Statesmen and legislators, standing so completely within the institution, never distinctly and nakedly behold it. They speak of mo...ving society, but they have no resting-place without it. They may be men of a certain experience and discrimination, and have no doubt invented ingenious and even useful systems, for which we sincerely thank them; but all their wit and usefulness lie within certain not very wide limits. They are wont to forget that the world is not governed by policy and expediency.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Forced labor as a punishment is limited as to time and intensity. The convict retains his rights over his body; he is not absolute...ly tortured and he is not absolutely dominated. Banishment banishes only from one part of the world to another part of the world, also inhabited by human beings; it does not exclude from the human world altogether. Throughout history slavery has been an institution within a social order; slaves were not, like concentration-camp inmates, withdrawn from the sight and hence the protection of their fellow-men; as instruments of labor they had a definite price and as property a definite value. The concentration-camp inmate has no price, because he can always be replaced; nobody knows to whom he belongs, because he is never seen. From the point of view of normal society he is absolutely superfluous.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The multiplication of individual sects should not fool us: the important point is that the whole of America is preoccupied with th...e sect as a moral institution, with its immediate demand for beatification, its material efficacity, its compulsion for justification, and doubtless also with its madness and frenzy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One learns quite easily to identify the rich person who is making a career out of dangling the carrot; of being fawned on by insti...tutions eager for his (or, more often, her) money. It is not very productive to "cultivate" them. I associated with many, and developed great compassion for rich people who suspect that they are in demand only because they are a potential source of income to some cause or institution. Whether it's true or not, their suspicions isolate them from all save a handful of old and trusted friends, turn them sour, make it difficult for them to accept new friends at face value, and leave them with little attraction other than their money.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I regard the effort to introduce women into colleges for young men as very undesirable, and for many reasons. That the two sexes s...hould be united, both as teachers and pupils, in the same institution seems very desirable, but rarely in early life by a method that removes them from parental watch and care, and the protecting influences of a home.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a ...direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults. A cult differs from a formal religion in many significant ways. It is in the nature of a cult to claim some esoteric knowledge which has been submerged (or repressed by orthodoxy) for a long time but has now suddenly been illuminated. There is often some heterodox figure, mocked or scorned by the orthodox, who presents these new teachings. There are communal rites which often permit or spur an individual to act out impulses that had hitherto been repressed. In the cult, one feels as though one were exploring novel or hitherto taboo modes of conduct. What defines a cult, therefore, is its implicit emphasis on magic rather than theology, on the personal tie to a guru or to the group, rather than to an institution or a creed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A great deal of unnecessary worry is indulged in by theatregoers trying to understand what Bernard Shaw means. They are not satisf...ied to listen to a pleasantly written scene in which three or four clever people say clever things, but they need to purse their lips and scowl a little and debate as to whether Shaw meant the lines to be an attack on monogamy as an institution or a plea for manual training in the public school system.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Five o'clock tea" is a phrase our "rude forefathers," even of the last generation, would scarcely have understood, so completely ...is it a thing of to-day; and yet, so rapid is the March of the Mind, it has already risen into a national institution, and rivals, in its universal application to all ranks and ages, and as a specific for "all the ills that flesh is heir to," the glorious Magna Charta.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The sick man is taken away by the institution that takes charge not of the individual, but of his illness, an isolated object tran...sformed or eliminated by technicians devoted to the defense of health the way others are attached to the defense of law and order or tidiness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are now a nation of people in daily contact with strangers. Thanks to mass transportation, school administrators and teachers o...ften live many miles from the neighborhood schoolhouse. They are no longer in daily informal contact with parents, ministers, and other institution leaders . . . [and are] no longer a natural extension of parental authority.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »