitnick

Medicine's focus is narrow. Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet - and this is the painful paradox - we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days. For more than half a century now, we have treated the trials of sickness, aging, and mortality as medical concerns. It's been an experiment in social engineering, putting our fates in the hands of people valued more for their technical prowess than for their understanding of human needs. — Atul Gawande

A simple social engineering hack might involve leaving a thumb drive on the pavement close to the driver's door of a car. — John McAfee

The same undisciplined government spending and social engineering that has undermined our economy over the past 30 years has also been tearing at the social fabric of this land. — Stockwell Day

For every scientific (or engineering) action, there is an equal and opposite social reaction. — Norman Ralph Augustine

Social engineering is using deception, manipulation and influence to convince a human who has access to a computer system to do something, like click on an attachment in an e-mail. — Kevin Mitnick

Universities face a constant struggle to maintain their integrity, and their fundamental social role in a healthy society, in the face of external pressures. The problems are heightened with the expansion of private power in every domain, in the course of the state-corporate social engineering projects of the past several decades. . . . To defend their integrity and proper commitments is an honorable and difficult task in itself, but our sights should be set higher than that. Particularly in the societies that are more privileged, many choices are available, including fundamental institutional change, if that is the right way to proceed, and surely including scholarship that contributes to, and draws from, the never-ending popular struggles for freedom and justice. 5 Higher education is under attack not because it is failing, but because it is a potentially democratic public sphere. — Noam Chomsky

Between 1946-1956, every turn was a left turn. I had to fend off temptations toward anarchism. I was more deeply drawn into the vision of an egalitarian society shaped by radical social engineering, Marxist historical and sociological interpretation, and resource redistribution. Everything imaginable seemed possible for my young mind, and I was well rewarded for my utopian thoughts by those older leaders of my church. Resistance to all those ideas simply didn't occur either on my part or on the part of people I knew, including family and friends. I was on a mission to make the world a much better place and felt empowered to actually transform our society — Thomas C. Oden

If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on earth does not have even one percent of the total knowledge on earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left. — Thomas Sowell

I was one of the first practitioners of social engineering as a hacking technique, and today it is my only tool of use, aside from a smartphone - in a purely white hat sort of way. But if you don't trust me, then ask any reasonably competent social engineer. — John McAfee

What's gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is ONE RIGHT WAY to proceed with growing up. — John Taylor Gatto

'Social engineering,' the fancy term for tricking you into giving away your digital secrets, is at least as great a threat as spooky technology. — Barton Gellman

Social pressure is the fascism of the democracies. Fascism is the democracy of the ruthless. Social engineering is the opiate of romantic intellectuals. — Michael D. O'Brien

Social engineering has become about 75% of an average hacker's toolkit, and for the most successful hackers, it reaches 90% or more. — John McAfee

I've always written. I'm from an older generation of programmers [who] did not come out of engineering. [A]ll sorts of people were drawn in from the social sciences and humanities. — Ellen Ullman

Government has ceased to mean upholding and reinforcing the traditional rights and morals of the governed; it now means compulsion in the service of social engineering. — Joseph Sobran

It should soon be possible dramatically to increase the intelligence and life span of a few individuals [with the help of genetic engineering]. They and their offspring could become a master race. Evolution pays no regard to social justice. It was not fair on the Neanderthals they were replaced by modern humans. — Stephen Hawking

According to the prevailing notion, freedom manifests as "preference-satisfying behavior." About the preferences themselves we are to maintain a principled silence, out of deference to the autonomy of the individual. They are said to express the authentic core of the self, and are for that reason unavailable for rational scrutiny. But this logic would seem to break down when our preferences are the object of massive social engineering, conducted not by government "nudgers" but by those who want to monetize our attention. — Matthew B. Crawford

This attempt to ban smoking is an example of social engineering on a vast scale. Such massive intervention in the private lives and choices of one quarter of our adult population recalls the extremism of Prohibition, the last national crusade against a supposed social evil. — Charles Orville Whitley

Liberals say they are for civil liberties and personal freedom, but they continue to advocate government regulation of business, redistribution of wealth, and various forms of social engineering to manipulate human relationships and attitudes. — Richard Ebeling

At their best, at their most creative, science and engineering are attributes of liberty-noble expressions of man's God-given right to investigate and explore the universe without fear of social or political or religious reprisals. — David Sarnoff

Pragmatically speaking, I like the fact that the masses vote, abuse drugs, believe in Jesus, follow sports, and worship a flag. They are tools of social engineering that keep the many-too-many sedate, pacified, and out of many people's hair (chiefly, my own). — Matt Paradise

The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany: 'Traditional values are to be debunked' and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it. — C.S. Lewis

As with scientists, American university professors were more atheistic or agnostic than the general populace (23 percent versus 7 percent nonbelievers, respectively). But when professors from different areas were polled, it became clear that scientists were the least religious. While only 6 percent of "health" professors were atheists or agnostics, this figure was 29 percent for humanities, 33 percent for computer science and engineering, 39 percent for social sciences, and a whopping 52 percent for physical and biological scientists together. When disciplines were divided more finely, biologists and psychologists tied as the least religious: 61 percent of each group were agnostics or atheists. — Jerry A. Coyne

Social engineering bypasses all technologies, including firewalls. — Kevin Mitnick

He informed Byrdie that his social engineering ambitions betrayed all the delusions of grandeur that you might expect from the son of a poet. — Nell Zink

Programmers are isolated. They sit in their cubicle; they don't think about the larger picture. To my mind, a programmer is not an engineer, because an engineer is somebody who starts with a social problem that an organization or a society has and says, "OK, here's this problem that we have- how can we solve it?" The engineer comes up with a clever, cost-effective solution to address that problem, builds it, tests it to make sure it solves the problem. That's engineering. — Philip Greenspun

I had grown up among engineers, and I could remember the engineers of the twenties very well indeed: their open, shining intellects, their free and gentle humor, their agility and breadth of thought, the ease with which they shifted from one engineering field to another, and, for that matter, from technology to social concerns and art. Then, too, they personified good manners and delicacy of taste; well-bred speech that flowed evenly and was free of uncultured words; one of them might play a musical instrument, another dabble in painting; and their faces always bore a spiritual imprint. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Edward Bellamy's eugenic utopian novel, "Looking Backward" was the inspiration for American Progressivism. — A.E. Samaan

I feel very strongly that history is about everything. It isn't just about politics or the military or social issues. If art, music, engineering, science, medicine, finance, the world of architecture and technology - if those are left out, then you're not getting a full sense of the human condition. History is human and we human beings are involved in all kinds of things and that's part of our humanity. — David McCullough

Human material culture - the buildings and roads and works that would strike any human as an obvious sign of intelligence - had for years seemed like part of an elaborate mating ritual to the starlings, useless and flamboyant as the peacock's tail. — Joe Pitkin

Having federal officials, whether judges, bureaucrats, or congressmen, impose a new definition of marriage on the people is an act of social engineering profoundly hostile to liberty. — Ron Paul

The conservatives could sneer about "social engineering" if they wanted, but I thought that most people believed as I did that government should embody our best hopes and lend a hand to people who were struggling. — Joe Biden

A hacker is someone who uses a combination of high-tech cybertools and social engineering to gain illicit access to someone else's data. — John McAfee

Hey, if I had my choice for social engineering, I'd declare an automatic R-rating for any movie that depicts television commercials. There's a truly dangerous influence on our children. — Marshall Herskovitz

Governments, including free and democratic governments, are not really friendly to freedom and democracy. They abhor any rule of law that limits their powers and penchant for social engineering. — George Jonas

When I work with experimental gadgets, like new variations on virtual reality, in a lab environment, I am always reminded of how small changes in the details of a digital design can have profound unforeseen effects on the experiences of the humans who are playing with it. The slightest change in something as seemingly trivial as the use of a button can sometimes completely alter behavior patterns.
For instance, Stanford University researcher Jeremy Bailenson has demonstrated that changing the height of one's avatar in immersive virtual reality transforms self-esteem and social self-perception. Technologies are extensions of ourselves, and, like the avatars in Jeremy's lab, our identities can be shifted by the quirks of gadgets. It is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging in social engineering. — Jaron Lanier

We are reaping the fruits of ten thousand, fifty thousand years of sowing of the fields of mind. And it is being dropped into our laps for us to create human-machine interfacing, control of genetic material, redefinition of social reality, re engineering of languages, revisioning of the planetary ecology, all these things fall upon us. — Terence McKenna

One day stores will no longer have gender classifications. Instead the consumer decides how and what they want, rather than the social engineering of corporations. The concept of gender will be extinct. — Lorin Morgan-Richards

I am looking at opening a school of social engineering. The McAfee School of Social Engineering has a nice ring to it. Beyond that, it is hard to say what life will bring my way. — John McAfee

Policy makers and politicians want more STEM; educators want more STEAM. Both, in ways that are eerily similar, are engaging in social engineering to support an ideology. At the macro-level, in both worlds, it's all about teaching a point of view, rather than teaching students to learn. We seem hell bent on an arbitrarily linear approach to engineering a "useful" or job-securing education, from which we continue to get mixed results. — Henry Doss

All these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust — Nathanael West

The key to social engineering is influencing a person to do something that allows the hacker to gain access to information or your network. — Kevin Mitnick

Malevich, Lissitsky, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Pevsner, Rodchenko ... all believed in the social role of art ... Their works were like hinged doors, connecting activity with activity. Art with engineering; music with painting; poetry with design; fine art with propaganda; photographs with typography; diagrams with action; the studio with the street ... — John Berger

There are fewer Arabs in Tel Aviv, one of the largest cities in the Middle East, than there are in Chicago, the largest city in the American Midwest. How do you accomplish such a remarkable feat of social engineering without massive violence? — Max Blumenthal

The reason our country looks the way it does is through social engineering that distinctly benefits suburban communities, exurban communities, and often white residents. And we are socially engineered in such a way as to, often unconsciously and unintentionally, but sometimes intentionally, perpetuate this divisive inequality. — Richard Benjamin

Legislating morality grows big government immensely, and helps fashion the noose the government will use to ultimately hang you by. — A.E. Samaan

A firm belief that things were more likely than not to go wrong was another characteristic of Sir Gavin's approach to life, induced no doubt by his own regrets. Indeed, he could not be entirely absolved from suspicion of rather enjoying the worst when it happened: at times almost of engineering disaster of a purely social kind. — Anthony Powell

Since 2000, no important technology innovation in the United States has been scaled up to create millions of manufacturing, marketing, and engineering jobs here, as personal computers and related industries did. While selling online and social networking are clearly transformational movements that have created entrepreneurial opportunities, fewer than fifty thousand traditional jobs - those with full-time hours, benefits, and health insurance - have been created. — Doug Menuez

Suicide creates his own society: to shut yourself off from other people in some dingy, rented box and stare, like Melville's Bartleby, day in and day out at the dead wall outside your window is in itself a rejection of the world which is said to be rejecting you. It is a way of saying, like Bartleby, 'I prefer not to' to every offer and every possibility, which is a condition no amount of social engineering will cure. — Al Alvarez

In the age of arms, a super warhead might be the most powerful for its destructiveness. In the age of farms, an irrigation system is most powerful, for it feeds lives. But how do you define power and advancement in the age of social engineering? It is the one that mimics human the best, isn't it? We don't need a warhead when there has been a drought. We don't point at our enemy with sprinklers. It is about evolving. (Douglas Parsley) — Alan Chains

Piecemeal social engineering resembles physical engineering in regarding the ends as beyond the province of technology. — Karl Popper

I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism
that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything. — Robert Penn Warren

The social and physical construction of suburban America really was quite complex. It was a very elaborate system, and clearly a massive social engineering project that has changed U.S. society enormously. — Noam Chomsky

It matters that we recognize the very large extent to which individual human thought and reason are not activities that occur solely in the brain or even solely within the organismic skin-bag. This matters because it drives home the degree to which environmental engineering is also self-engineering. In building our physical and social worlds, we build (or rather, we massively reconfigure) our minds and our capacities of thought and reason. — Andy Clark

C-68 has little to do with gun control or crime control, but it is the first step necessary to begin the social re-engineering of Canada. — Sharon Carstairs

Liberals tend to view traditions, policies, and morals of past generations as arbitrary designs put in place by less enlightened people. Because of this, liberals don't pay much attention to why traditions developed or wonder about possible ramifications of their social engineering. — John Hawkins

He couldn't work, as such, but needed to flex himself somehow in ways that felt like work, he thought. Lacking credentials and sight he could not teach, for example. Even reading a cold-call script would be out, although he'd heard of a resourceful blind man who went to the social security office and suggested, "Give me either a job or just my damned check," and received the former, skillfully handling mediation assignments. — Edward Hoagland

As patriarchy enforces a temperamental imbalance of personality traits between the sexes, its educational institutions, segregated or co-educational, accept a cultural programing toward the generally operative division between "masculine" and "feminine" subject matter, assigning the humanities and certain social sciences (at least in their lower or marginal branches) to the female - and science and technology, the professions, business and engineering to the male. Of — Kate Millett

Both social engineering and technical attacks played a big part in what I was able to do. It was a hybrid. I used social engineering when it was appropriate, and exploited technical vulnerabilities when it was appropriate. — Kevin Mitnick

Combining influencing tactics, such as authority and scarcity, can strengthen any social engineering campaign for maximum results. — Jeremiah Talamantes

Obama has compiled a record of hostility to religion that is unmatched by any other president in American history. Author David Barton calls Obama "America's most Biblically-hostile U.S. president." As commander in chief of the United States military, the office in which he enjoys unquestioned authority, he has been particularly aggressive in curbing religious expression. The military employs a high concentration of people who believe in God and Country - a formulation that Obama wants to replace with an allegiance to the State and its Progressive Social Engineering. — Phyllis Schlafly

I'm against ObamaCare, which is imposing radical change, and I would be against a conservative imposing radical change ... I don't think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering ... I don't think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate. — Newt Gingrich

If your political theory requires humanity to "evolve", then you do not have a theory. — A.E. Samaan

Social Engineering - The art of replacing what works with what sounds good. — Thomas Sowell

We live in a world of diverse cultures, and we know very little about social engineering and how to 'build nations.' And when we cannot be sure how to improve the world, hubristic visions pose a grave danger. — Joseph Nye

Lyndon Johnson is not a comfortable model for President Obama to imitate. He is an all-but-forgotten president - pilloried for the failed war in Vietnam and criticized for grandiose reforms conservatives denounce as the epitome of federal social engineering that costs too much and does too little. — Robert Dallek

In a sense, scattered dots are exactly what one would expect to see in a pre-Enlightenment, pre-mechanized world. There were disbelievers in Greek antiquity just as there were everywhere, but there was no obvious role for mass-movement atheism in a culture where ensuring the stability of the state - which depended on the favor of the gods - was prized above all else. Atheism has prospered in the West since the eighteenth century because society has a role for it: in an advanced capitalist economy based on technological innovation, it has been necessary to claw intellectual and moral authority away from the clergy and reallocate it to the secular specialists in science and engineering. It is this social function that has allowed atheism to emerge as a movement composed of individual atheists. — Tim Whitmarsh

We want you to write it down
to camouflage it. Only for the present, of course. Once the thing gets going we shan't have to bother about the great heart of the British public. We'll make the great heart what we want it to be. But in the meantime, it does make a difference how things are put. For instance, if it were even whispered that the N.I.C.E. wanted powers to experiment on criminals, you'd have all the old women of both sexes up in arms and yapping about humanity. Call it re-education of the mal-adjusted, and you have them all slobbering with delight that the brutal era of retributive punishment has at last come to and end. Odd thing it is
the word 'experiment' is unpopular, but not the word 'experimental.' You must'nt experiment on children; but offer the dear little kiddies free education in an experimental school attached to the N.I.C.E. and it's all correct! — C.S. Lewis

The most troublesome problem which confronts social engineering is how to provide for the untalented and, what is equally important, how to provide against them. — Eric Hoffer

But the 20th century suffered "two" ideologies that led to genocides. The other one, Marxism, had no use for race, didn't believe in genes and denied that human nature was a meaningful concept. Clearly, it's not an emphasis on genes or evolution that is dangerous. It's the desire to remake humanity by coercive means (eugenics or social engineering) and the belief that humanity advances through a struggle in which superior groups (race or classes) triumph over inferior ones. — Steven Pinker