Quotes About Civil Society

#1. All depend upon the engagement of as many people as possible on all levels, from civil society to national leaders, to advocate for the kind of national and international commitments, legislation, and public/ private partnerships that can make the difference.

Queen Noor Of Jordan

#2. Changes to parliamentary procedure won't transform the lives of the people whom I represent. Decentralising, devolving decision-making and renewing civil society will.

David Blunkett

#3. But who is to decide who truly fears the Lord? The magistrate has no power to enforce religious demands. The laws of the First Table of the Ten Commandments are not regulations for a civil society or a political order. They belong to the realm of religion, not politics.

Roger Williams

#4. So often, we leave the selfless side of ourselves for nights and weekends, for our charity work. It is our duty to inject that into our day-to-day business, into the work that we do, to improve corporations, to improve civil society, and to improve government.

Leila Janah

#5. Stories can educate, elevate, comfort, and afflict those who are too comfortable. They can create community. They can also drive people apart, justify unspeakable crimes, and destroy the most basic concepts of civil society. You

Jonathan Shapiro

#6. Whereas in Western countries the constitution merely had to guarantee the rights of a per-existing civil society and culture, in Russia it also had to create these. It had to educate society - and the state itself - into the values and ideas of liberal constitutionalism.

Orlando Figes

#7. I was in civil society long before I was ever in politics or my husband was ever even elected president.

Hillary Clinton

#8. The Society of American Civil Engineers, someone who's going to come in and say to the public, we've looked at, we've examined, we've reviewed the repairs and we think they're strong enough to withstand the type of hurricane that - that could hit the city this season.

Marc Morial

#9. You can't be halfhearted in a revolution. Values that serve well in a civil society don't work in a state of nature.

Glenn Reynolds

#10. ISIS BEHEADS CIVILIANS WHILE WORLD KEEPS FORGETTING WHAT VICTIMS' SOULS R BEGGING:
HUMANITY SAVE KOBANE

Widad Akreyi

#11. Democratic Development is a process of political struggle in which democrats work gains the upper hand in the society over non-democrats which directs aid at core political processes and institutions especially elections, political parties and politically oriented civil groups.

David Eddings

#12. I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE... AND DEMONSTRATE TO EVERYONE... THAT THEIR FEAR IS GENUINE

Widad Akreyi

#13. All men have a right to remain in a state of nature as long as they please; and in case of intolerable oppression, civil or religious, to leave the society they belong to, and enter into another.

Samuel Adams

#14. A new sense of shared international responsibility is unmistakable in the voices of the United Nations and its agencies, and in the civil society of thousands of supra-national NGOs.

John Charles Polanyi

#15. In an age where community involvement and partnerships with civil society are increasingly being recognized as indispensable, there is clearly a growing potential for cooperative development and renewal worldwide.

Kofi Annan

#16. If we want to understand the distinctive constitution of Europe, we must go back to its religious foundations. For the moral beliefs which Christianity fostered still underpin civil society in Europe, the institutions that surround us.

Larry Siedentop

#17. Mexico established a unique three-part governing system shared by the government, the information commission and civil society organisations.

Mo Ibrahim

#18. In emerging democracies like Russia, in authoritarian states like Iran or even Yugoslavia, journalists play a vital role in civil society. In fact, they form the very basis of those new democracies and civil societies.

Christiane Amanpour

#19. Civil government and economics and society change because theology changes.

Joseph C. Morecraft III

#20. I have for some time urged that a nuclear abolition summit to mark the effective end of the nuclear era be convened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 70th anniversary of the bombings of those cities, with the participation of national leaders and representatives of global civil society.

Daisaku Ikeda

#21. Why were we so full of hope in those days? Looking back, I see so clearly that violence was worsening. Living through that time, we didn't see that. We believed in our capacity to grow a great country. A just society.

Kaimana Wolff

#22. I shall support the law, for the law gentlemen, is the firm and solid basis of civil society, the guardian of liberty, the protection of the innocent, the terror of the guilty, and the scourge of the wicked.

Charles Lawrence

#23. Back then, Black churches were a small piece of peace. Church was a world where, even with its imperfections, the offer of equality and common humanity was the sustenance needed to make it through the rest of the week in a society that deemed them less than human.

Janelle Gray

#24. The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying 'this is mine', and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#25. A healthy society rests on three pillars: business, government and civil society, or non-profits. Each has a distinct and important role to play, and all three need to work together synergistically to create the most value for society.

John Mackey

#26. Pastors can lead the way in motivating the faithful to wise stewardship of their citizenship responsibilities. Without a healthy culture and civil society, limited government and ordered liberty will be impossible.

Edwin Meese

#27. Becoming a modern society is about industrialization, urbanization, and rising levels of literacy, education, and wealth. The qualities that make a society Western, in contrast, are special: the classical legacy, Christianity, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, civil society.

Samuel P. Huntington

#28. A healthy civil society and vibrant republic ultimately cannot survive without a properly functioning constitutional system.

Mark R. Levin

#29. [David Riesman] had made a hobby of studying the American Civil War and he had always been disturbed by the passions which it had unleashed in the country, the tensions and angers just below the surface, the thin fabric of the society which held it all together, so easy to rend.

David Halberstam

#30. The law given from Sinai was a civil and municipal as well as a moral and religious code; it contained many statutes ... of universal application-laws essential to the existence of men in society, and most of which have been enacted by every nation which ever professed any code of laws.

John Quincy Adams

#31. YAZIDIS AND CHRISTIANS WANT TO BE FREE OF NIGHT MIST AND BEHEADING DRIFT!

Widad Akreyi

#32. It is time for the world, the hemisphere and the region to make sure that relevant institutions of civil society and relevant laws are embedded in the mechanisms of governance.

Baldwin Spencer

#33. [T]he Christian religion, in its purity, is the basis, or rather the source of all genuine freedom in government ... and I am persuaded that no civil government of a republican form can exist and be durable in which the principles of that religion have not a controlling influence.

Noah Webster

#34. I think that for anybody who has worked in the civil society, government bureaucracy moves very very slowly.

Wangari Maathai

#35. WE KNOW YOU ARE SURROUNDED BY DARKNESS ...
IN THE TERROR FOREST!
WE HOPE FOR MOONLIGHT!

Widad Akreyi

#36. We don't go for segregation. We go for separation. Separation is when you have your own. You control your own economy; you control your own politics; you control your own society; you control your own everything. You have yours and you control yours; we have ours and we control ours.

Malcolm X

#37. We resign to civil society our natural rights of self-defence only on condition that the ordinances of law should protect us.

Walter Scott

#38. Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.

John Stuart Mill

#39. Society cannot exist without law. Law is the bond of society: that which makes it, that which preserves it and keeps it together. It is, in fact, the essence of civil society.

Joseph P. Bradley

#40. Stability in government is essential to national character and to the advantages annexed to it, as well as to that repose and confidence in the minds of the people, which are among the chief blessings of civil society.

James Madison

#41. The author finds any freaking, and remarkably objective, way to estimate religion's influence on American society before the Civil War. The population closely aligned with evangelical sympathies was three or four times the size of the voting population in 1860

Mark A. Noll

#42. The American people do not want people thumbing their nose at the law. It undercuts the very fabric of our society and the system of civil justice and of criminal justice as well.

Ernest Istook

#43. Racial prejudices are indication of a disturbed and potentially unstable society.

Kenneth Clark

#44. In any event, any person from 2.0 down on the Tone Scale should not have, in any thinking society, any civil rights of any kind, because by abusing those rights he brings into being arduous and strenuous laws which are oppressive to those who need no such restraints.

L. Ron Hubbard

#45. Our society needs to recognize the unstoppable momentum toward unequivocal civil equality for every gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered citizen of this country.

Zachary Quinto

#46. The greatest failure is that although we have created institutions, we have not created a civil society.

Paddy Ashdown

#47. You need a civil society ... Bushfires can achieve the change from society to community. Bushfires can. Floods can. Ghastly crimes and disasters can. Places can change ... but it takes blood, sweat and tears.

Bob Maguire

#48. Respect for human rights requires transparent and accountable institutions and governance as well as the effective participation of all individuals and civil society, who are an essential part of realizing social and people-centred sustainable development.

Alfred-Maurice De Zayas

#49. At issue is not whether the global economy will pass away. It is passing away. Rising populations and debt combined with depletion of freshwater sources and fossil fuel make the status quo untenable. The only question is whether civil society will survive the transition.

Daniel Suarez

#50. To retain our dignity, we must sometimes refuse to live life at any cost

Dario Spini

#51. We will not let governments off the hook. We will look to civil society to help us, to pin governments, to what they have committed to here. And we will report on it.

Mary Robinson

#52. Civil Society is a cluster of institutions and associations strong enough to prevent tyranny, but which are, none the less, entered and left freely, rather than imposed by birth or sustained by awesome ritual. You can join the Labour Party without slaughtering a sheep ...

Ernest Gellner

#53. In a democracy, it is the people who are sovereign. Therefore, with regard to the promotion of democracy at the local, country and regional levels, civil society must have a stronger voice in all political processes.

Alfred-Maurice De Zayas

#54. In a free society, the 'vision thing' is left to private individuals; civil servants are kept on a tight leash, because free people understand that a 'visionary' bureaucrat is a voracious one and that the grander the government ... the poorer and less free the people.

Ilana Mercer

#55. IT'S ALL CLEAR
ISIS INVADES YOUR SPHERE
YET NO ONE IMAGINES YOUR FEAR
BUT DON'T WORRY
TAUSSI MELEK IS HERE
RESTORING LIVES NEAR

Widad Akreyi

#56. I have no argument with those who see in organized religion a template or an imperative to live life according to a prescribed set of beliefs. Just give others the room, within the laws of civil society, to believe or not believe whatever they like.

Michael J. Fox

#57. Where there is an absence of international political leadership, civil society should step in to fill the gap, providing the energy and vision needed to move the world in a new and better direction.

Daisaku Ikeda

#58. The progress of manufactures and commerce insensibly collects a large multitude within the walls of a city: but these citizens are no longer soldiers; and the arts which adorn and improve the state of civil society, corrupt the habits of the military life.

Edward Gibbon

#59. I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE
AND THANK EVERYONE
WHO TRIES TO MAKE
A DIFFERENCE IN THE LIVES
OF VULNERABLE CIVILIANS

Widad Akreyi

#60. Nazism did not destroy civil society. Bolshevism did destroy civil society. This is one of the reasons for the "miracle" of German recovery, and for the continuation of Russian vulnerability and failure. Stalin did not destroy civil society. Lenin destroyed civil society.

Martin Amis

#61. Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), understanding of where water comes from and garbage goes, consumption or conservation. They map our lives.

Rebecca Solnit

#62. Mobile phones play a really wonderful role in enabling civil society. As well as empowering people economically and socially, they are a wonderful political tool.

Mo Ibrahim

#63. Civil society has not lost the possibility to influence the government and force them to change their policy. That is why we believe in your voice and your help.

Lidia Yusupova

#64. The shift from government (state power on its own) to governance (a broader configuration of state and key elements in civil society) has therefore been marked under neoliberalism.11 In this respect the practices of the neoliberal and developmental state broadly converge.

David Harvey

#65. I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil, - to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

Henry David Thoreau

#66. If there is no willingness to use force to defend civil society, it's civil society that goes away, not force.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden

#67. Obesity is a societal issue. We have to come together with government, business, civil society, and NGOs to create solutions for this.

Muhtar Kent

#68. You know, when you get to the New World and you develop your three branches of government and you have a civil society, you can just jettison all the barbarism I recommended in the first books.

Sam Harris

#69. So virtuous are the programs said to be - pensions for the elderly, compensation for the unemployed, medicine for the sick, and assistance for the disabled - few dare ring the alarm of looming economic catastrophe that threatens to destabilize the civil society.

Mark Levin

#70. The members of such a society consider that the transgression of a religious ordinance should be punished by civil penalties, and that the violation of a civil duty exposes the delinquent to divine correction.

Henry James Sumner Maine

#71. Building sustainable cities - and a sustainable future - will need open dialogue among all branches of national, regional and local government. And it will need the engagement of all stakeholders - including the private sector and civil society, and especially the poor and marginalized.

Ban Ki-moon

#72. The busybodies have begun to infect American society with a nasty intolerance - a zeal to police the private lives of others and hammer them into standard forms - A Nation of Finger Pointers.

Lance Morrow

#73. It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage ... Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe ...

James Madison

#74. Few enjoyments are given from the open and liberal hand of nature; but by art, labor and industry we can extract them in great abundance. Hence, the ideas of property become necessary in all civil society.

David Hume

#75. Resistance to change in the mental health system comes disguised as protection of civil liberties and freedom of speech. As a result, many parents, families, and caregivers are at a loss and feel defeated by the majority of Americans who strive to maintain the current rules of society.

Tamara Hill

#76. Homosexuality is not a civil right. Its rise almost always is accompanied, as in the Weimar Republic, with a decay of society and a collapse of its basic cinder block, the family.

Pat Buchanan

#77. Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery's full grip on U.S. Society - its intimate connections to present day wealth and power, the depth of its injury to black Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end - can we reconcile the paradoxes of current American life.

Douglas A. Blackmon

#78. When people get out of jail, it is not easy for them to find a job. It is not easy for them to return to civil society.

Bernie Sanders

#79. I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I'm proud of it.

Paul Krugman

#80. Democracy is disruptive ... there is no right in a democratic civil society to be free of disruption.

Naomi Wolf

#81. As a vibrant force in civil society, women continue to press for their rights, equal participation in decision-making, and the upholding of the principles of the revolution by the highest levels of leadership in Egypt.

Michelle Bachelet

#82. Business, labor and civil society organizations have skills and resources that are vital in helping to build a more robust global community.

Kofi Annan

#83. At the heart of these challenges lies the question of how the institutions of the European Union make laws, the types of laws they pass and the effectiveness with which those laws are implemented on civil society and the economy.

John Hutton

#84. The teachings of the New Testament are the most valuable guide to the best way to a civil and sustainable society the world has seen.

Andrew Forrest

#85. Rosa Parks will be remembered for her lasting contributions to society. Her legacy lives on in the continued struggle for civil rights around the world. She will be missed.

Jim Costa

#86. If civil society has nobody who protects the law, then what kind of society is that?

Ai Weiwei

#87. Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it. -Andrew Young, author, civil rights activist, US congressman, mayor, and UN ambassador (b. 1932)

Andrew Young

#88. Security against foreign danger is one of the primitive objects of civil society. It is an avowed and essential object of the American Union.

James Madison

#89. If you create enough space in Egypt, civil society will revive itself, and then will you have all of these secular forces, liberals, nationalists and others, compete with the Islamists. And then you will see the Islamists reduced to their size.

Hisham Melhem

#90. In justice to human society it may perhaps be said of almost all the polities and civil institutions in the world, however imperfect, that they have been founded in and carried on with very considerable wisdom.

Ezra Stiles

#91. In every aspect and among almost every demographic, how American society digested and processed the long, dark chapter between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the civil rights movement has been delusion.

Douglas A. Blackmon

#92. A variant of the NIT puts it within our power to end poverty, provide for comfortable retirement and medical care for everyone, and - as a bonus that is probably more important than any of the immediate effects - revitalize American civil society.

Charles Murray

#93. Standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church.

Pope Benedict XVI

#94. The good society is marked by a high degree of order, justice, and freedom. Among these, order has primacy: for justice cannot be enforced until a tolerable civil social order is attained, nor can freedom be anything better than violence until order gives us laws.

Russell Kirk

#95. I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE ... AND BEG EVERYONE ... TO HELP RESCUE ALL IMPRISONED WOMEN.

Widad Akreyi

#96. A just laicism allows religious freedom. The state does not impose religion but rather gives space to religions with a responsibility toward civil society, and therefore it allows these religions to be factors in building up society.

Pope Benedict XVI

#97. Activist government overreach and ongoing economic stagnation have shown us why Washington should not try to displace what is best left to civil society.

Paul Ryan

#98. It is still in the lap of the gods whether a society can succeed which is based on "civil liberties and human rights" conceived as I have tried to describe them; but of one thing at least we may be sure: the alternatives that have so far appeared have been immeasurably worse.

Learned Hand

#99. I'm a big fan of the vigor of civil society, political engagement, and public life in many parts of Latin America.

Rebecca Solnit

#100. I shall work with Congress, civil society groups and local government executives who are convinced that charter changes are needed to enable the country to surmount the unprecedented challenges of the 21st century.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo