Societies Quotations

In countries with a properly functioning legal system, the mob continues to exist, but it is rarely called upon to mete out capital punishment. The right to take human life belongs to the state. Not so in societies where weak courts and poor law enforcement are combined with intractable structural injustices.

Societies cannot move forward without law, and our constitution is the cornerstone of the law and our National Assembly is its umbrella and fortress.

I've always had a Marxist understanding of history: democracy is a result of a broad modernization process that happens in every country. Neocons think the use of political power can force the pace of change, but ultimately it depends on societies doing it themselves.

Free and civilized societies do not hold prisoners incommunicado.

It's the relationship I have with the world: always trying to escape from reality. I'm a daydreamer; I don't feel in harmony with my epoch or the societies I live in.

The 1 to 2 billion poorest in the world, who don't have food for the day, suffer from the worst disease: globalization deficiency. The way globalization is occurring could be much better, but the worst thing is not being part of it. For those people, we need to support good civil societies and governments.

Globalisation will make our societies more creative and prosperous, but also more vulnerable.

Sporting achievements bestow a sense of unification on the cultures and societies in which they take place and create an outpouring of nationalism and pride.

Law is stable; the societies we are speaking of are progressive. The greater or less happiness of a people depends on the degree of promptitude with which the gulf is narrowed.

And so in terms of territorial control, in terms of economic preeminence, the western share of the gross world product is declining as Asian societies in particular develop economically.

I started collecting aerial photographs of Native American and South Pacific architecture; only the African ones were fractal. And if you think about it, all these different societies have different geometric design themes that they use. So Native Americans use a combination of circular symmetry and fourfold symmetry.

By seeing the problem of poverty merely in terms of assistance, we overlook that our enormous economic advantage is deeply tainted by how it accumulated over the course of one historical process that has devastated the societies and cultures of four continents.

Throughout history, when societies face tough economic times, we have seen democratic reforms deferred, decreased trust in government, persecution of minority groups, and a general shrinking of the democratic space.

You have to believe that it's through politics that societies can lead social and economic and political change.

In contrast, fear societies are societies in which dissent is banned.

Southeast Asia is an area in which there is a form of Islam which is both devout and progressive, and therefore to be supported. It's an area in which I see a congruence of American interests and local interests: to have tolerant societies and become more prosperous.

Religion is everywhere. There are no human societies without it, whether they acknowledge it as a religion or not.

If you look within the United States, religion seems to make you a better person. Yet atheist societies do very well - better, in many ways, than devout ones.

Technology advances at exponential rates, and human institutions and societies do not. They adapt at much slower rates. Those gaps get wider and wider.

People who study primate societies make a distinction between two kinds of cultural interactions, agonic and hedonic. In agonic societies, you gain status by asserting dominance over others. In hedonic societies, you gain status by drawing attention to yourself. Open source is a hedonic culture.

Institutionalized discrimination is bad for people and for societies. Widespread discrimination is also bad for economies. There is clear evidence that when societies enact laws that prevent productive people from fully participating in the workforce, economies suffer.

Humans are remarkable: the first species in almost four billion years of life on earth that dominates the biosphere. This gives us the power, in principle, to build societies in which everyone flourishes. But it also creates great dangers because it is not clear that we really understand how to use our potentially devastating powers.

Remember, until the 1970s, the spread of democracy has always been accompanied by the decline of inequality. The more democratic our societies have been, the more equal they have been becoming. Now we have the reverse tendency. The spread of democracy now is very much accompanied by the increase in inequality.

We increasingly live in societies based on the vocabulary of 'choice' and a denial of reality - a denial of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible concentration of power in relatively few hands, and a growing machinery of social and civil death.

It is also, I would guess, a universal that in all societies people value respectability granted to them.

There is very strong historical data that suggests the way societies grow is by making large, long-term investments.

Societies should be judged by how they treat the weakest among them.

Well we are hoping that the power of the community of free nations is such that our sovereignty our rights are not going to be challenged by anybody who's going try to undermine the freedom, the openness of our societies and our security.

Libraries are public treasuries. They're ways in which well-meaning societies leave the wealth of the past arranged A to Z so that anyone walking past can find it.

In the West, especially after World War II, the government came to be seen as so successful that it could fulfill all the obligations that in less modern societies are fulfilled by the family.

Professional societies are sooner or later fractured by the ego of their leaders. Everyone wants to be president, chairman, CEO; no one wants to be a mere follower.

A 'human right' is, by definition, timeless. It cannot adhere to some societies and not others, at some times and not at other times.

Whenever societies do well, they believe that there is something in their cultural DNA that made it happen.

Countries that have the Internet already are not going to turn it off. And so the power of freedom, the power of ideas will spread, and it will change those societies in very dramatic ways.

The serious questions that are talked out or strangled with red tape are more numerous than those that are killed by silence; the number of people whose ideas are knocked on the head in societies is greater in our day than that of the solitary fighters who go under.

The poorest and most backward societies are always those that put women down.

Businesses succeed when societies themselves succeed. When countries are affected by violence and the absence of the rule of law, business can and must be a messenger of peace.

The Native American cultures on this continent, most of them, were matrilineal, and some women were the chiefs. Societies were about balance.

Most agree, whatever their party political position, that the West can and should open its agricultural markets more fully to the products of the poorer countries of the globe. They are agricultural societies that need our markets more than our charity.

Now, there's been a persistent legend and a lot of slogans, and the formation of societies for the fostering of Franco-American friendship, which have had some effect, but there is a strong admiration in this country for the culture of France, and generally speaking I think the French find the Americans have been stout supporters of them in many of their periods of distress.

Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us... Suicide terrorism is not a supply-limited phenomenon where there are just a few hundred around the world willing to do it because they are religious fanatics. It is a demand-driven phenomenon.

Shallowness and ignorance have been our lot in the mass consumer societies we inhabit, where we were too distracted to act politically, apart from periodically deputing political elites to take life-and-death decisions on our behalf.

Simon Wiesenthal and the institute he created played an absolutely vital role in showing the mechanisms of the Holocaust, pointing to those guilty of this genocide, ... I hope that this message will be universally accepted by politicians, societies and not just in the context of the Holocaust, but all crimes against human rights which take place in the modern world.

Future generations of Americans will be dealing with the fact other nations, other cultures, other societies will be out there with us, and that's a good thing.

Galbraith argued that the truly important economic issues must be evaluated through the lens of economics, politics, sociology, law, ideology and history simultaneously, and that economic analysis and prescription must always keep front and centre both the factors of power and the narratives that societies use to tell their economic stories.

Free societies, which allow differences to speak and be heard, and live by intermarriage, commerce, and free migration, and democratic societies, which convert enemies into adversaries and reconcile differences without resort to violence, are societies in which the genocidal temptation is unlikely and even inconceivable.

I don't remember such a long period of peace between India and Pakistan, or a time when the civil societies were so active.

If a journalist cannot be trusted to guarantee confidentiality, the journalist cannot function and there cannot be a free press. The freest and fairest societies are not only those with independent judiciaries, but those with an independent press that works every day to keep government accountable by publishing what the government might not want the public to know.

But we have to recognize the limits on our power and the fact that our ability to bring about changes in other societies is, is declining.

But by having a right to dissent and having institutions which protect that right, free societies also have mechanisms to correct those abuses.

China and the U.S. are two societies with very different attitudes towards opinion and criticism. In China, I am constantly under surveillance. Even my slightest, most innocuous move can - and often is - censored by Chinese authorities.

I have a fascination for extra-judicial societies and underground cultures, and in situations where justice can only be found outside the law, and how these societies have evolved over the centuries.

Here in Toronto, the Canadian model is showcased for the world to see. It is an achievement that has eluded many societies and one that we Canadians sometimes take for granted, and that is unfortunate.

What we find in the fossil record doesn't always represent what was going on. Prior to the pottery age, women in all societies are working in things that don't preserve very well, such as skins and braiding fiber.

Human societies rely heavily on hydro-carbon power and this produce a lot of carbon dioxide that increases the global warming.

If the home is not reinforcing reading, it is much more difficult to learn it in school, ... Reading scores don't just measure schools. They're also a reflection of the values societies or families put on reading.

there is a strong historical correlation between open societies and honest societies and their economic progress, so over time of course, this matters a great deal.

It is every artist's fantasy to run things. I know personally, I'd be happiest as dictator of a small island. The problem is that romantic artists are usually too disorganized to run their own lives, let alone societies. And most societies are too sensible to let them try it.

I think that we live in a highly specialized, technologically advanced society. Highly developed societies tend to have very remote understandings about what underlies our prosperity.

I think a lot of things will be self-correcting, even in America. After all, human societies are essentially self-organizing emergent systems. The catch is, how much disorder will we have to endure while this re-self-organizing process occurs.

Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.

Our task is not to make societies safe for globalization, but to make the global system safe for decent societies.

I think the language of sacrifice is particularly important for societies like the United States in which war remains our most determinative common experience, because states like the United States depend on the story of our wars for our ability to narrate our history as a unified story.

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from

Most of all, it must generate new momentum towards developing the economies and societies of poor countries, and transforming the lives of poor people,

We propose this with great caution, ... The evidence, after all, only applies strongly to insects. Human altruism and tight-knit societies may well have evolved differently. But if it is true, it would help us understand the group aggression and warfare so widespread today. Those who study human biology and behavior should take a new look at this possibility.

There are precedents for what happens when societies allow the divide between rich and poor to get so huge that it stops being funny and starts becoming a sick, blood-boiling joke. If you had a Tardis, you could go back to 1917 and ask the Russian royal family how it was all going.

We're not talking about separating two combatants, we're talking about engaging a combatant, to use deadly force, to ensure the security of the societies we're protecting.

When both women and men contribute to a country's economic life on an equal basis, they help building stronger societies and stronger economies.

Very few societies on Earth developed science as we know it today. On the other hand, the number is not zero - the Greeks, the Chinese, and the Maya did, among others. Once invented, science proved so useful that it spread like mold on a petri dish.

Throughout history, when societies have been faced with big challenges, they've put their best people on them. During the Space Race, American and Russian scientists, engineers, astronauts and cosmonauts pushed the bounds of what was possible and landed men on the moon.

At no previous period has mankind been faced by a half-century which so paradoxically united violence and progress. Its greater and lesser wars and long series of major assassinations have been strangely combined with the liberation of more societies and individuals than ever before in history, and by the transformation of millions of second-class citizens -- women, workers and the members of subject races -- to a stage at which first-rate achievement is no longer inhibited even if opportunities are not yet complete.

Documentaries have tremendous power to reveal truth and can have profound effects on societies and lives, ... It will be a pleasure to introduce these projects to local and international audiences through EIDF 2005.

Diaspora communities are the main resources for this global jihad, ... (Their families) left for a better life, but they really have not been able to fully integrate with the recipient societies that they have immigrated to.

East and West, most societies have come to believe that competition will produce more prosperity for more people than a planned economy. I share that belief.

While there is no one model that is perfect for every nation at every time in its development, a look across the globe suggests that societies that tend to encourage more open markets and freer systems are societies where the people are enjoying the greatest opportunities,

The societies of the futures, always searching for salves, will be so greedy to have this capital which is the man, that they will find all sorts of dirty ways to religiously or culturally brutify him and even severely punishing him if he would chose suicide or the ideology that shows the true path of salvation of the mankind through itself. Precisely because they will understand that the Man is the World and the World is the Man! This aphorism will be the one that will be in the foreground on the backgrounds tainted by all these murders of the money of this society which will be the antechamber of the society of the Sacred Self.

The strong emergence of pro-feminine values in highly masculine societies signals that traditional masculine structures will continue to be challenged as the Millennial generation grows up and gains even more influence.

Veterinarians from other states have told us they feel this will definitely instigate other veterinary medical societies to start doing the same thing.

Strengthening the social contract in societies with pervasive poverty and highly unequal distribution of income will continue to challenge many Latin American governments for some time to come.

On this important issue, we hope that friends from all societies of Indonesia would join us to oppose 'Taiwan independence' and jointly maintain peace and well-being of the region.

Professional societies are asking why they are applying political criteria to overturn academic decisions.

dealing with not only a lack of management skills, but societies where crowd management generally - not just in sport - is pretty much an alien concept.

As borders around the world are coming down, as societies emerge to participate in world economic order, they must have a competitive infrastructure in which to compete,

Already we're seeing graduates of U.S. higher education going back to their home countries and contributing to societies there, where in the past they would have stayed in the U.S. and built new companies here. We have to have immigration reform that allows talented foreigners to become Americans.

Punitive murder by the police and by vigilantes has existed in all societies at some point, and probably still exists in most.

probably be many billions of dollars. However, we cannot fathom the cost of these poor societies and the nameless fishermen and fishing villages that have just been wiped out.

Tech innovation is something societies have to pursue as vigorously as they can. We have to innovate civically and socially at the same rate; otherwise, you create unfortunate disruptions, and that's where you have people opposing technological innovations.

We believe information is power. We also believe the Internet is a positive force in China. It has revolutionized information access, helps create open societies and helps accelerate the gradual evolution toward a more outward-looking Chinese society.

In its current form, globalization cannot be sustained. Democratic societies will not support it. Authoritarian leaders will fear to impose it.

If one of those friendly societies itself runs into environmental problems and collapses for environmental reasons, that collapse may then drag down their trade partners.

In societies where one sees a higher prevalence of 'modern values' - individualism, vitalism and self-expression - there's also higher reported job satisfaction.

If you look at the primitive societies that we know about, the worst thing that could have happened to you was to be captured and be turned over to the women.

If we want to take polar research to the next level, for example, understanding the implications of melting ice caps for ocean circulation, for different societies and economies, and how human activities contribute to these changes, we need scientists working across disciplines and international boundaries,

Societies can easily talk themselves into conflict and misery. But they can also talk, and act, their way out.

I'm really puzzled by why people in societies find it difficult to work collaboratively together with other people in societies.

As we strive today to become one of the most vibrant knowledge societies in the world, our future economic development will depend to a large degree on our ability to generate new knowledge and to innovate,

The billboard is an effort to dialogue with the Cuban people. Only in totalitarian societies do governments talk and talk at their people and never listen.

Every Western industrialised nation faces the same issues of an ageing society that needs migrants, a sceptical public and some hostile media. In supporting migrants, we do face formidable challenges but I'm still optimistic; we just have to focus on bringing together the needs of our societies and the aspirations of migrant families.

Clearly, it is in the interests of Western societies to help protect indigenous cultures,