#social

The Enlightenment may have made its most lasting impact in the way we live and think today through its social history. Our institutions and laws, our conception of the state, and our political sensitivity all stem from Enlightenment ideas… Remarkably enough, at the center of these ideas stands the age-old concept of natural law. Much if the Enlightenment’s innovation in in political theory may be traced to a change in the interpretation of that concept. ↗

— Louis Dupre

#natural-law #social-history #age

Occupying the bottom end of the inequality ladder, and becoming a 'collateral victim' of a human action or a natural disaster, interact the way the opposite poles of magnets do: they tend to gravitate towards each other. ↗

— Zygmunt Bauman

#social #age

There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe. ↗

— Edith Wharton

#social-commentary #society #age

Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind of people who only ask one to pretend! ↗

— Edith Wharton

#hypocrisy #new-york #pulitzer-prize #social-criticism #age

And a human being whose life is nurtured in an advantage which has accrued from the disadvantage of other human beings, and who prefers that this should remain as it is, is a human being by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer, and the scavengers of the deep sea. ↗

— James Agee

#morality #morals #right #social-justice #society

All Welsh knew was that he was scared shitless, and at the same time was afflicted with a choking gorge of anger that any social coercion existed in the world which could force him to be here. ↗

— James Jones

#eddie-welsh #fear #social-coercion #warfare #anger

Again, we find that the space standards of twenty-first century luxury are below the required minimum for dockworkers in 1962. ↗

— Owen Hatherley

#housing #social #architecture

The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution! ↗

— Albert Einstein

#democracy #freedom #history #hope #individualism

Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It's terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal. I can't see how to avoid it, without being very rich or very unpopular, & it does worry me, for time is slipping by , and nothing is done. It isn't as if anything was gained by this social frivolity, It isn't: it's just a waste. ↗

— Philip Larkin

#energy #socialising #solitude #art

Because you live to love and love to live/ And because of what your heardrum will give/ Now we might love to live and live to love. ↗

— Janet Goodfriend

#best #book-club #cape-cod #character #community