#institutions

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

Even institutions of State, such as the judiciary, were seriously weakened, to the extent that the citizenry justifiably feared a breakdown in law and order. The business community was hit by a slump in sales and confidence, leading to reduced earnings and loss of jobs. ↗

— Kamisese Mara

#business #business community #citizenry #community #confidence

True education is limited to those people who would die without knowing, whereas the masses in the institutions are merely going through the motions, for education is a way of living. ↗

— Bryant H. McGill

#education #going #institutions #knowing #limited

In vain, without the Bible, we increase penal laws and draw entrenchments around our institutions. ↗

— James McHenry

#bible #draw #increase #institutions #laws

Not only our future economic soundness but the very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our government to give employment to idle men. ↗

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

#depends #determination #economic #employment #future

There's lots of institutions and lots of different cultures, and so that's the kind of thing that parents need to be able to evaluate, and students themselves, when they make a selection. ↗

— Margaret Spellings

#cultures #different #different cultures #evaluate #institutions

Judaism lives not in an abstract creed, but in its institutions. ↗

— Berthold Auerbach

#creed #institutions #judaism #lives

For decades Republicans have made policy with a higher purpose in mind: to solidify the GOP base or to damage the institutions and movements aligned with the other side. ↗

— Thomas Frank

#base #damage #decades #gop #higher

To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral. ↗

— Abbie Hoffman

#empire #equally #evil #immoral #institutions