Social Forces Quotes & Sayings

An important consequence of giving highest priority to the metaphor of Moral Strength is that it rules out any explanations in terms of social forces or social class. — George Lakoff

An entirely new factor has appeared in the social development of the country, and this factor is the Irish-American, and his influence. To mature its powers, to concentrate its action, to learn the secret of its own strength and of England's weakness, the Celtic intellect has had to cross the Atlantic. At home it had but learned the pathetic weakness of nationality; in a strange land it realised what indomitable forces nationality possesses. What captivity was to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish: America and American influence have educated them. — Oscar Wilde

Because evangelicals view their primary task as evangelism and discipleship,1 they tend to avoid issues that hinder these activities. Thus, they are generally not counter-cultural. With some significant exceptions, they avoid "rocking the boat," and live within the confines of the larger culture. At times they have been able to call for and realize social change, but most typically their influence has been limited to alterations at the margins. So, despite having the subcultural tools to call for radical changes in race relations, they most consistently call for changes in persons that leave the dominant social structures, institutions, and culture intact. This avoidance of boat-rocking unwittingly leads to granting power to larger economic and social forces. It also means that evangelicals' views to a considerable extent conform to the socioeconomic conditions of their time. — Christian Smith

The impersonal forces of over-population and over-organization, and the social engineers who are trying to direct these forces, are pushing us in the direction of a new medieval system. — Aldous Huxley

In the early stages the sexual needs will have the upper hand, in later stages the compulsive moralistic inhibition. At times of political upheavals of the total social organization, the conflict between sexuality and compulsive morality becomes most acute. This will impress some people as the "collapse of morality," other people as "sexual revolution." At any rate, the idea of the "decline of culture" is the perception of the breakthrough of natural sexuality. The only reason why it is experienced subjectively as "decline" is the fact that it threatens the compulsive moralistic way of living. What happens objectively is only the downfall of the sexual dictatorship which maintains the compulsive moralistic forces in the individuals in the interest of authoritarian marriage and family. — Wilhelm Reich

Mali is a very social society. We share everything. I think sharing our resources in music forces us to collaborate more, play with other people more, share ideas more. — Vieux Farka Toure

It is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies. — Michel Foucault

The mechanical mind has a passion for control - of everything except itself. Beyond the control it has won over the forces of nature it would now win control over the forces of society of stating the problem and producing the solution, with social machinery to correspond. — L. P. Jacks

The cultural forces that help politically sustain both the militaristic and the corporate function of the Deep State, however, are growing more irrational and antiscience. A military tradition that glories in force and appeals to self-sacrifice is the polar opposite of the Enlightenment heritate of rationality, the search for peace, and a belief in the common destiny of mankind. The warrior-leader, like the witch doctor, ultimately appeals to irrational emotionalism; and the cultural psychology that produces the bravest and most loyal warriors is a mind-set that is usually hostile to the sort of free inquiry of which scientific progress depends. This dynamic is observable in Afghanistan: no outside power has been able to conquer and pacify that society for millennia because of the tenacity of its warrior spirit; yet the country has one of the highest illiteracy rates on earth and is barely out of the Bronze Age in social development. p 260 — Mike Lofgren

Neither the passions not justice nor politics nor the great social forces ever consider the victims they strike. — Honore De Balzac

In an age when the difference between prince and peasant was thought to be in the stars, Mr Tzara, art was naturally an affirmation for the one and a consolation to the other; but we live in an age when the social order is seen to be the work of material forces and we have been given an entirely new kind of responsibility, the responsibility of changing society. — Tom Stoppard

Political emancipation is a reduction of man, on the one hand to a member of civil society, an independent and egoistic individual, and on the other hand, to a citizen, a moral person.
Human emancipation will only be complete when the real, individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a species-being; and when he has recognized and organized his own powers (forces propres) as social powers so that he no longer separates this social power from himself as political power. — Karl Marx

To be located in society means to be at the intersection point of specific social forces. Commonly one ignores these forces one also knows that there is not an awful lot that one can do about this. — Peter L. Berger

The greatness of America has grown out of a political and social system and a method of control of economic forces distinctly its own - our American system. — Herbert Hoover

So are demons forces that are totally external to us who seek to defy God? Are they just the shadow side of our own souls? Are they social constructions from a premodern era? Bottom line: Who cares? I don't think demons are something human reason can put its finger on. Or that human faith can resolve. I just know that demons, whether they be addictions or actual evil spirits, are not what Jesus wants for us, since basically every time he encounters them he tells them to piss off. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime. — Victor Hugo

Much if not all we know about the complex mechanism responsible for the development (and stagnation) of productive forces, and for the rise and decay of social organizations, is the result of the analytical work undertaken by Marx and by those whom he inspired. — Paul A. Baran

The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses end up socializing with other people with big houses. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

And so a miserable but possible scenario is that countries in the bottom billion oscillate between the traps and limbo, perhaps switching in the process from one trap to another..
Let me be clear: we cannot rescue them. The societies of the bottom billion can only be rescued from within. In every society of the bottom billion there are people working for change, but usually they are defeated by the powerful internal forces stacked against them. We should be helping the heroes. So far, our efforts have been paltry: through inertia, ignorance, and incompetence, we have stood by and watched them lose.
Let me be clear: we cannot rescue them. These societies of the bottom billion can only be rescued from within. — Paul Collier

One reason for the primacy of the market in shaping the modern world is that it forces a reorganization of society in order to make the market work properly . When a market comes into existence, as Marx fully appreciated, it becomes a potent force driving social change. — Robert Gilpin

to have a physical body and to work with it and to work with the forces of nature to mold it into the highest expression of joy, and to keep it always by using it to learn how to overcome disease, impairment and as today's cutting edge, non-funded, objective, purposeful science says, one day, even death? What if short-term excitement and intensity created by the overblown desire to win at all cost could be replaced by a more durable excitement in an intensity springing from the heart of the physical athletic experience itself? It would soon be discovered that sports and physical activities reformed and refurbished with integrity, not buy-offs are the best possible path to personal enlightenment and social transformation for this new millennium. — Don Tolman

The discipline of seeing interrelationships gradually undermines older attitudes of blame and guilt. We begin to see that all of us are trapped in structures, structures embedded both in our ways of thinking and in the interpersonal and social milieus in which we live. Our knee-jerk tendencies to find fault with one another gradually fade, leaving a much deeper appreciation of the forces within which we all operate. This does not imply that people are simply victims of systems that dictate their behavior. Often, the structures are of our own creation. But this has little meaning until those structures are seen. For most of us, the structures within which we operate are invisible. We are neither victims nor culprits but human beings controlled by forces we have not yet learned how to perceive. We — Peter M. Senge

The biggest challenge at the national level is to defeat communal forces for which the support of the Left parties was essential but the party is opposed to the Left in Kerala because UDF's aim is to ensure economic development and social harmony. — Sonia Gandhi

The stage of the development of the productive forces determines the political and ideological superstructure of society which are crystallized into a system of social organization. — Earl Browder

There is no one force, no group, and no class that is the preserver of liberty. Liberty is preserved by those who are against the existing chief power. Oppositions which do not express genuine social forces are as trivial, in relation to entrenched power, as the old court jesters. — James Burnham

One thing that gets lost in all the aggregation throughout this book: on an individual level, the personal affects of these broad social forces are often very subtle... when you go person by person, any individual's experience is too small and too varied to conclusively say anything racial has happened. It could be your skin or it could be just you. On the other side of it, it's laughable to think of one red-faced guy searching for n****r jokes because Barak Obama got elected, but it's a lot less funny when you can see that he's one of thousands and thousands making the same search. And it's less funny still when you see the large affects these private attitudes can still have, even in public life. Thus the story of just one of us versus the story of us all. That's why data like this is necessary; it ends arguments that anecdotes could never win. It provides facts that need facing. — Christian Rudder

Crucial to this is what conservatives see as the essence of America - the Ladder of Success myth. As long as free enterprise flourishes and anyone with enough self-discipline and imagination can become an entrepreneur, the Morality of Reward and Punishment will hold and all will be well. The logic of conservatism locates so-called "social" problems within people, not within society. For this reason, it would make no sense to conservatives to use class and social forces as forms of explanation and justification for social policy. Nature — George Lakoff

The first stage of the economy's domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having - human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing - all "having" must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances. At the same time all individual reality has become social, in the sense that it is shaped by social forces and is directly dependent on them. Individual reality is allowed to appear only if it is not actually real. — Guy Debord

Our society distinguishes itself by conquering the centrifugal social forces with Technology rather than Terror, on the dual basis of an overwhelming efficiency and an increasing standard of living. — Herbert Marcuse

We live in an era of social science, and have become accustomed to understanding the social world in terms of "forces," "pressures," "processes," and "developments." It is easy to forget that those "forces" are statistical summaries of the deeds of millions of men and women who act on their beliefs in pursuit of their desires. The habit of submerging the individual into abstractions can lead not only to bad science (it's not as if the "social forces" obeyed Newton's laws) but to dehumanization. — Steven Pinker

Lenin held that religion was a simply product of social oppression and economic exploitation. 'The social oppression of toiling masses, their apparent complete helplessness before the blind forces of capitalism ... that is the deepest contemporary root of religion'. Theoretically it followed from this that the elimination of social and economic evils should lead to the disappearance of religious belief. In practice, however, the party has never shown any confidence that this would happen: it has not felt able to concede the churches toleration, and let them decline of their own accord. On the contrary, from the beginning it has aimed at the destruction of the churches and the forcible secularization of believers. With the exemption of the years 1941-53, that has remained the case ever since. — Geoffrey Hosking

I think social media, it in a way forces companies to be more authentic or more transparent because it gives a voice to the consumer and a reach to the consumer that they didn't have before. — Padmasree Warrior

It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn something too of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions and which, I take it, we call a system of morality. — Anthony Burgess

A work of art can be called revolutionary if, by virtue of the aesthetic transformation, it represents, in the exemplary fate of individuals, the prevailing unfreedom and the rebelling forces, thus breaking through the mystified (and petrified) social reality, and opening the horizon of change (liberation). — Herbert Marcuse

When a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, it loses its social perspective ... There is something about a war like this that makes people insensitive. It dulls the conscience. It strengthens the forces of reaction, and it brings into being bitterness and hatred and violence. — Martin Luther King Jr.

The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. — Georg Simmel

Let's begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes-indeed, deletes-the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity. — John Kenneth Galbraith

The poet who sees himself as a hero or a prophet, or a priest of the socio-political forces to which he is loyal, which he believes are the historical necessities of his times, too easily becomes a puppet. He has no external measure with which to assess reality. Whether he submits to the forces or rejects them, he becomes a parody of himself, and then without knowing it submits his gifts to the demons of his era. He loses his place in the continuity of time. He becomes dependent on social affirmation and the drug of exalted feelings common to all revolutionaries. He destroys, even as he thinks he creates. — Michael D. O'Brien

Hauriou, became a crown witness for us when he confirmed this connection in 1916, in the midst of WWI: The revolution of 1789 had no other goal than absolute access to the writing of legal statutes and the systematic destruction of customary institutions. It resulted in a state of permanent revolution because the mobility of the writing of laws did not provide for the stability of certain customary institutions, because the forces of change were stronger than the forces of stability. Social and political life in France was completely emptied of institutions and was only able to provisionally maintain itself by sudden jolts spurred by the heightened morality. — Carl Schmitt

I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I'm interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak. — Rachel Kushner

The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person - every person - needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need. The Church is one of those living forces. — Pope Benedict XVI

Evolution is always the work of pioneers, and their followers are always small in number. This following is not a clique; it is the result of all the existing social forces; it is composed of all those who through innate or acquired capacity are ready to represent the existing degree of human revolution. — Piet Mondrian

If networks of women are formed, they should be job related and task related rather than female-concerns related. Personal networks for sociability in the context of a work organization would tend to promote the image of women contained in the temperamental model - that companies must compensate for women's deficiencies and bring them together for support because they could not make it on their own. But job-related task forces serve the social-psychological functions while reinforcing a more positive image of women. — Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Only once we understand how social interactions work together with competitive forces can we hope to ensure stability and fairness — Alex Pentland

Socialist revolution aims at liberating the productive forces. The changeover from individual to socialist, collective ownership in agriculture and handicrafts and from capitalist to socialist ownership in private industry and commerce is bound to bring about a tremendous liberation of the productive forces. Thus, the social conditions are being created for a tremendous expansion of industrial and agricultural production. — Mao Zedong

So endgames are naturally messy.

They may not be very dynamic, but when an active war is shutting down, there is still a lot of cleaning up to do. It may sound grim, but that's what it looks like. There are broken things everywhere, wounds and corpses, general messiness. Things collapsing due to zemblanity forces that have been set in motion but are too large to control. — Venkatesh G. Rao

And every historic effort to forge a democratic project has been undermined by two fundamental realities: poverty and paranoia. The persistence of poverty generates levels of despair that deepen social conflict the escalation of paranoia produces levels of distrust that reinforce cultural division. Rae is the most explosive issue in American life precisely because it forces us to confront the tragic facts of poverty and paranoia despair, and distrust. In short, a candid examination of race matters takes us to the core of the crisis of American democracy (p. 107). — Cornel West

There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory ... Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along. — Elizabeth Warren

Wars are motivated by the need to seize the wealth of our neighbours, to wield power, to protect ourselves from real or imagined threats: in short they have, as we have seen, political, social, economic or demographic causes. There is no need to refer to Islam or the clash of civilizations to explain why the Afghans or the Iraqis resist the western military forces occupying their countries. Nor to speak of anti-Jewish sentiment or anti-Semitism to understand the reasons why the Palestinians are not overjoyed by the Israeli occupation of their lands. — Tzvetan Todorov

Turgenev saw human beings as individuals always endowed with consciousness, character, feelings, and moral strengths and weaknesses; Marx saw them always as snowflakes in an avalanche, as instances of general forces, as not yet fully human because utterly conditioned by their circumstances. Where Turgenev saw men, Marx saw classes of men; where Turgenev saw people, Marx saw the People. These two ways of looking at the world persist into our own time and profoundly affect, for better or for worse, the solutions we propose to our social problems. — Theodore Dalrymple

Society, because it is composed of living humans, is organic and if healthy, supple. It is like a rubber band. As long as the groups that compose society are flexible and social and emotionally supporting, it serves its constituency well. It bends, weaves, twists, turns, and envelops everyone in diverse manners. If opposing forces become too locked into their polarized viewpoints, though, other things happen.

Like two grumpy siblings, they hold their views with anger or self-righteousness and utter vulgar and crass words, but it amounts to the same thing. The two groups pull on the rubber band and rigidly hold to their position without empathy.

The rubber band (society) grows taut and then eventually it snaps and collateral damage ensues and the proverbial baby is thrown out with the bath water. — Leviak B. Kelly

Human social institutions can effect the course of human evolution. Just as climate, food supply, predators, and other natural forces of selection have molded our nature, so too can our culture. — Peter Singer

The real guarantee of freedom is an equilibrium of social forces in conflict, not the triumph of any one force. — Max Eastman

The progressive historical role of capitalism may be summed up in two brief propositions: increase in the productive forces of social labour, and the socialisation of that labour. But both these facts manifest themselves in extremely diverse processes in different branches of the national economy. — Vladimir Lenin

The power of recognition is one of the strongest forces for stimulating human and social action. — Lowell Milken

Law should seek far more than mere reconciliation; it should be one of the great creative forces of our social life. — Mary Parker Follett

Globalization has not only lost its promise but is embittering many. The forces representing human solidarity and community have no choice but to step in quickly to convince the disenchanted masses that, as the banner of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre proclaims, 'Another world is possible!' — Walden Bello

The unadorned gentleman's suit was the product of the change from rigid status to social structures constantly shifting in response to the forces of modern capitalism, becoming ever more egalitarian in both appearance and reality. — Adolf Loos

Under weak government, in a wide, thinly populated country, in the struggle against the raw natural environment and with the freeplay of economic forces, unified social groups become the transmitters of culture. — Johan Huizinga

The character of human life, like the character of the human condition, like the character of all life, is "ambiguity": the inseparable mixture of good and evil, the true and false, the creative and destructive forces-both individual and social. — Paul Tillich

The incompatibility here [between some anthropologies] rests with basic attitudes toward cultural others, which in turn rests on fundamentally different understandings of history. The one sees the Other as different and *separate,* a product of its own history and carrying its own hitoricity...The second sees the Other as different but *connected,* a product of a particular history that is itself intertwined with a larger set of economic, political, social, and cultural processes to such an extent that analytical separation of "our" history and "their" history is impossible. In this view, there are no cultures-outside-of-history to be reconstructed, no culture without history, no culture or society "with its own structure and history" to which world-historical forces arrive. — William Roseberry

Feminism remains a crucial element of any program for social justice today, which is why patriarchal forces attempt to eliminate or marginalize feminist ideas. — Robert Jensen

The most important step in emancipating oneself from social controls is the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment. If a person learns to enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience, in the process of living itself, the burden of social controls automatically falls from one's shoulders. Power returns to the person when rewards are no longer relegated to outside forces. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

To think that because those who wield power in society wield in the end that of government, therefore it is of no use to attempt to influence the constitution of the government by acting on opinion, is to forget that opinion is itself one of the greatest active social forces. One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests. — John Stuart Mill

If we hope to stem the mass destruction that inevitably attends our economic system (and to alter the sense of entitlement - the sense of contempt, the hatred - on which it is based), fundamental historical, social, economic, and technological forces need to be pondered, understood, and redirected. Behavior won't change much without a fundamental change in consciousness. The question becomes: How do we change consciousness? — Derrick Jensen

The myth of self-sufficiency blinds us to the workings of other forces in family life. For families are not now, nor were they ever, the self-sufficient building blocks of society, exclusively responsible, praiseworthy, and blamable for their own destiny. They are deeply influenced by broad social and economic forces over which they have little control. — Kenneth Keniston

Consciousness means that we have developed an acute awareness of both our suffering and our humanity: what happens to us and what we have a right to. We know we are human and so the suffering (inferior status, exploitation, sexual abuse) is an intolerable series of violations that must be stopped. Experiencing suffering as such - instead of becoming numb - forces us to act human: to resist oppression, to demand fairness, to create new social arrangements that include us as human. When humans rebel against suffering, the heroes of history, known and unknown, are born. — Andrea Dworkin

Liberty and Freedom are complex concepts. They go back to religious ideas of Free Will and are related to the Ruler Mystique implicit in absolute monarchs. Without absolute monarchs patterned after the Old Gods and ruling by the grace of a belief in religious indulgence, Liberty and Freedom would never have gained their present meaning. These ideals owe their very existence to past examples of oppression. And the forces that maintain such ideas will erode unless renewed by dramatic teaching or new oppressions. This is the most basic key to my life. — Frank Herbert

In the United States, it is our weakness to confuse the numerical strength of an organization and the publicity attached to leaders with the germinating forces that sow the seeds of social upheaval in our community. — Malcolm X

We are pushed forward by the social forces, reluctant and stumbling, our faces over our shoulders, clutching at every relic of the past as we are forced along; still adoring whatever is behind us. We insist upon worshipping 'the God of our fathers.' Why not the God of our children? Does eternity only stretch one way? — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Habitus, then, is a kind of compatibilism. As a social being acting in the world, I'm not an unconstrained "free" creature "without inertia"; neither am I the passive victim of external causes and determining forces. Neither mechanical determinism nor libertarian freedom can really make sense of our being-in-the-world because our freedom is both "conditioned and conditional." Both our perception and our action are conditioned, but as conditioned, it is possible for both to be spontaneous and improvisational. I learn how to constitute my world from others, but I learn how to constitute my world. The "I" that perceives is always already a "we." My — James K.A. Smith

Since the 1970s, we have witnessed the forces of market fundamentalism strip education of its public values, critical content, and civic responsibilities as part of its broader goal of creating new subjects wedded to consumerism, risk-free relationships, and the destruction of the social state. — Henry Giroux

1. Institutions shape politics. The rules and standard operating procedures that make up institutions leave their imprint on political outcomes by structuring political behavior. Outcomes are not simply reducible to the billiard-ball interaction of individuals nor to the intersection of broad social forces. Institutions influence outcomes because they shape actors' identities, power, and strategies. 2. Institutions are shaped by history. Whatever other factors may affect their form, institutions have inertia and "robustness." They therefore embody historical trajectories and turning points. History matters because it is "path dependent": what comes first (even if it was in some sense "accidental") conditions what comes later. Individuals may "choose" their institutions, but they do not choose them under circumstances of their own making, and their choices in turn influence the rules within which their successors choose. — Robert D. Putnam

There was something particularly American about it--blaming yourself for bad luck--that resistance to seeing your life as affected by social forces, a tendency to attribute larger problems to individual behavior. The ugly reverse of the American Dream. — Philipp Meyer

Deep caring about each other's fate does seem to be on the decline, but I do not believe that New Age narcissism is much to blame. The external causes of our moral indifference are a fragmented mass society that leaves us isolated and afraid, an economic system that puts the rights of capital before the rights of people, and a political process that makes citizens into ciphers.

These are the forces that allow, even encourage, unbridled competition, social irresponsibility, and the survival of the financially fittest. The executives who brought down the major corporations by taking indecent sums off the top while wage earners of modest means lost their retirement accounts were clearly more influenced by capitalist amorality than by some New Age guru. — Parker J. Palmer

Successions are explained by historical narratives that indicate the significance of the events and the forces-human and otherwise-which influenced them. While some causal forces operate continuously, others influence the sequence of events only at particular points in time. For example, it makes no sense to say that Peter the Great caused the cold war; he had been dead for centuries before it started, and any direct causal influence would be impossible. However, Peter the Great took actions that set into motion historical events that promoted the unification and modernization of Russia. Without Peter, it is possible that Russia would have developed differently and that the cold war would not have occurred. Peter's actions exerted an influence in this case, but it is not the type of direct, continuous causal influence that most variable-based social science theories rely on. — Marshall Scott Poole

We are, in any case, only one of the forces acting in society — Errico Malatesta

In committing an estimated 3,000 U.S. forces to join international Ebola relief efforts in West Africa, President Obama seems to be fulfilling the plans of highly influential progressive groups who seek to transform the American military into more of a social-work organization. — Aaron Klein

The social system grows rigid but the productive forces continue to expand, and conflict ensues between the forces of production and the social conditions of production. — Earl Browder

Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total ... Man has created a world of man-made things as it never existed before. He has constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself. — Erich Fromm

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. — Karl Marx

Reality is much more complex than any judgment of right and wrong encourages you to believe. When you really understand the ethical, spiritual, social, economic, and psychological forces that shape individuals, you will see that people's choices are not based on a desire to hurt. Instead, they are in accord with what they know and what world views are available to them. Most are doing the best they can, given what information they've received and what problems they are facing. — Michael Lerner

Scholars have been arguing for a long time whether the Soviet Union could have been turned into some kind of social democracy. I doubt it myself. I think what Gorbachev didn't quite understand, until it was too late, is that his efforts at change unleashed new, certrifical forces he hadn't counted on. He opened the door a crack and a huge wind blew it open. — David Hoffman

I look for stories that tell transformative, emotional journeys, have big emotional worlds, feel very relevant and true to the times we're living in - even though they might be of a different time - have a sense of real intimacy with larger forces at work, where there's some kind of social injustice and inequity happening that needs to be conquered or addressed. I find historically that's the formula for a lot of successful operas. — Jake Heggie

Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds. — Emile Durkheim

In other words, ideas can become powerful forces, but only to the extent to which they are answers to specific human needs prominent in a given social character. — Erich Fromm

They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces. — Richard Wright

Like most geniuses, the Countess was a very limited person. Sigmund Freud was so ignorant of the art that Surrealist painters had to explain then- use of Freudian symbols over and over again, and he still didn't get it. Einstein never could remember to take the biscuits out of oven. Those same forces that drive a genius to create things or ideas that entertain or enlighten us often gobble so much of his personality that he has none left for the social graces (Should you invite Van Gogh to your home he might stand on your sofa in his muddy boots and pee where he pleased), and the very act of creation requires such focused concentration that vast areas of knowledge may be completely overlooked. Well, so what? There is no evidence that generalized skills are in any way superior to specialized brilliance, and certainly that sputter less little candle. Same of the mediocre mind known as "common sense" has never produced anything worth celebrating. — Tom Robbins

The modern world needs people with a complex identity who are intellectually autonomous and prepared to cope with uncertainty; who are able to tolerate ambiguity and not be driven by fear into a rigid, single-solution approach to problems, who are rational, foresightful and who look for facts; who can draw inferences and can control their behavior in the light of foreseen consequences, who are altruistic and enjoy doing for others, and who understand social forces and trends. — Robert J. Havighurst

One of the outstanding sources of resistance to imperial power in the Muslim world came from Sufi groups. While Sufi brotherhoods are generally known for a more quietist and mystic approach to Islam, they traditionally rank among the best organized and most coherent groupings in society. They constitute ready-made organizations - social-based NGOs, if you will - for maintaining Islamic culture and practices under periods of extreme oppression and for fomenting resistance and guerrilla warfare against foreign occupation. The history of Sufi participation in dozens of liberation struggles is long and widespread across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Sufi groups were prominent in the anti-Soviet resistance, and later against the American in Afghanistan and against US occupation forces in Iraq. — Graham Fuller

Anarchism is a definite intellectual current in the life of our times, whose adherents advocate the abolition of economic monopolies and of all political and social coercive institutions within society. In place of the present capitalistic economic order Anarchists would have a free association of all productive forces based upon co-operative labour, which would have as its sole purpose the satisfying of the necessary requirements of every member of society, and would no longer have in view the special interest of privileged minorities within the social union. — Rudolf Rocker

The record of anarchist ideas, and even more, of the inspiring struggles of people who have sought to liberate themselves from oppression and domination, must be treasured and preserved, not as means of freezing thought and conception in some new mold but as basis for understanding of the social reality and committed work to change it. There is no reason to suppose that history is at an end, that the current structures of authority and domination are graven in stone. It would also be great error to underestimate the power of social forces that will fight to maintain power and privilege. — Noam Chomsky

The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way, with the same sternness that they exterminate beasts of prey and herds of useless ruminants. — Herbert Spencer

The social prestige of wine at table and at the club must be destroyed through lofty example and polite ridicule; forces which are not always available, and for whose successful operation much time will be required. But the outstanding fact remains, that the world has come to regard liquor in a new and clearer light. Our next generation of poets will contain but few Anacreons, for the thinking element of mankind has robbed the flowing bowl of its fancied virtues and fictitious beauties. The grape, so long permitted to masquerade as the inspirer of wit and art, is now revealed as the mother of ruin and death. The wolf at last stands divested of its sheep's clothing. — H.P. Lovecraft

Religious communities have historically been designed to counteract the forces of alienation. That's why so many successful social movements have relied upon the strength of spiritual communities and a large base of their organizing has been through them. — Tim DeChristopher

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

This is a very special Greek kind of socialist, all the social democratic parties in Europe are against this idea and I think that the dividing line today in the Greek political system is not the centre right or socialist, the real dividing line is between those parties and those political forces who really believe that Greece should stay in the Eurozone and make the efforts and change, and make the reforms and change the old and Mr Tsipras who is really resisting any kind of change in Greece. — Dora Bakoyannis

I'm not an intellectual - Fascism has no need of that. What is wanted is the deed. Theory derives from action. What our corporate state demands from us is comprehension of the social forces - of history. You — Philip K. Dick

The classical heritage as shaped by and filtered through Roman culture had two great flaws. First, it prevented the very rich oral cultures of the ancient Mediterranean from surviving from antiquity into later times. All that was left as creative forces were Greek philosophy and Roman law. These were very substantial cultures but they represented a great narrowing of what could be passed on from antiquity to later centuries...
"Second, another deficiency of classical culture was its lack of social conscience, its obliviousness to the slavery, poverty, disease, and everyday cruelty endured by more than half of the fifty million people who inhabited the empire. The classical heritage represented a narrow and insensitive social and political theory reinforcing a miserably class-ridden and technologically stagnant society. — Norman F. Cantor

Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony. — Emma Goldman