Institutions Quotes

“Marriage is a fine institution, but I'm not ready for an institution.”
― Mae West, The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
― Edward O. Wilson

“Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.”
― Richard Dawkins

“When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
and when we escape like squirrels turning in the
cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don't know ourselves.

Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like
burnt paper.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine - and no perishable - work within institutions”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with. She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance, but I cannot pity her: she is white. She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it. She persisted, and her subsequent reaction is something that all of us have known at one time or another. She did something every child has done-she tried to put the evidence of her offense away from her. But in this case she was no child hiding stolen contraband: she struck out at her victim-of necessity she must put him away from her-he must be removed from her presence, from this world. She must destroy the evidence of her offense.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
― Clay Shirky

“The institution was a cross between an orphanage and a slaughterhouse. Worst of all, it was run entirely by norms. The word alone would set my chin trembling. I would beg and grieve and he would allow that I deserved another chance.”
― Katherine Dunn

“I just wish this social institution [religion] wasn't based on what appears to me to be a monumental hoax built on an accumulation of customs and myths directed toward proving something that isn't true.”
― Andy Rooney, Sincerely, Andy Rooney

“The church may update its techniques and methods, but it is always in service of the institutional organism. This is one of the reasons why the pedophile priest issue is and will remain an endemic disease in the Catholic Church.”
― Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

“What if good institutions were in fact the product of good intentions? What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget the origins of the greatness we lay claim to - power and wealth as secondary consequences of the progress of freedom, or, as Whitman would prefer, Democracy?”
― Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books

“If I have so far argued that Foucault is a kind of closet liberal and thus deeply modern, I need to be equally critical of evangelical (and especially American) Christianity's modernity and its appropriation of Enlightenment notions of the autonomous self. Indeed, many otherwise orthodox Christians, who recoil at the notion of theological liberalism, have unwittingly adopted notions of freedom and autonomy that are liberal to the core. Averse to hierarchies and control, contemporary evangelicalism thrives on autonomy: the autonomy of the nondenominational church, at a macrocosmic level, and the autonomy of the individual Christian, at the microcosmic level. And it does not seem to me that the emerging church has changed much on this score; indeed, some elements of emergent spirituality are intensifications of this affirmation of autonomy and a laissez-faire attitude with respect to institutions.”
― James K.A. Smith, Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church

“Sixth grade, I remembermy best friend Wendy
whose parents were fighting, harshly, loudly,
and we sat on the curb outside so she wouldn't have to hear it,
and she cried, believing her world was falling apart.
I made up a kind-of game:
to everything she would say, I would respond
'Is that a fact or an opinion?'
and she had to figure it out and say it outloud--
we played it for hours,
ending up laughing
but she also began to separate
what was actually happening inside the house
from her feelings about it
and her fears.

I feel like I'm still playing 'Fact or Opinion'
in my writing,
in the world--
with family, friends,
and, of course, myself.

Wish I could play it with our governmental representatives,
our institutions,
our courts.”
― Shellen Lubin

“Invariably, knowledge dictates life, liberty, and death, but those who have historically occupied the seats of power not only dictate what is defined as knowledge but also dictate what’s included, what’s excluded, and how it is filtered to society vis-à-vis America’s major institutions . . . particularly the educational system; ultimately, shaping the very essence of life.”
― Martin Guevara Urbina, Latino Access to Higher Education: Ethnic Realitites and New Directions for the Twenty-first Century

“The overthrow of beliefs is not immediately followed by the overthrow of institutions; rather, the new beliefs live for a long time in the now desolate and eerie house of their predecessors, which they themselves preserve, because of the housing shortage.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“How can a deep-seated distrust of all elites and institutions be squared with unwavering admiration for one leader and party? This is why populists ultimately depend on the mystical notion that the strongman embodies the people. When trust in bureaucratic institutions like election boards, courts, and newspapers is particularly low, an enhanced reliance on mythology is the only way to preserve order.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“[M]any DEI initiatives, as they function currently, neither serve those they are supposedly intended for, nor do they make any meaningful changes in the structure of the society at large. Instead, the way I see many DEI initiatives working in this country…is by maintaining the status quo in several ways: first, most diverse people I see in different places are tokens and are only allowed any form of power or contributions upon the condition of proving that they are not there to rock the boat or be a threat to the upper powers, who are usually selected privileged whites. Second, there are deliberate and malicious efforts to tokenize diverse people who are not only incompetent, but also complicit to almost make it look like that truly qualified diverse people don’t exist (far from true), as well as to give the majority of white people the impression that they are losing their jobs and privileges to people who are not even qualified or deserving, hence creating further bitterness and divide in the society. In sum, the way the DEI initiatives work is neither benefiting the truly qualified and competent diverse people who could change the structure and the system, nor are they helping white people truly see the value of different perspectives and different ways of thinking, sensing, and doing that enrich this world.

[From “The Trump Age: Critical Questions” published on CounterPunch on June 23, 2023]”
― Louis Yako

“That was what had changed, he thought. To love posterity and the great institutions you had to believe in the wisdom of men. You had to love them as a child might, gazing upward.”
― Lydia Millet, How the Dead Dream

“Leadership is largely ignored by recent liberal theorists. I suspect that the very idea of leadership has a non-egalitarian and authoritarian quality to it, best left to those (inspired by Max Webber) with a fascination for charisma or revolution; or left to fascists or management consultants and organisational psychologists.

But this neglect by liberal theorists comes at a cost. Institutions and procedures are run by imperfect human beings and without ongoing maintenance, care and investment they decay. While I do not claim that 'leadership' is a sufficient response to the challenges of institutional decay and renewal, it may well be a necessary one.”
― Eric Schliesser, The Scottish Enlightenment: Human Nature, Social Theory and Moral Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Christopher J. Berry

“If institutions of the state fail to match their professional context, they are risky for the state.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“Boys' gangs are neighborhood institutions.”
― Robert Ezra Park, The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment

“Everything in the hands of an oppressor is a tool”
― Seun Ayilara

“La jeune fille était probablement plus exigeante, plus gourmande que la moyenne. Elle avait déjà deux tentatives de suicide derrière elle. Je me souviens d'elle allongée sur un lit d'hôpital, qui cherchait à fixer un point indéfini sur le mur immaculé pour ne plus entendre les gémissements des autres, pour tromper le temps, les allées et les venues des infirmières au masque dur et impassible, mais qui finissait par se retrouver face à elle-même, qu'était-elle devenue, sinon encore un numéro à qui il fallait administrer ceci et cela.”
― Marceline Loridan-Ivens, L'Amour après

“There is no more reason now than there has ever been to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws, not simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will — HUMAN institutions, that have to face the test of legitimacy, and if they do not meet it, can be replaced by others that are more free and more just, as often in the past.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Don’t be fooled by their hypocrisy and double standards. They have no honor, moral standards, ethics, principles or integrity. It is never about right or wrong, but it is about which side they are on, who is paying them and who is also on the payroll. When it is one of their own who does wrong or who commits crime. They will never call them out. Prosecute, judge, arrest, cancel, confront, expose, seek answers or humiliate them. They wont comment or make any statements . They will be silent like nothing happened because they protect each other and protect their interests. When it is not one of their own. All hell will break lose. They would have 24/7 coverage on every news channel or newspaper, on the front pages. Having their own sketchy, bias headline, analysts, experts, professors, influences, investigators, journalists and witnesses. They would even blow it out of proposition. Making remarks and statement seeking answers. Challenging the court ,government and the people. They are all puppets and there is someone pulling the strings. They are all owned by the same master.”
― De philosopher DJ Kyos

“An institution can call itself by whatever name it wants, but if it lacks a strong self-correcting mechanism, it is not a scientific institution.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Anytime we step outside of the realm of the market economy and
monetary calculation, the social system must attempt to provide a substitute for property, prices, and profit-and-loss to align incentives, guide decisions, lure entrants and innovation, and discipline and select superior methods of production to reveal opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation. Whether or not these substitutes can effectively serve the function that the price system does is the crux of the debate in comparative institutional analysis.”
― Peter Boettke, The Socialist Calculation Debate: Theory, History, and Contemporary Relevance

“Toynbee’s wholesale dismissal of five centuries of Western art, eccentric and paradoxical as it is, raises fundamental issues about the character of human life itself. Man is a being who is aware of himself, and aware that his world is a mindaffected world. It is because his world is such that he is all at home in it. To say this is to say how vitally man depends on legacies and traditions, on the transmission of modes of thought and behaviour, on artefacts and institutions, without which he would be unable to survive, or at best become simply an animal or a savage. It is for this reason, among others, that man’s nature is his history.”
― Elie Kedourie, The Crossman Confessions and Other Essays in Politics, History, and Religion