Social Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

As medium for reaching understanding, speech acts serve: a) to establish and renew interpersonal relations, whereby the speaker takes up a relation to something in the world of legitimate social orders; b) to represent states and events, whereby the speaker takes up a relation to something in the world of existing states of affairs; c) to manifest experiences that is, to represent oneself- whereby the speaker takes up a relation to something in the subjective world to which he has privileged access.

Jürgen Habermas

To act the part of a true friend requires more conscientious feeling than to fill with credit and complacency any other station or capacity in social life.

Sarah Stickney Ellis

Let's take some students of the same social class and I.Q. and compare those who go to college and those who don't four years down the road. Let's see how they stack up on things like values and reasoning ability.

William J. Bennett

[interpersonal meaning] embodies all use of language to express social and personal relations, including all forms of the speaker's intrusion into the speech situation and the speech act.

Michael Halliday

I don't involve myself in politics, my daily life is devoted to charity and social work. Apart from that I help my loved ones to live better, that's true. I never wanted to harm anyone. I deplore the fact that people have forgotten that for 23 years their lives improved greatly … and Tunisia became a modern country. I hope that my compatriots will render me justice by remembering the journey we undertook together. I hope that in the twilight of my life I will retain my honour.

What did this long-range goodwill mean, and what did it say about the social contract that allowed a rich man to free all of his descendents from the need to work over the course of almost two centuries?

Edward St. Aubyn

Another common deficiency is the failure of some panaceas to take into account a social system's developmental responsibilities to its stakeholders.

Russell L. Ackoff

We do not go to bed in single pairs; even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents' lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our whole biographies – all the bits and pieces of our unique existences.

How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort, in a hospital.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The last two decades have witnessed, especially in Germany and France, the rise of a new discipline, the sociology of knowledge (Wissenssoziologie), with a rapidly increasing number of students and a growing literature (even a selected bibliography would include several hundred titles). Since most of the investigations in this field have been concerned with the socio-cultural factors influencing the development of beliefs and opinion rather than of positive knowledge, the term. Wissen must be interpreted very broadly indeed, as referring to social ideas and thought generally, and not to the physical sciences, except where expressly indicated.

Robert K. Merton

My advice to myself and to everyone else, particularly young people, is to turn on, tune in and drop out. By drop out, I mean to detach yourself from involvement in secular, external social games. But the dropping out has to occur internally before it can occur externally. I'm not telling kids just to quit school; I'm not telling people to quit their jobs. That is an inevitable development of the process of turning on and tuning in.

This assumption of Negro leadership in the ghetto, then, must not be confined to matters of religion, education, and social uplift; it must deal with such fundamental forces in life as make these things possible.

Carter G. Woodson

— social life is fill'd
With doubts and vain aspirings; solitude,
When the imagination is dethroned,
Is turned to weariness.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

These proposals included cries for billions of new money for social assistance in the name of child poverty and for more business subsidies in the name of cultural identity. In both cases I was sought out as a rare public figure to oppose such projects.

It's okay to say no to unwanted social invitations... You will not be banished to the tundra to die alone because you decline an invitation.

As soon as artistic activity turns into an 'ism', it ceases to be artistic activity. To be alive is to engage in a daily struggle for form and for survival. (By way of analogy: social concern is a form and a method that is currently seen as appropriate and right. But where it elevates itself into Socialism, an order and a dogma, then it loses its best and truest qualities and may turn criminal.)

Gerhard Richter

All these problems constantly come in the work of political and social development. But they stand for a vast progression toward better conditions, a better society, a better economic system. In approaching them, we need to have in mind the Federalist's analysis of our constitutional system: — The powers delegated to the Federal Government are few and defined; those to remain in the hands of the State government are numerous and indefinite.

Calvin Coolidge

Real morality is possible when the sanctions for morality are also tangible and real. Therefore, atheism shifts the basis of morality from faith in god to obligations of social living. Moral conduct is not a passport to heaven; it is social necessity.

Goparaju Ramachandra Rao

We can stretch our personalities, but only up to a point. Bill Gates is never going to be Bill Clinton, no matter how he polishes his social skills, and Bill Clinton can never be Bill Gates, no matter how much time he spends alone with a computer.

One social evil for which the New Testament is clearly in part responsible is anti-Semitism.

An iniquitous social structure has produced an iniquitous power structure. Individuals and parties are not at fault. Political, social and economic monopolies exclude a large section of the masses from decision-making. To that extent they are undemocratic. So far teams of the ruling elite played and the rest were called to applaud. Now the onlookers are saying we also want to kick and net a goal, and we have our own team.

I want, however, to conclude by calling attention to a less visible form of social action: norms of social behavior, including ethical and moral codes. I suggest as one possible interpretation that they are reactions of society to compensate for market failures. It is useful for individuals to have some trust in each other's word. In the absence of trust it would become very costly to arrange for alternative sanctions and guarantees, and many opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation would have to be, foregone.

Prostitution myths justify the existence of prostitution, promote misinformation about prostitution, and contribute to a social climate that exploits and harms not only prostituted women but all women.

What the convict system bequeathed to later Australian generations was not the sturdy, skeptical independence…but an intense concern with social and political respectability. The idea of the 'convict stain', a moral blot soaked into our fabric, dominated all argument about Australian selfhood by the 1840s.

In my view, the only recourse for a scientist concerned about the social consequences of his work is to remain involved with it to the end.