Social Quotes - page 57

We have to ensure that it is structured organically, so that it functions like a person functions internally, like the organs function... First in the examination of the matter. Secondly in that one develops a concept of.... a social order that have never existed before. That simply means: to realize freedom, democracy and socialism – free democratic socialism. (Joseph Beuys)
I want to found a free school for creativity and interdisciplinary research in Düsseldorf [where Beuys was teaching at the Art Academy]. I hope that I will succeed. Everyone can come to me. This school has a legal status... First a school is there to develop ability, that is consciousness, then the children will recognize what a future social structure should look like; that means that one can learn a social feeling or a social sense... View quote
Joseph Beuys
This most modern art discipline - Social Sculpture / Social Architecture - will only reach fruition when every living person becomes a creator, a sculptor, or architect of the social organism. View quote
Joseph Beuys
I had the feeling that another kind of life -- perhaps in a transcendental area -- would give me a better possibility to influence, or to work, or to act within this contradiction. So, this was my general feeling: on the one side, this beautiful undamaged nature form which I took a lot and had a lot of possibilities for contemplation, meditation, research, collecting things, making a kind of system; and on the other side, this social debacle that I felt already as a coming dilemma. View quote
Joseph Beuys
Let's talk of a system that transforms all the social organisms into a work of art, in which the entire process of work is included... something in which the principle of production and consumption takes on a form of quality. It's a Gigantic project. View quote
Joseph Beuys
Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the death-line: to dismantle in order to build 'A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART. View quote
Joseph Beuys
I was invited to come here to speak about my idea of art, which is to enlarge the effectivity of art beyond the idea of art as coming out of art history - an art idea which contains the well-known disciplines like sculpture, architecture, painting, music, dancing, poetry and so on. I would like to declare why I feel that it's now necessary to establish a new kind of art, able to show the problems of the whole society, of every living being - and how this new discipline - which I call social sculpture - can realize the future of humankind. It could be a guarantee for the evolution of the earth as a planet, establish conditions for other planetarians too, and you can control it with your own thinking. View quote
Joseph Beuys
Giacomo Rizzolatti... calls these "mirror neurons" and suggests that they provide the first insight into imitation, identification, empathy, and possibly the ability to mime vocalization-the mental processes intrinsic to human interaction. Vilayanur Ramachandran has found evidence of comparable neurons in the premotor cortex of people. ...one can see a whole new area of biology opening up... that can give us a sense of what makes us social, communicating beings. An ambitious undertaking of this sort might... teach us something about the factors that give rise to tribalism, which is so often associated with fear, hatred, and intolerance of outsiders. View quote
Eric Kandel
In the period from 1920 to 1960, psychiatry derived its main intellectual impetus from psychoanalysis. During this phase, its most powerful antidisciplines were philosophy and the social sciences. Since 1960, psychiatry has begun (again) to derive its main intellectual challenge from biology, with the result that neurobiology has been thrust into the position of the new antidiscipline for psychiatry. View quote
Eric Kandel
What we're doing is playing social experimentation with our military right now. And that's tragic. View quote
Rick Santorum
I would say any type of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military. And the fact that they're making a point to include it as a provision within the military that we are going to recognize a group of people and give them a special privilege to - and removing 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,' I think tries to inject social policy into the military. And the military's job is to do one thing, and that is to defend our country. (Rick Santorum)
By making social hierarchies and the reproduction of these hierarchies appear based upon the hierarchy of ‘gifts', merits, or skill established and ratified by its sanctions, or, in a word, by converting social hierarchies into academic hierarchies, the educational system fulfils a function of legitimation which is more and more necessary to the perpetuation of the ‘social order' as the evolution of the power relationship between classes tends more completely to exclude the imposition of a hierarchy based upon the crude and ruthless affirmation of the power relationship. View quote
Pierre Bourdieu
The point of my work is to show that culture and education arent simply hobbies or minor influences. They are hugely important in the affirmation of differences between groups and social classes and in the reproduction of those differences. View quote
Pierre Bourdieu
We do not know, in most cases, how far social failure and success are due to heredity, and how far to environment. But environment is the easier of the two to improve. View quote
J. B. S. Haldane
Now since France has three times in sixty years failed to obtain practical results from Political revolutions, all Europe is apt to press forward into new Social doctrine to regulate the future. View quote
Lajos Kossuth
.. between ourselves, do you think a worker wants to hang a picture in his home where he sees himself sweating in a factory? He would prefer a bouquet of flowers or a pretty landscape. [Leger's critic on Aragon's Social Realism ]. View quote
Fernand Léger
Well, I certainly was not going to study physics, and I knew I was not going to study biology, but I could have become a sociologist or an anthropologist. However, I found sociology a little soft. I think that somewhere in my mind, I probably already had the notion – which turned out to be right – that if I was going to be a social scientist of some kind, I would like a rigorous social science. The analytical aspect of economics already appealed to me. That must have been so. It was not really a matter of chance. But if my wife had said ‘oh, no, economics was terribly boring', I would probably have found something else to do. View quote
Robert Solow
Conscience is deceived by the social. Our supplementary energy (imaginative) is to a great extent taken up with the social. It has to be detached from it. That is the most difficult of detachments. View quote
Simone Weil
In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs. View quote
Simone Weil
Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it. View quote
Simone Weil
The social conditions that nourished and made use of this ideology can still revive; perhaps - who knows? - the virus is dormant, waiting for the next opportunity. Dreams about the perfect society belong to the enduring stock of civilization. (Leszek Kołakowski)
The year 1844 saw the beginning of Marx' s friendship and collaboration with Friedrich Engels, whom he had already met briefly in Cologne. Engels had been through a similar spiritual evolution to Marx, though their early education was different. Born on 28 November 1820, Engels was the son of a manufacturer at Barmen (Wuppertal, near Dü sseldorf). He grew up in a stifling atmosphere of narrow-minded pietism, but soon escaped from its influence, leaving school before his final year to work in his father' s factory; in 1838 he was sent to Bremen to gain business experience. As a result of practical contact with trade and industry he soon became interested in social questions. View quote
Leszek Kołakowski
The destructive work of totalitarian machinery, whether or not this word is used, is usually supported by a special kind of primitive social philosophy. It proclaims not only that the common good of 'society' has priority over the interests of individuals, but that the very existence of individuals as persons is reducible to the existence of the social 'whole'; in other words, personal existence is, in a strange sense, unreal. This is a convenient foundation for any ideology of slavery. View quote
Leszek Kołakowski
In 1903 there appeared Problems of Idealism, a collection of essays many of whose authors had recently been Marxists, but which condemned Marxism and materialism for their moral nihilism, contempt of personality, determinism, and fanatical pursuit of social values regardless of the individuals who made up society; they also attacked Marxism for its uncritical worship of progress and sacrifice of the present to the future. (pp. 420-1) View quote
Leszek Kołakowski
I ask to be able to participate directly in all the social decisions that may affect my existence, or the general course of the world in which I live. I do not accept the fact that my lot is decided, day after day, by people whose projects are hostile to me or simply unknown to me, and for whom we, that is I and everyone else, are only numbers in a general plan or pawns on a chessboard, and that, ultimately, my life and death are in the hands of people whom I know to be, necessarily, blind. View quote
Cornelius Castoriadis