#social

John Hodgson can describe Richard Dawkins's atheism as vacuous only because 'atheist' is a term which non-believers use purely as a polemical convenience when we have to define concisely what we don't believe [...]. No atheist is principally that. What we'd want to call ourselves is humanist or materialist, or biologist or linguist, or for that matter socialist, because one or more of these, or something else again, is what we do and think and are. We have 'purely and simply finished with God', to adapt a phrase of Engels's. ↗

— David Craig

#atheists #biologists #friedrich-engels #god #humanists

It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with "I," "me," "mine," that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's. ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#communism #hinduism #socialism #spirituality #anarchy

The way people get their living determines their social outlook. ↗

— Karl Marx

#communism #marxism #social #socialism #communism

Or why should one refrain from burning hatred, whatever its basis--race, class, or ideology? Such hatred is in fact corroding many hearts today. Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hatred of their own society. Amid all the vituperation we forget that the defects of capitalism represent the basic flaws of human nature, allowed unlimited freedom together with the various human rights; we forget that under Communism (and Communism is breathing down the neck of all moderate forms of socialism, which are unstable) the identical flaws run riot in any person with the least degree of authority; while everyone else under that system does indeed attain 'equality'--the equality of destitute slaves. This eager fanning of the flames of hatred is becoming the mark of today's free world. Indeed, the broader the personal freedoms are, the higher the level of prosperity or even of abundance--the more vehement, paradoxically, does this blind hatred become. The contemporary developed West thus demonstrates by its own example that human salvation can be found neither in the profusion of material goods nor in merely making money. ↗

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#communism #socialism #western-intellectuals #equality

Rascals are always sociable, and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others company. ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#nobility #rascals #social #nobility

To begin an ethnographic project with a goal, with an object of research and a set of presumptions, is already to stymie the process of discovery; it blocks one's ability to learn something new that exceed the frameworks with which one enters. ↗

— J. Jack Halberstam

#social-psychology #sociology #sociology

Being in prison for seven years was like being in an army that never drilled, never deployed, and only fought itself. ↗

— Raegan Butcher

#poetry #prison #social-commentary #sociology #sociology

I alternate between feeling sympathetic toward humanity and being a misanthrope. When I'm sympathetic, it usually means I haven't been around people in awhile. ↗

— John R. Lindensmith

#humor #misanthrope #social-commentary #humor

I've written 18 books, mostly dealing with issues of social justice, ending racism, feminism, and cultural criticism. ↗

— Bell Hooks

#criticism #cultural #dealing #ending #feminism

We must seek to persuade member states and institutions that better regulation in Europe does not mean cutting health and safety in the workplace, nor does it mean dismantling social standards. ↗

— John Hutton

#cutting #dismantling #does #europe #health