Quotes by Sociologists - Page 14

He came away with an exasperated sense of failure. He denounced parliamentary government root and branch that night. Parliament was doomed. The fact that it had not listened to Rud was only one little conclusive fact in a long indictment. "It has become a series of empty forms," he said. "All over the world, always, the sawdust of reality is running out of the shapes of quasi-public things. Not one British citizen in a thousand watches what is done in Parliament; not one in a thousand Americans follows the discourses of Congress. Interest has gone. Every election in the past thirty years has been fought on gross misunderstandings.
H.G.Wells
We have nothing to destroy," said Rud. "All these things are done for already. They are falling in all over the world. They are dead. No need for destructive activities. But if we have nothing to destroy we have much to clear away. That's different. What is needed is a brand-new common-sense reorganisation of the world's affairs, and that's what we have to give them. I can't imagine how the government sleeps of nights. I should lie awake at night listening all the time for the trickle of plaster that comes before a smash. Ever since they began blundering in the Near East and Spain, they've never done a single wise thing. This American adventure spells disaster. Plainly. Australia has protested already. India now is plainly in collapse. Everyone who has been there lately with open eyes speaks of the vague miasma of hatred in the streets. We don't get half the news from India. Just because there exists no clear idea whatever of a new India, it doesn't mean that the old isn't disintegrating. Things that are tumbling down, tumble down. They don'twait to be shown the plans of the new building. The East crumbles. All over the world it becomes unpleasant to be a foreigner, but an Englishman now can't walk in a bazaar without a policeman behind him...
H.G.Wells
Public men in America are too public. Too accessible. This sitting on the stoop and being 'just folk' was all very well for local politics and the simple farmer days of a hundred years ago, but it's no good for world affairs. Opening flower-shows and being genial to babies and all that is out of date. These parish politics methods have to go. The ultimate leader ought to be distant, audible but far off. Show yourself and then vanish into a cloud. Marx would never have counted for one tenth of his weight as 'Charlie Marx' playing chess with the boys, and Woodrow Wilson threw away all his magic as far as Europe was concerned when he crossed the Atlantic. Before he crossed he was a god -- what a god he was! After he arrived he was just a grinning guest. I've got to be the Common Man, yes, but not common like that.
H.G.Wells
You English," said Steenhold."You Americans," said Rud."When you aren't as fresh as paint," he said, "you Americans are as stale as old cabbage leaves. I'm amazed at your Labour leaders, at the sort of things you can still take seriously as Presidential Candidates. These leonine reverberators tossing their manes back in order to keep their eyes on the White House -- they belong to the Pleistocene. We dropped that sort of head in England after John Bright. When the Revolution is over and I retire, I shall retire as Hitler did, to some remote hunting-lodge, and we'll have the heads of Great Labour Leaders and Presidential Hopes stuck all round the Hall. Hippopotami won't be in it.
H.G.Wells
We find the same situation in the economy. On the one hand, the battered remnants of production and the real economy; on the other, the circulation of gigantic amounts of virtual capital. But the two are so disconnected that the misfortunes which beset that capital – stock market crashes and other financial debacles – do not bring about the collapse of real economies any more. It is the same in the political sphere: scandals, corruption and the general decline in standards have no decisive effects in a split society, where responsibility (the possibility that the two parties may respond to each other) is no longer part of the game.This paradoxical situation is in a sense beneficial: it protects civil society (what remains of it) from the vicissitudes of the political sphere, just as it protects the economy (what remains of it) from the random fluctuations of the Stock Exchange and international finance. The immunity of the one creates a reciprocal immunity in the other – a mirror indifference. Better: real society is losing interest in the political class, while nonetheless availing itself of the spectacle. At last, then, the media have some use, and the ‘society of the spectacle’ assumes its full meaning in this fierce irony: the masses availing themselves of the spectacle of the dysfunctionings of representation through the random twists in the story of the political class’s corruption. All that remains now to the politicians is the obligation to sacrifice themselves to provide the requisite spectacle for the entertainment of the people.
Jean Baudrillard
... The form of leadership must be the focus of constant reappraisal. Weber states, for example: 'Each new fact may necessitate the re-adjustment of the relations between end and indispensable means, between desired goals and unavoidable subsidiary consequences.' This process of re-adjustment is ultimately without resolution, for the political and ethical value-spheres are not only in constant opposition but also in permanent flux. It is the task of the politician to negotiate this value conflict and to be decisive as to the value to be pursued and the means to be employed.
Nicholas Gane
... In view of the violence of political power responsibility must always prevail. The only possible synthesis between conviction and responsibility is thus one in which passion is subordinated to responsibility, so that political responsibility is the primary value to be pursued with passion, thereby engendering what H. H. Bruun terms a 'responsible ethic of conviction.' Weber states: 'To be sure, mere passion, however genuinely felt, is not enough. It does not make a politician, unless passion as devotion to a "cause" also makes responsibility to this cause the guiding star of action.
Nicholas Gane
... The political leader must constantly appraise and reappraise the means through which 'he can hope to do justice to the responsibility that power imposes upon him' while at the same time pursuing political values with conviction.
Nicholas Gane
It is certain that there can be no work in political economy on any other than an altruistic basis... If our work is to retain any meaning it can only be informed by this: concern for the future, for those who will come after us.
Max Weber
The final result of political action often, no regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning.
Max Weber
Leaders who do not help the people must be replaced by the people.
DaShanne Stokes
We elected a man who knows how to build walls when we needed someone who knows how to build bridges.
DaShanne Stokes
I've fought for religious freedom and I can tell you that anti-gay 'religious freedom' bills aren't it.
DaShanne Stokes
Today's 'religious freedom' policies should not be seen as a problem limited to LGBT people but as a co-optation of religion that affects us all.
DaShanne Stokes
Electing a bigot enables further bigotry.
DaShanne Stokes
Denying the popular vote is un-American and anti-democratic.
DaShanne Stokes
Utopia confronts reality not with a measured assessment of the possibilities of change but with the demand for change. 'This is the way the world should be.' It refuses to accept current definitions of the possible because it knows these to be part of the reality that it seeks to change... Wilde was right: 'A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.
Krishan Kumar
We owe our loyalty to each other and to our children's children, not to party politics.
DaShanne Stokes
Laws forbidding adoptees from accessing their original birth certificates are outdated and need to be changed today.
DaShanne Stokes
Truth is hard, propaganda is cheap.
DaShanne Stokes
Ethics and oversight are what you eliminate when you want absolute power.
DaShanne Stokes
No matter their party, people with a conflict of interest should be banned from the Electoral College.
DaShanne Stokes
Accepting fraud from our leaders means accepting fraud in our personal lives.
DaShanne Stokes
Fascism thrives in obscurity and darkness.
DaShanne Stokes
If you lay with a scorpion, don't be surprised when it finally stings you.
DaShanne Stokes
Blind party loyalty will be our downfall. We must follow the truth wherever it leads.
DaShanne Stokes
Utopia's value lies not in its relation to present practice but in its relation to a possible future. Its "practical" use is to overstep the immediate reality to depict a condition whose clear desirability draws us on, like a magnet.
Krishan Kumar
One of the most important qualities of a president is the ability to inspire, to bring people together for the common good.
DaShanne Stokes
We must acknowledge and take responsibility for the conflicts we have helped to create, and act to create real change. That, after all, is the true hallmark of democracy--a commitment to justice, honest self-appraisal, and action--even when it means challenging ourselves and the political institutions we hold most dear.
DaShanne Stokes
Our democracy should aspire to be more democratic.
DaShanne Stokes
When and where there is repression, what a woman does when she gets dressed in the morning may be considered political. Wearing or not wearing a veil, disobeying laws that prohibit transgender dressing, or wearing a large Afro in an institution that seeks to diminish the formation of racial alliances are all actions that can serve as challenges to domination
Maxine Leeds Craig
Leadership by deception isn't leadership. It's fraud.
DaShanne Stokes
When you're dealing with frauds and liars, listen more to what they don't say than what they do.
DaShanne Stokes
If you voted for a man who said "Grab em by the pussy," you have zero room to claim to protect anyone in bathrooms.
DaShanne Stokes
In the letters section, a Scot reminds his readers of the ‘Glorious Alliance’ between France and Mary Queen of Scots, which explains why Scotland should not share the rabid Europhobia of Englishmen.
Bruno Latour
A president who has incited violence inspires citizens towards hate and violence.
DaShanne Stokes
Those who incite violence have no business lecturing others about unity.
DaShanne Stokes
Violence isn't a Democrat or Republican problem. It's an American problem, requiring an American solution.
DaShanne Stokes
A president cannot defend a nation if he is not held accountable to its laws.
DaShanne Stokes
Failing to indict a criminal sitting president sends the message that those in power are above the law.
DaShanne Stokes
Discrimination does not 'make America great.' It makes America weak.
DaShanne Stokes
we see that an aspect of the work of the masses consists in investigating and opening up the question of names
Sylvain Lazarus
It is undoubtedly true that religion is often socially conservative. By binding a people together under a shared God, a common cosmology and a common morality, religion creates order and stability and its rituals create social cohesio...n. By promising to the pious poor rewards in the next life, it reconciles them to their fate in this one and thus discourages them from rebelling against their condition...[also] religion [is] an inspiration to radicalism and rebellion. religion is a potential threat to any political or social order because it claims an authority higher than any available in this world. pp. 10-11
Steve Bruce
All concepts of politics, of whatever kind, are about conflict──how to contain it, or abolish it.
Ralph Miliband
At a conservative estimate, there are probably a million men and women in their twenties and thirties who would happily work long hours doing what most needs to be done, if they were paid something for it.
Philip Slater
Perhaps because our culture and politics have gone so off course, with values so contrary to those of Jesus, more and more people intuitively recognize that His vision of God's kingdom-a new world of compassion, justice, integrity and peace- is the Good News they've been searching and waiting for.
Tony Campolo
Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth - that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today.
Max Weber
Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.
Jean Baudrillard
The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
It was a red-flannel chest-protector, one of those large quasi-hygienic objects that with pills and medicines take the place of beneficial relics and images among the Protestant peoples of Christendom.
H.G.Wells
The aftereffects of confiding something you shouldn't have, almost as bad as a hangover.
Malka Ann Older
Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness.
Theodor W. Adorno
Why did every human concern clog itself up in a tangle of routines, formalities, disciplines, imperatives? Why couldn’t one be free? Really free? Guarding one’s freedom, wasn’t freedom at all. Why couldn’t one win one’s freedom for good and all, and get on with life?
H.G.Wells
And she wanted to be free. It wasn't Mr. Brumley she wanted; he was but a means — if indeed he was a means — to an end. The person she wanted, the person she had always wanted — was herself. Could Mr. Brumley give her that? Would Mr. Brumley give her that? Was it conceivable he would carry sacrifice to such a pitch as that?...
H.G.Wells
She had learnt many things since the days of her first rebellion, and she knew now that this matter of the man friend and nothing else in the world is the central issue in the emancipation of women. The difficulty of him is latent in every other restriction of which women complain. The complete emancipation of women will come with complete emancipation of humanity from jealousy — and no sooner. All other emancipations are shams until a woman may go about as freely with this man as with that, and nothing remains for emancipation when she can.
H.G.Wells
Processes of rationalization and disenchantment engender a shift from a social order founded upon value-rational beliefs and governed through charismatic and traditional forms of authority, to an order ruled by the force of instrumental reason and dominated by new forms of institutional bureaucracy. This movement results in the depersonalization of the social world: instrumental calculation steadily suppresses the passionate pursuit of ultimate values, and bureaucracy reduces the scope for individual initiative and personal fulfillment... instrumental reason... is not only tied to the devaluation or disenchantment of the highest and most sublime values and ideals, but places important limits on the scope for individual autonomy and freedom in the modern world.
Nicholas Gane
An institution rooted in slavery can never set us free.
DaShanne Stokes
Free elections don't always result in fair elections.
DaShanne Stokes
Freedom may never be conceived merely negatively, as the absence of compulsion. Freedom conceived intersubjectively distinguishes itself from the arbitrary freedom of the isolated individual. No one is free until we are all free.
Jürgen Habermas
But in truth, a general prohibition in a state may increase the sum of liberty, and a general permission may diminish it. It does not follow, as these people would have us believe, that a man is more free where there is least law and more restricted where there is most law.
H.G.Wells