Human Societies Quotes

#1. The moment one begins thinking about morality in terms of well-being, it becomes remarkably easy to discern a moral hierarchy across human societies.

Sam Harris

#2. Butterflies have always had wings; people have always had legs. While history is marked by the hybridity of human societies & the desire for movement, the reality of most of migration today reveals the unequal relations between rich & poor, between North and South, between whiteness and its others.

Harsha Walia

#3. we are here confronted with an irreducible oddity about all human societies: all are strung around figments of the human imagination.

Patricia Crone

#4. Gender healing and reconciliation consciously invokes this universal love of the heart, which in the end has the capacity to overcome the very real and formidable challenges of gender oppression and injustice that have tormented human societies for literally thousands of years

William Keepin

#5. No matter how complex or affluent, human societies are nothing but subsystems of the biosphere, the Earth's thin veneer of life, which is ultimately run by bacteria, fungi and green plants.

Vaclav Smil

#6. When love of one's people becomes an absolute, it turns into racism. When love of equality turns into a supreme thing, it can result in hatred and violence toward anyone who has led a privileged life. It is the settled tendency of human societies to turn good political causes into counterfeit gods.

Timothy Keller

#7. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference. So,

Jared Diamond

#8. Unions are susceptible to the same ills that befall all human societies.

Tony Kushner

#9. In most of history, societies have not been free. It's a very rare society that is free. The default condition of human societies is tyranny.

Michael Novak

#10. They had grown up to believe that the natural order of things was for one's home to be a place of freedom and space far removed from the complexities and restrictions of human societies. We

Kobie Kruger

#11. Human societies are based on the human tendency to want things, and are geared to satisfying those wants: possessions or facilities to bring ease and personal satisfaction. The results are frequently disappointing, and always terminate in the embarrassing non sequitur of death.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

#12. Nay, all laws must fall, human societies that subsist by them be dissolved, and all innocent persons be exposed to the violence of the most wicked, if men might not justly defend themselves against injustice by their own natural right, when the ways prescribed by publick authority cannot be taken.

Algernon Sidney

#13. Among the laws controlling human societies there is one more precise and clearer, it seems to me, than all the others. If men are to remain civilized or to become civilized, the art of association must develop and improve among them at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#14. We know that genes shape human cultures and human societies: The DNA we inherited from our ancestors makes certain foods taste better, affects the way we care for children, influences what colors we find vibrant, and contributes to our love of socializing, among other examples.

Sam Kean

#15. History has been conceived
and with high justification in the records
as the human struggle for civilization against barbarism in different ages and places, from the beginning of human societies.

Mary Ritter Beard

#16. Human societies, at least the more advanced cultures, have rarely offered the individual anything but imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism for dealing with "other" cultures.

Edward W. Said

#17. human societies always define themselves by their narrowest possible interests.That they are exclusive not inclusive.

Joel Shepherd

#18. The origin behind myths and religion is human terror of annihilation. Human societies invented mythology and religion in order to militate against people's fear of living a mortal life. People fear time as a destroyer of human happiness, human beings, and human societies.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#19. The Jungle Law is a law without exceptions. Only the strong survives. Animals are following it, human societies are following it. It is the law of the beast, and it knows neither reason nor compassion

Stephan Attia

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

Octavia E. Butler

#21. Nothing can be more readily disproved than the old saw, "You can't keep a good man down." Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down.

John W. Gardner

#22. Human societies as temporally and spatially far-flung as the Mesopotamians, Mayans, and Easter Islanders likely came to ruin by expanding beyond the capacity of their environments to sustain them.

William E. Rees

#23. Think how different human societies would be if they were based on love rather than justice. But no such societies have ever existed on earth.

Mortimer Adler

#24. Nothing has ever been out of place in this existence. Things have been out of place in human societies.

Jaggi Vasudev

#25. Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.

Emile Durkheim

#26. The crucial differences which distinguish human societies and human beings are not biological. They are cultural.

Ruth Benedict

#27. Although failure is a great teacher, we cannot afford the time to learn from our failures. Human societies cannot be subjected to such a process.

Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum

#28. Throughout history most human societies were so busy with local conflicts and neighbourhood quarrels that they never considered exploring and conquering distant lands.

Yuval Noah Harari

#29. History is not the accumulation of events of every kind which happened in the past. It is the science of human societies.

Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges

#30. There is no doubt that I have discovered the ultimate in stagnant human societies. The Bikura have realized the human dream of immortality and have paid for it with their humanity and their immortal souls.

Dan Simmons

#31. 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.

James Howard Kunstler

#32. It is necessary to mankind in general, that there should be religion in the world, absolutely necessary for the preservation of the honour of the human nature, and no less so for the preservation of the order of human societies.

Matthew Henry

#33. The anthropologist respects history, but he does not accord it a special value. He conceives it as a study complementary to his own: one of them unfurls the range of human societies in time, the other in space.

Claude Levi-Strauss

#34. The most threatened group in human societies as in animal societies is the unmated male: the unmated male is more likely to wind up in prison or in an asylum or dead than his mated counterpart. He is less likely to be promoted at work and he is considered a poor credit risk.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

#35. Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies.

Whittaker Chambers

#36. Human societies vary in lots of independent factors affecting their openness to innovation.

Jared Diamond

#37. For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.

Jared Diamond

#38. Its likely that a general pattern of behavior among threatened human societies is to become more blindered, rather than more focused on the crisis, as they fall.

Ed Ayres

#39. All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.

Jared Diamond

#40. In all human societies, health and education have an intrinsic value: the ability to enjoy years of good health, like the ability to acquire knowledge and culture, is one of the fundamental purposes of civilization.

Thomas Piketty

#41. The rate of human invention is faster, and the rate of cultural loss is slower, in areas occupied by many competing societies with many individuals and in contact with societies elsewhere.

Jared Diamond

#42. In fact, all known societies above the very primitive level have been slave societies - even many of the Northwest American Indian tribes had slaves long before Columbus's voyage.46 Amid this universal slavery, only one civilization ever rejected human bondage: Christendom. And it did it twice!

Rodney Stark

#43. Am I embarrassed to speak for a less than perfect democracy? Not one bit. Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are societies which are free of sin? No, I don't. Do I think ours is, on balance, incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world has? Yes, I do.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#44. We have a list of human rights - right to food, right to shelter, right to health, right to education, many such items which are considered and accepted as bill of rights. These are to be insured to people. So all nations, all societies try to do that.

Muhammad Yunus

#45. You mean one human is good, but a hundred humans is bad?" "Exactly. One human is just a person. A hundred humans make a society. And societies have kings, and religions and priests, and all these other things serrin completely fail to understand

Joel Shepherd

#46. Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.

Mary Catherine Bateson

#47. The promotion of the culture of life should be the highest priority in our societies ... If the right to life is not defended decisively as a condition for all other rights of the person, all other references to human rights remain deceitful and illusory.

Pope John Paul II

#48. Knowledge leads towards different kind of societies then those societies don't relate with each other because people in those societies think, act and reacts with their knowledge that create different ways of life and different recognitions of humans.

Zaman Ali

#49. Democratic societies can no longer give religious fanatics a free hand to abuse and murder non believers. Such action betrays contempt for the basic human rights which animate any democracy with meaning.

Armstrong Williams

#50. We sense that 'normal' isn't coming back, that we are being born into a new normal: a new kind of society, a new relationship to the earth, a new experience of being human.

Charles Eisenstein

#51. Millions of men have lived to fight, build palaces and boundaries, shape destinies and societies; but the compelling force of all times has been the force of originality and creation profoundly affecting the roots of human spirit.

Ansel Adams

#52. Beneath the broad tides of human history there flow the stealthy undercurrents of the secret societies, which frequently determine in the depth the changes that take place upon the surface.

A. E. Waite

#53. Functional societies need algorithms which reward us for being of service to those who need it most. Instead we have algorithms which reward us for being of service to those who need it least

Heather Marsh

#54. Societies as well as people become afraid of change as they grow older. It's human nature. The young have adventures while the old sit at home and nurture their memories.

Paul J. McAuley

#55. Empathy is one of our highest human skills and holds families and societies together. Feeling connected to other people is probably the deepest satisfaction we will ever know. How terrible for children who are being brought up without that capacity.

Sue Gerhardt

#56. We who live in free market societies believe that growth, prosperity and ultimately human fulfillment, are created from the bottom up, not the government down.

Ronald Reagan

#57. Today, our attention is less than the television advertisement. We're looking at six or seven problems constantly. We're living in the disturbed societies of cities. I think modern technology is one of the worst things human beings have invented.

Marina Abramovic

#58. America is a new kind of society that produces a new kind of human being. That human being - confident, self-reliant, tolerant, generous, future-oriented - is a vast improvement over the wretched, servile, fatalistic and intolerant human being that traditional societies have always produced.

Dinesh D'Souza

#59. We must ask why apparently general musical abilities should be restricted to a chosen few in societies supposed to be culturally more advanced. Does cultural development represent a real advance in human sensitivity, or is it chiefly a diversion for elites and a weapon of class exploitation?

John Blacking

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

Mitch Kapor

#61. Because men, compared to male chimps, have such relatively small testicles (large testicles indicate a species where many males mate, one after the other, with the same female), we might guess that promiscuous societies were uncommon in the immediate human past.

Carl Sagan

#62. If we do not have a vision before us of where we are headed, we will assume that the status quo is normal, and that we and our cultures and our societies are "only human," without ever realizing that we have never seen normal humanity, in our lives.

Russell D. Moore

#63. We are literally linked in a circle, including with nature, as well as with other human beings. Old societies didn't have and still don't have "he" and "she." They don't have gendered pronouns. They don't have a word for nature, because we're not separate from nature.

Gloria Steinem

#64. There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.

Walter Lippmann

#65. The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.

Tony Kushner

#66. A university is not a service station. Neither is it a political society, nor a meeting place for political societies. With all its limitations and failures, and they are invariably many, it is the best and most benign side of our society insofar as that society aims to cherish the human mind.

Richard Hofstadter

#67. The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.

Northrop Frye

#68. To be human, at the most profound level, is to encounter honestly the inescapable circumstances that constrain us, yet muster the courage to struggle compassionately for our own unique individualities and for more democratic and free societies.

Cornel West

#69. People do not consciously and rationally choose the form of their society. Societies develop through processes of social evolution that are not under rational human control.

Theodore Kaczynski

#70. Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There's more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it's awfully close to human.

P. J. O'Rourke

#71. News for the godless: religion is inescapable. there has never been a human society without some form of worship. And don't point to communist societies like the Soviet Union - they worshipped blue jeans.

Stephen Colbert

#72. Our rate of progress is such that an individual human being, of ordinary length of life, will be called on to face novel situations which find no parallel in his past. The fixed person, for the fixed duties, who, in older societies was such a godsend, in the future will be a public danger.

Alfred North Whitehead

#73. War does horrible things to human beings, to societies. It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature.

Richard Engel

#74. Basically, success the way we've defined it is no longer sustainable. It's no longer sustainable for human beings or for societies.

Arianna Huffington

#75. The greatest historical events in the twentieth century - in fact, in all of human history - have been the overthrow of capitalism and establishment of societies run by and for the working class in the two great communist revolutions in Russia and China.

Grover Furr

#76. We can imagine a society in which no one could survive as a social being because it does not correspond to biologically determined perceptions and human social needs. For historical reasons, existing societies might have such properties, leading to various forms of pathology.

Noam Chomsky

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

Tom Stoppard

#78. We are in the twilight of this earth. The societies and civilizations of human beings will not endure much longer because of their abuses of power.

Frederick Lenz