#institution

When people criticize me for not having any respect for existing structures and institutions, I protest. I say I give institutions and structures and traditions all the respect that I think they deserve. That's usually mighty little, but there are things that I do respect. They have to earn that respect. They have to earn it by serving people. They don't earn it just by age or legality or tradition. ↗

— Myles Horton

#respect #sociology #tradition #age

As it is not a settled question, you must clear your mind of the fancy with which we all begin as children, that the institutions under which we live, including our legal ways of distributing income and allowing people to own things, are natural, like the weather. They are not. Because they exist everywhere in our little world, we take it for granted that they have always existed and must always exist, and that they are self-acting. That is a dangerous mistake. They are in fact transient makeshifts; and many of them would not be obeyed, even by well-meaning people, if there were not a policeman within call and a prison within reach. They are being changed continually by Parliament, because we are never satisfied with them.... At the elections some candidates get votes by promising to make new laws or to get rid of old ones, and others by promising to keep things just as they are. This is impossible. Things will not stay as they are. Changes that nobody ever believed possible take place in a few generations. Children nowadays think that spending nine years in school, oldage and widows’ pensions, votes for women, and short-skirted ladies in Parliament or pleading in barristers’ wigs in the courts are part of the order of Nature, and always were and ever shall be; but their great-grandmothers would have set down anyone who told them that such things were coming as mad, and anyone who wanted them to come as wicked. ↗

— George Bernard Shaw

#government #institutions #laws #politicians #society

I always tell people that religious institutions and political institutions should be separate. So while I'm telling people this, I myself continue with them combined. Hypocrisy! ↗

— Dalai Lama

#combined #continue #hypocrisy #i #i always

The institutions of the European Union, and the states that belong to this union, each and every one, are paying the price of our failures, hesitations and contradictions. We should each ask ourselves how personally responsible we are. ↗

— Giorgio Napolitano

#belong #contradictions #each #european #european union

It is day after day in this institution, borrow money, run up the debt, run up the deficits and then with a straight face say, we are going to repeal a tax that affects 1 percent of the American people, just 1 percent of the American people. ↗

— Richard Neal

#after #american #american people #borrow #day

The development of a political-economic framework to explore long-run institutional change occupied me during all of the 1980s and led to the publication of Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance in 1990. ↗

— Douglass North

#development #during #economic #explore #framework

Our political institutions work remarkably well. They are designed to clang against each other. The noise is democracy at work. ↗

— Michael Novak

#democracy #designed #each #institutions #noise

The cinema is an institution nowadays, with its roots sunk deep in the hearts of the millions of people who find enjoyment and entertainment in going to the pictures. ↗

— Ivor Novello

#deep #enjoyment #entertainment #find #going

There's an institution here called the National Sound Archive, and there's a character who works there, Paul Wilson. He takes a very special interest in the history of the music and advised Martin Davidson of the existence of these tapes. ↗

— Evan Parker

#called #character #davidson #existence #here

Democracy: An institution in which the whole is equal to the scum of the parts. ↗

— Keith Preston

#equal #institution #parts #which #whole