We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but... rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named "fair competition" and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There was a time when all these things would have passed me by, like the flitting figures of a theatre, sufficient for the amuseme...nt of an hour. But now, I have lost the power of looking merely on the surface. Everything seems to me to come from the Infinite, to be filled with the Infinite, to be tending toward the Infinite. Do I see crowds of men hastening to extinguish a fire? I see not merely uncouth garbs, and fantastic, flickering lights, of lurid hue, like a trampling troop of gnomes--but straightway my mind is filled with thoughts about mutual helpfulness, human sympathy, the common bond of brotherhood, and the mysteriously deep foundations on which society rests; or rather, on which it now reels and totters.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The family is both the fundamental unit of society as well as the root of culture. It represents a child's initial source of uncon...ditional love and acceptance and provides lifelong connectedness with others. The family is the first setting in which socialization takes place and where children learn to live with mutual respect for one another. A family is where a child learns to display affection, control his temper, and pick up his toys. Finally, a family is a perpetual source of encouragement, advocacy, assurance, and emotional refueling that empowers a child to venture with confidence into the greater world and to become all that he can be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does o...f us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited re...liance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark:M"I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Settlement ... is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by ...the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than ...forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While there are practical and sometimes moral reasons for the decomposition of the family, it coincides neither with what most peo...ple in society say they desire nor, especially in the case of children, with their best interests.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Within the university ... you can study without waiting for any efficient or immediate result. You may search, just for the sake o...f searching, and try for the sake of trying. So there is a possibility of what I would call playing. It's perhaps the only place within society where play is possible to such an extent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »