"Social system" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that the front of my waistcoat was all wet with tears, though I was wholly unconscious of shedding them. Ah, if I could have written the quarter of what I saw and felt under that tree, with what clearness should I have brought out all the contradictions of our social system; with what simplicity should I have demonstrated that man is good naturally, and that by institution ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... society in America. An excellent antidote to the pessimism of modern writers on our social system."—Baltimore Sun. ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... of fiddling while Rome is burning. A school, of which Lord Rosebery is representative, has endeavored to substitute for the moral or social ideals which have hitherto been the motive of politics a general coherency or completeness in the social system which has gained the nick-name of "efficiency." I am not very certain of the secret doctrine of this sect in the matter. But, as far as I can make out, "efficiency" means that we ought to discover ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... is full of such unaccountable warts and birth-marks and sixth fingers; and the best reason that I know of why all practical schemes for a perfect social system have failed is, that they are so perfect, so compact, that they ignore all these excrescences, these untied ends, in making up their whole. Yet it is a wonderful bit of mosaic, this Communist system: a place for every man, and every man in his place; "to insure to each human being ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... certainly never agreed to pay, and which he is told makes sugar and tea so shamefully dear. No. I tell you what does a little counteract those eloquent incentives to break his own head against the strong walls of the Social System—it is, that he has two eyes in that head, which are not always employed in reading. And, having been told in print that masters are tyrants, parsons hypocrites or drones in the hive, and land-owners vampires ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... this community—the commencement of a dire revolution, or the commencement of a return to the sounder notions and juster principles that prevailed among us thirty years since, than certainly prevail to-day. There is one favourable symptom discoverable in the deep-seated disease that pervades the social system: men dare, and do, deal more honestly and frankly with the condition of society in this country, than was done a few years since. This right, one that ought to be most dear to every freeman, has been recovered only by painful sacrifices and a stern ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... of St. Louis, the former with the moderation of an able man, the latter with headiness and disregard of right or wrong, labored both of them without cessation to extend the domains and power of the crown, to gain conquests over their neighbors and their vassals, and to destroy the social system of their age, the feudal system, its rights as well as its wrongs and tyrannies, in order to put in its place pure monarchy, and to exalt the kingly authority above all liberties, whether of the aristocracy or of the people. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... establishing public graineries like those which were maintained in Babylon, and by means of these graineries, ably administered, the crown was enabled to acquire the estates of the great feudatories, and thus the whole social system of Egypt was changed. And Joseph, from being a poor waif, cast away by his brethren in the wilderness, became the foremost man in Egypt and the means of settling his compatriots in the province of Gotham, where they still ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... maintained by its application to the reason of man. The charlatans, whether they deal in moral or in physical wonders, form a race which is never extinct. They migrate to the different zones of the social system, and though they change their place, and their purposes, and their victims, yet their character and motives remain the same. The philosophical mind, therefore, is not disposed to study either of these varieties of impostors; but the other two families which compose the second class are objects ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... and would have checked its ability to out-vote the regions of property by limiting its political power, so that it should never equal that of the Atlantic coast. But more liberal counsels prevailed. In the first debates upon the public lands, also, it was clearly stated that the social system of the nation was involved quite as much as the question of revenue. Eastern fears that cheap lands in abundance would depopulate the Atlantic States and check their industrial growth by a scarcity of labor supply ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... crisis. We watched it gather with exultation and insult. There fell on them the most terrible necessity which can befall men, the necessity of sacrificing the flower of their citizens in civil war, of tearing up their civil and social system by the roots, of transforming the most peaceful type of society into the most military. We magnified and shouted over every disaster; we covered them with insult; we filled the world with ominous forebodings and unjust accusations. There came on them one awful hour when the powers of evil ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... always an aid to public morals. Marriage between Roman citizens and the women of the so-called barbarian nations was rarely recognized by law; many of the Spanish women, as prisoners of war, were sold into slavery; and with such a social system imposed by the conquerors, it is easy to see that contamination ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... character of Camors, she still understood that, like the great majority of the young men of his day, the young Count was not overburdened with principle. But she held that one of the privileges of woman, in our social system, was the elevation of their husbands by connection with a pure soul, by family affections, and by the sweet religion of the heart. Seeking, therefore, by making her daughter an amiable and lovable woman, to prepare her for the high mission for which ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... desires of a distinctly lowly order, and at literally any cost. It is thus exquisitely egocentric, selfish, personal, and antisocial. The activities of this "pleasure principle", however, constantly come into conflict with the "reality principle." The rigid requirements of our environment, of the social system in which we live, deny us the fulfillment of many, if not most, of our most dearly coveted desires, without, however, being able ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... and Italy, to Wall Street, and to the nation which allowed Wall Street to bamboozle and exploit it. There were many Americans who had "muck-raked" their own country in the interests of social reform, and had praised the social system of Germany. These arguments the German propagandists now found useful, and Jimmie would take them to the Socialist local and pass them about. From the meeting of the local he and Meissner would go to the saloon where they had rendezvous with Jerry Coleman, who would distribute more ten-dollar bills ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... satisfactory finding. This would not shut out any one who would be of value to American institutions, but it would require European countries to care for the criminals and paupers which their own social system has bred. ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... under its founder President KIM Il Sung, adopted a policy of ostensible diplomatic and economic "self-reliance" as a check against excessive Soviet or Communist Chinese influence. The DPRK demonized the US as the ultimate threat to its social system through state-funded propaganda, and molded political, economic, and military policies around the core ideological objective of eventual unification of Korea under Pyongyang's control. KIM's son, the current ruler ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... to uphold the law and assist in the protection of property, viewed the complications and mysteries of the social system with a simple and penetrating logic. The rich are not dangerous, reasoned Policeman Billings, because they have what they want. But the poor who have not what they want are, despite paradox and precedent, always to be watched closely. A raggedly dressed man walking ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... no liberty. There are comparative degrees of captivity, and comparative degrees of slavery; but of liberty, our social system knows nothing but the name. That sentry, if you asked him, would tell you that he is free. He pities me, perhaps, for being a prisoner. Yet he is even less free than myself. He is the slave of discipline. He must walk, hold up his head, wear his hair, dress, ...
— Monsieur Maurice • Amelia B. Edwards
... already of an affectionate disposition, an affection turned readily to either sex. No boy was the cause of my inclinations, which were quite spontaneous. (No doubt, part of the cause may be found in our social system, by which ladies are rather drawing-room creatures to be treated with distant respect.) When I was 10, at a preparatory school, I first began to form attachments with other boys of my own age, in which I always ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... had been relieved in his mind after a consultation with a distinguished barrister, and, moreover, was pleased at the prospect of leaving this island of fogs for the sunny shores of France. The times were exciting; the country, on the verge of proposed electoral reforms. But in France the new social system had sprung into existence and—lamentable fact!—duty towards one's country had assumed an empire superior to ancient devotion ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... party or the individual that aspires to establish a tyranny. Duly graduating in corruption, the leaders of the mob become the oppressors of the people. Cultivation of intellect and diffusion of knowledge may make the English nation more sensible of the benefits of their social system, and better qualified to discharge the duties with which their institutions have invested them, but they will never render them competent to preserve their liberties without the aid of these institutions. ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... characteristics—unceasing ferocity of faction, and increasing violence of aggression against foreign States. The scandal of the French Revolution fell back upon the United States of America, who were regarded as the first disturbers of the ancient social system. The principal European monarchs combined, under the guidance of England, to arrest the presumptuous career of France and extirpate democracy by the sword. Nevertheless, the republican cause, however odious in Europe, was our national cause. The sympathies ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... similar to that of a Chinese emperor. Thus the basis of the organization of the Hsiung-nu state lay in its rivalry with the neighbouring China; but the details naturally corresponded to the special nature of the Hsiung-nu social system. The young Hsiung-nu feudal state differed from the ancient Chinese feudal state not only in depending on a nomad economy with only supplementary agriculture, but also in possessing, in addition to a whole class of nobility and another of commoners, a stratum of slavery to be analysed further below. ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... Then we talked—talked; we discussed again and again the reasons for the war, the object of it, what we were going to do to Germany when it was over. Every evening we tried Germany over again, put her culture, commerce, social system on the rack, found her guilty and had her hanged, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... creators, one of whom was the author of our animal frames, the other of society, then indeed we might understand how it comes to pass that labour of mind and body, the useful arts, the duties of a statesman, government, and the like, which are required by the social system, are so destructive of health, enjoyment, and life. That is, in other words, we cannot adequately account for existing and undeniable truths except on the hypothesis of what we feel to ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... in his "Decade of Italian Women," in which he wrote of the scholarly women of the Renaissance, says: "The degree in which any social system has succeeded in ascertaining woman's proper position, and in putting her into it, will be a very accurate test of the progress it has made in civilization. And the very general and growing conviction that our own social arrangements, as they exist at present, have not attained ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... passion, not of principle, nor even purpose. Since that wretched epoch, he had watched, with morbid zeal and minuteness, not his acts,—for those it was easy to arrange,—but each breath of emotion, and his every thought. At the head of the social system, as the clergymen of that day stood, he was only the more trammelled by its regulations, its principles, and even its prejudices. As a priest, the framework of his order inevitably hemmed him in. As a man who had once sinned, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... masculine selection, working through long ages, has made the essentially "womanly" type, is one in which physical beauty, charm of manner, general rather than special ability, affectionate and competent response to family, easy adaptability to whatever social system her marriage might give entrance, and unswerving loyalty to the ethical traditions and religious sanctions of her day and generation, combine to attract the love of man and the ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... man present that the Kemp Ferralls had determined to ignore Siward's recent foolishness, which indicated that he might reasonably expect the continued good-will of several sets, the orbits of which intersected in the social system of his native city. Indeed, the few qualified to snub him cared nothing about the matter, and it was not likely that anybody else would take the initiative in being disagreeable to a young man, the fortunes and misfortunes of whose race were part of the history of Manhattan Island. Siwards, ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... were not many of them left in New Jersey, although there were a few in the State until after the Revolution. Negro slavery, however, continued much longer. It grew and flourished until it became a part of the New Jersey social system; but it must not be supposed that all the people of the State continued to be satisfied ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... for their surplus population; great nations desire territory to extend their trade, and when there are several great powers to divide the spoil they distribute it among themselves and call it "spheres of influence", and all in honor of the god Commerce. In China the fundamentals of our social system are brotherhood and ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... existence is avowed may combine for selfish ends, and in derogation of the common rights of the social system. They may defend their members, to the injury of justice, in our courts. They may interfere with the management of churches and societies. They may bring an influence of intimidation to bear on public men. They may disseminate ...
— Secret Societies • David MacDill, Jonathan Blanchard, and Edward Beecher
... accept these principles, and would seize upon the things which the world agrees to consider desirable. The Christian majority would become the slaves of the unchristian minority, and would be at their mercy. Christianity, in so far as it is a social system at all, is the purest kind of socialism, a socialism not of compulsion but of disinterestedness. It is easy, of course, to scoff at the possibility of so far disintegrating the vast and complex organisation of society, as to arrange life on the simpler lines; but the fact remains that the very few ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... had been a landowner in the West Indies, and thus, by a somewhat curious coincidence, had borne a part in the same social system which stung Browning's father into revolt and renunciation. The parts played by Edward Barrett, however, though little or nothing is known of it, was probably very different. He was a man Conservative by nature, a believer in authority in the nation and the family, and endowed with some ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... and the means by which they are brought about, are mysterious and inscrutable. John Dounce had led this life for twenty years and upwards, without wish for change, or care for variety, when his whole social system was suddenly upset and turned completely topsy-turvy—not by an earthquake, or some other dreadful convulsion of nature, as the reader would be inclined to suppose, but by the simple agency of an ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... philosophies, of books and places; of the endless struggles of men like himself to be intellectually honest and spiritually free. But oftenest we speak of the people around us, the people on whom the injustices of a selfish social system fall most heavily; and among them, sharing their hardships, understanding their burdens, recognizing their limitations and weaknesses, leading and directing them, he has found life in losing it, and it now has meaning ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... the picture and reproach the art dealer. Money is no good without position, and here in England you have had such hundreds of years of freedom from invasion, that you have had time, which no other country has had, to perfect your social system. Let the Radicals and the uninformed of other lands rail as they will, your English aristocracy is the finest body of thinkers and livers in the world. One hears ever of the black sheep, the few luridly glaring failures, but never of the ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... is one of the most imposing organizations in the social system of America. It reaches the workers in every trade. Every contributor to the physical necessities of our materialistic civilization has felt the far-reaching influence of confederated power. A sense of its strength ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... labor will, as long as the world lasts, be a necessary part of the experience of humanity; therefore men and women properly have a joint heritage in its exactions and its privileges. But government is a passing phase in the evolution of the social system: when men are perfected, it will vanish in spontaneous obedience. War or crude violence universally governed in the primitive society. Little by little, this barbaric reign of force was encroached upon and superseded by politics, the ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... reforms in prostitution, therefore, can only follow a reform in our marriage system. But prostitution is also related to economics, and when it is realized how much has to be altogether changed in our whole social system to secure even an approximate abolition of prostitution it becomes doubtful whether many people are willing to pay the price of removing the "social evil" they find it so easy to deplore. They are prepared to appoint Commissions; they have no objection to offer up ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... supreme moral faith before the eyes of all London. But Alan pointed out to her the many practical difficulties, amounting almost to impossibilities, which beset such a course; and Herminia, though it was hateful to her thus to yield to the immoral prejudices of a false social system, gave way at last to Alan's repeated expression of the necessity for prudent and practical action. She would go with him to Italy, she said, as a proof of her affection and her confidence in his judgment, though she still thought the right thing was to stand by her guns fearlessly, and fight it ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... was certainly the most popularly beloved. The desire to aid, to succour, to protect, to comfort, to bless, seemed to pervade her whole being. Though the complicated miseries that originate in penury and guilt are unknown to the social system of the Vril-ya, still, no sage had yet discovered in vril an agency which could banish sorrow from life; and wherever amongst her people sorrow found its way, there Zee followed in the mission of comforter. Did some sister Gy fail to secure the love she sighed for? Zee sought ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Nonparas, do not forget it!" His voice changed. "Now I give an order! To the police and to nonparas: You will no longer resist paras! To paras: You will enter Government Center quietly and peacefully. You will not molest the nonparas you come upon. I begin at once the organization of a new social system in which paras and nonparas must co-operate. There must be obedience ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... pronounced, in the popular mind. Either the Secessionists will show fight handsomely, or they will fail to do so. If they fail to do it, they are the derision of the world forever,—since no one ever spares a beaten bully,—and thenceforward their social system must go down of itself. If, on the other hand, they make a resistance which proves formidable and costly, then the adoption of the John-Quincy-Adams policy of military emancipation is an ultimate necessity, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... which gradually grew up under it. It is sufficient to say that the system which he adopted was celebrated throughout the world during the period of its continuance, and has since been celebrated in every age, as being the most stern and rugged social system that was ever framed. The commonwealth of Sparta became, under the institutions of Lycurgus, one great camp. The nation was a nation of soldiers. Every possible device was resorted to to inure all classes of the population, the young and the ...
— Pyrrhus - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... by the traditions which the settlers had inherited. Neither planter nor servant came to America with utopian ideals of society or government. It was discontent not dissent that drove them out. Dissatisfied with their position in the English social system, they were yet well content with the system itself; a system which they were willing enough to establish in the New World in the hope of obtaining in it a more desirable position for themselves. And so it happened ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... of this social system was the more striking from the fact that it underlay not only such innumerable local customs and liberties, but an almost equal number of philosophic opinions, of religious practices, and of dialects. There was not even one current official language for the educated thought of ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... great scientific pretensions, but no one attached much importance to his maunderings. Dreaming of place and honour, he had only obtained a very subordinate situation in the household of a great noble. The Revolution opened up an unhoped-for future. Swollen with hatred of the old social system which had not recognised his merits, he put himself at the head of the most violent section of the people. Having publicly glorified the massacres of September, he founded a journal which denounced everybody and clamoured incessantly ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... nations of the earth: when he called these things to mind and dwelt upon them, he felt certain that the national gratitude MUST relieve him from the consequences of his late proceedings, and would certainly restore him to his old place in the happy social system. ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... years before the discovery was made in reference to them. "The existence among them of clans, named after animals, was pointed out at an early day, but without suspecting that it was the unit of a social system upon which both the tribe and the confederacy rested." But, being ignorant of this fact, it is not singular that they made serious mistakes in ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... question whether a mitigation might not be practicable. An inconceivable daily amount of suffering, inflicted on unknown thousands of creatures, dying in slow anguish, when their death might be without pain as being instantaneous, is accounted no deformity in the social system, no incongruity with the national profession of religion of which the essence is charity and mercy, nothing to sully the polish, or offend the refinement, of what demands to be accounted, in its higher portions, a pre-eminently civilized and humanized community. ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... declare, according to the honest convictions of their hearts, who shall be the officers to rule over them. There is no privilege so high, there is no right so grand. It lies at the very foundation of this Government; and when you introduce into the social system of this country the right of the African race to compete at the ballot-box with the intelligent white citizens of this country, you are disturbing and embittering the whole social system; you rend the bonds of a common political ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... education, in order to be sound and to produce "beneficial results, must develop what is best in man, and make him not only clever, but good. A one-sided education will develop a one-sided life; and such a life will surely topple over, and so will every social system that is built up of such lives. True civilization requires that not only the physical and intellectual, but also the moral and religious, well-being of the people should be improved, and ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... illustrate what might be accomplished by reducing to action the ardor of those youths who so bitterly arraign our present industrial order. While no part of the social system can be changed rapidly, we would all admit that the present industrial arrangements in America might be vastly improved and that we are failing to meet the requirements of our industrial life with courage and success simply ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... arose, in which event the council established the rank of the tribes as elder and younger brother, grandfather, father and sons, rendering the relationship and its vocabulary most intricate, but necessary in a social system in which age was the predominant consideration and etiquette most exacting. (See Morgan, Tables of Consanguinity, Smithsonian Contributions, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... offered very little attraction to the young men of the early eighties, who, viewing our social system with the fresh eyes of youth, saw its cruelties and its absurdities and judged them, not as older men, by comparison with the worse cruelties and greater absurdities of earlier days, but by the standard of common fairness and common ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... ancient city from which Lot fled, would call the wrath of heaven that visited Hampton, although a sermon on these lines was delivered from more than one of her pulpits on the following Sunday. Let us surmise, rather, that a decrepit social system in a moment of lowered vitality becomes an easy prey to certain diseases which respectable communities are not supposed to have. The germ of a philosophy evolved in decadent Europe flies across the sea to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... must be clear and orderly and concise. Readers nowadays are impatient and easily bored, and crave excitement. And they are dulled too, and no longer hear so clearly the true ring of sincere conviction. Yet I have peace, for this will be read. It will strike the summits, and the social system of today is still built so that everything slowly spreads from the summits and penetrates to the ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... I can't get quite to the bottom of the anti-English feeling at Washington. God knows, this people have their faults. Their social system and much else here is mediaeval. I could write several volumes in criticism of them. So I could also in criticism of anybody else. But Jefferson's[77] letter is as true to-day as it was when he wrote it. One may or may not have a lot of sentiment ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... but as happiness is an accidental state, resulting only from the development of man's faculties and his social system, it is not the immediate and direct object of nature; it is in some measure, a superfluity annexed to the necessary and ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... they have vitalised the souls of the children and transformed themselves into sentiments of loyalty and devotion, they all return. I am not exaggerating a whit when I say that the Utopian school is an ideal community, a community whose social system, instead of being inspired by that spirit of "competitive selfishness" which makes "each for himself, and the devil take the hindmost" its motto, seems to have realised the Socialistic dream of "Each for all, and ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... interest, has indeed, in some sense, his punishment in the contempt and aversion with which he is viewed by his fellow-men. Much more than this, however, attaches to such a character;—he has violated the principles given him for his guidance in the social system;—he has fallen from his sound condition as a moral being; and incurs actual guilt in the eye of a righteous Governor, whose will the order of this lower world is intended to obey. But it by no means follows, that the man, who performs in a certain manner ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie
... countries must imply the same sort of causes. Thus, an equal amount of corruption among British politicians, or an equal amount of vulgarity in the British press, would argue a much greater degree of rottenness in the general social system than the same phenomena in the United States. So, too, some of the characteristic British vices are, so to say, of a spontaneous, involuntary, semi-unconscious growth, and the American observer would commit a grievous error if he ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... battle-stained cross against overwhelming odds, dreading death not half so much as surrender, he reaches the home he left so prosperous and beautiful? He finds his house in ruins, his farm devastated, his slaves free, his stock killed, his barns empty, his trade destroyed, his money worthless, his social system, feudal in its magnificence, swept away; his people without law or legal status; his comrades slain, and the burdens of others heavy on his shoulders. Crushed by defeat, his very traditions are gone. ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... denied, where the stream has not its legitimate vent, the energy, irritated and aroused, possesses the whole being, and if not wasted on desultory schemes, or if not purified by conscience and principle, becomes a dangerous and destructive element in the social system, through which it wanders in riot and disorder. Hence, in all wise monarchies,—nay, in all well-constituted states,—the peculiar care with which channels are opened for every art and every science; hence the honour paid to their cultivators ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... say to me;—"How comes it that millions of men thus allow the Rothschilds and the Mackays to appropriate the fruit of their labour?" Alas, they cannot help themselves under the existing social system! But let us picture to our minds a city all of whose inhabitants find their lodging, clothing, food and occupation secured to them, on condition of producing things useful to the community, and let us suppose a Rothschild to enter this city bringing ...
— The Place of Anarchism in Socialistic Evolution - An Address Delivered in Paris • Pierre Kropotkin
... understood," says Jacolliot, "that it was but sacerdotal influence and Brahminical decay that, in changing the primitive condition of the East, reduced woman to a state of subordination which has not yet disappeared from our social system. ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... can reject only at its peril. The first is that there can and must be a deep, sharp abridgment of the sphere of industrial life which has been marked out as hopeless, or as an inevitable part of the social system. ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... His father has ample means, and though perhaps your family is not much concerned on that point, we have to remember that a man's income is one of the first considerations in the eyes, not only of our social system, ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... half as depraving as it ought logically to be in their conditions, their social system would drop to pieces. It was always astonishing to me that a people with their facilities for evil, their difficulties for good, should remain so kind and ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... more difficult to get profitable slaves, the same economic laws tended to encourage the freedom of the slave.[292] "Fortunately for the moral development of our beloved colonies," says Weeden, "the climate was too harsh, the social system too simple, to engender a good economic employment of black labor. The simple industrial methods of each New England homestead, described in so many ways through these pages, make a natural barrier against an alien social system including either ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... think they are both tired of America, at least E—- is, and John wants to get to his work! I am not tired of Americans, but I could not live in this country; the system political is to me odious, much of the social system ditto; and the society is so disunited, so patchy, so apparently without bonds of union or common interests, the life they lead so dull and without the charms of society at home, and yet there are many as nice and clever and ...
— The British Association's visit to Montreal, 1884: Letters • Clara Rayleigh
... past affords the brightest hope for our future. It is the fact that our misfortunes have come because of our own faults. If they had come when we were doing our best, there would be no hope for us." Now the evils of our own social system which result from mistakes or faults are just such a ground of hope. Every such evil which can be cited describes one possible reform, and the longer the list of evils, the greater is the sum total of gain which we can make by doing away with them. If ...
— Social Justice Without Socialism • John Bates Clark
... truth that a governor, one man elected by the people, is just as much their representative and is just as certain to carry out their ideas as is a legislature, a body of men elected by the people. They provided a government which accentuated, instead of softening, the defects in their own social system. They were in no danger of suffering from tyranny; they were in no danger of losing the liberty which they so jealously guarded. The perils that threatened them were lawlessness, lack of order, and lack of capacity to concentrate their efforts in time of danger from within ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... country one class unfortunately endeavors to enforce upon the other.' John bowed, but gave no further heed. Presently we came to the Mormon settlement, and here he set to chaffing me about equal privileges. 'We always had inconsistencies in our social system,' he said; 'just see how many wives these Mormons have got, and what a nice thing they are making of equal rights. You beat us there, Smooth; we Englishmen would never think of such sort of thing.' John looked very innocent and honest, which, added to his dignity so naturally put on, was enough to ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... groat, would be blank leaves, and posterity might probably have lacked the information that certain monsters of virtue ever had existence. But it is upon a much better and wider scale, let me say it once again—it is in the effect of such institutions upon the great social system, and the peace and happiness of mankind, that I delight to contemplate them; and, in my heart, I am quite certain that long after your institution, and others of the same nature, have crumbled into dust, the noble harvest of the seed sown ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... attaching the outlying parts of the empire to the throne. Of the soundness of this proposition as a general principle no doubt can, I presume, be entertained. It is not, indeed, always easy to apply it in these communities, where fortunes are precarious, the social system so much based on equality, and public services so generally mixed up with party conflicts. But it should never, in my opinion, be lost sight of, and advantage should be taken of all favourable opportunities to ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... fireside—and thought them a ridiculous pair. Learning that he was a painter they tried to approach him, to show him too that they were the real thing; but he looked at them across the big room, as if they were miles away: they were a compendium of everything he most objected to in the social system of his country. Such people as that, all convention and patent- leather, with ejaculations that stopped conversation, had no business in a studio. A studio was a place to learn to see, and how could you see ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... without interest to observe in those remote times, and under a social system so widely different from the modern, the same small causes that ruffle and interrupt the 'course of love', which operate so commonly at this day—the same inventive jealousy, the same cunning slander, the same crafty ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... others, the traveller passed shuddering through a succession of silent villages, in which not a single inhabitant remained. The currency had been debased; the authority of laws and magistrates had been suspended; the whole social system was deranged. For, during that convulsive struggle, everything that was not military violence was anarchy. Even the army was disorganised. Some great generals, and a crowd of excellent officers, had fallen, and it had been impossible to supply their place. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... process of pure reasoning, following up its effects, as he supposes, on smell, taste, hearing, sight and touch, fashions a complete human soul. Rousseau, by means of a contract, founds political association, and, with this given idea, pulls down the constitution, government and laws of every balanced social system. In a book which serves as the philosophical testament of the century,[3242] Condorcet declares that this method is the "final step of philosophy, that which places a sort of eternal barrier between humanity and its ancient infantile errors." "By applying it to morals, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... furniture and dress, with all the new elegance and ceremony of court life, there naturally remained much disorder, violence, and coarseness throughout the social system. Although the laws concerning the maintenance of order in the streets were strict, forbidding any one even to "blowe any horne in the night, or whistle after the hour of nyne of the clock in the night," ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... a few words of preliminary explanation. In this matter, the reverse of Europe, Africa, whose social system is built upon slavery, holds field-work, and indeed all manual labour, degrading to the free man. The idea of a 'bold peasantry, its country's pride,' is utterly alien to Nigritia. The husband hunts, fights, and trades—that is to say, peddles—he leaves ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... social system the interests of all men are so closely intertwined that in the immense majority of cases a straight-dealing man who by his efficiency, by his ingenuity and industry, benefits himself must also benefit others. Normally the man of great ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... among the Kayans, as we have seen, a large village acknowledges a supreme chief as well as the chiefs of the several houses of the village; and in the operations of war on a large scale, a supreme war chief presides over a council of lesser chiefs. And it is to be expected that the social system of the superior powers should be modelled upon that of the ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... establish elementary and collegiate education in the State, and to prohibit the further importation of slaves into Virginia. He also sought to inaugurate a system of gradual emancipation; but slavery was already so thoroughly engrafted on the social system of the people, that even Jefferson, Wythe, and Mason could not dislodge it. Jefferson, in 1821, referring to his failure in this regard, said: "it was found that the public mind would not yet bear the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... spend many lives, for, according to what he has done in one life, so must he contend with in the next. If, while possessing physical and mental strength in one body, he assists in upholding a corrupt social system which takes from the weak and gives to the strong, he must expect these same conditions to exist when he returns as a weakling. For as long as hogs are bred and slaughtered, so must he take his chances of being one of them. How much better to help mankind seek a higher plane of ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... other organ in the whole body. Reverse the order—and how soon is the entire system diseased! Now, does that member of the great body of the people act honestly and honourably, who regularly receives his portion of good from the general social system, and gives nothing back ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... peculiar combination of causes has made this characteristic one of the most prominent in English society. The middle ages left all Europe with a social system headed by Courts. The Government was made the head of all society, all intercourse, and all life; everything paid allegiance to the sovereign, and everything ranged itself round the sovereign—what was next to be greatest, and what was farthest least. The idea that the head of the ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... much as surrender, he reaches the home he left so prosperous and beautiful? He finds his house in ruins, his farm devastated, his slaves free, his stock killed, his barns empty, his trade destroyed, his money worthless; his social system, feudal in its magnificence, swept away; his people without law or legal status, his comrades slain, and the burdens of others heavy on his shoulders. Crushed by defeat, his very traditions are gone; without money, ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... social and political ideas were still more considerable; differences in governmental theories and institutions were seemingly irreconcilable. In Sweden the tone of the political system, until far in the nineteenth century, was distinctly autocratic, and that of the social system aristocratic; in Norway the principle that preponderated was rather that of democracy. Between the two states there was disagreement upon even the fundamental question of the nature of the union. The Swedish contention ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... quiet tide of Eastern life had received as yet no disturbing impulse from the stream of Mohammedan and European conquest. This Hindu Javanese literature tells us of a people far advanced in the essentials of civilization, and reveals the existence of a social system which, though undoubtedly primitive, was at the same time complete and homogeneous. From the date of the Mohammedan conquest onwards, that is to say, for the last four centuries, the national life has been directed by alien forces. During this period ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... opinion that the corset would tariff it were subjected to any more strain in the way of duties. Mr. MARSHALL remarked that the corset avoided a great deal of Waist. It was whalebone of his bone, or something of that sort. It was one of the main Stays of our social system. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 5, April 30, 1870 • Various
... and political questions which have arisen from the agitation to admit to equal political rights the women of our country, and to impose on them the burden of discharging, equally with men, political and public duties. Whether so radical a change in our political and social system would advance the happiness and welfare of the American people, considered as a whole, without distinction of sex, is a question on which there is a marked disagreement among the most enlightened and thoughtful of both sexes. Its solution involves considerations so intimately ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... said one[76] who knew them well, "to acquire land from the Indians, to organize a social system, to introduce municipal regulations, or to establish military defences; but cheerfully obeyed the priests and the king's officers, and enjoyed the present without troubling their heads about the future. They seem to have ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... government and social system of Russia heap upon the peasant-man can best be realized from a description of its effects upon the unhappy creature whom this man, himself a slave in all but name, may treat—nay, almost must treat—as a slave. To pay the quit-rent and taxes the peasant hires himself ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... be more delightful than to have one's house full of friends at will, and then be able to turn them out at a moment's notice (as a life-boat gets rid of superfluous water) by that simple mechanism of a Chamberlain. When the Social System attains its acme, all of us will have a Chamberlain and be ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... wholly joking. I mean the best part of it. Great monopolies that abuse their trust are far more dangerous enemies of public morals than an honest gambling-house at every corner. Monte Carlo as it stands is just a concentrated embodiment of all the evils of our anti-social system, and the tables are by far the least serious among them. It is an Influence for Good, because it mirrors our own world in all its naked, all its over-draped hideousness. There it rears its meretricious head, that ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... Chinese and Arab writers and travellers, as well as the authoritative evidence supplied by epigraphy and numismatics; and though for many centuries still very infrequently, the precious remains of ancient monuments. But the original background is never effaced, for the whole religious and social system, the whole philosophic outlook upon the world of which I have sought to outline the long and laborious evolution through prehistoric ages, remained fundamentally immune against change until the advent of the British to India subjected ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... lies in their power to make the rainbow impossible; they are doing all in their power to make it impossible for us to have in the nation, in the home, or in the individual life, purity at all. Those who look out upon scenes which disgrace our social system, and our city, and, with a shrug of the shoulders, lead people to believe they constitute a necessary evil which cannot be faced, are not only unconsciously believing in the blasphemy that God made His physical laws so that they could not obey His moral laws; they are not only condoning ...
— The After-glow of a Great Reign - Four Addresses Delivered in St. Paul's Cathedral • A. F. Winnington Ingram
... converse with a mature man, and her conversation must have more attraction for him. As to our boys coming out too soon, doubtless they do, but that depends not on the persons ready to receive them, but on the general social system of the country which pushes them into the world so early. For instance, I was left my own master at twenty-one. So, too, with the want of proper progress and growth in knowledge of the men. It is and must be so with the man of fashion every where, for he is not occupied in ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... boy,"—sinking his voice to a whisper almost inaudible on the other side of the street—"take my tip. Go and jump off the dock yourself. You'll feel another man. Give up this bachelor business. It's a mug's game. I look on you bachelors as excrescences on the social system. I regard you, old man, purely and simply as a wart. Go and get married, laddie, go and get married. By gad, I've forgotten to pay the cabby. Lend me a couple of bob, ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... occasion. The prophets and Jesus taught a method of experimentation, calling upon the people whom they addressed to test the principle and see if it worked. The prophets and Jesus showed that power comes in the will to do and in actual obedience to the principle. They looked for an improved social system reared on this basis which would be a real "kingdom of God," not merely the economic commonwealth of the Socialist, but a commonwealth governed by the principle of consecration to the social welfare, spiritual ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... undermined? The external grandeur was nothing amid so much vice and wickedness and wretchedness. A world, therefore, as fair and glorious as our own, must needs crumble away. There were no proper conservative forces. The poison had descended to the extremities of the social system. A corrupt body must die when vitality had fled. The soul was gone. Principle, patriotism, virtue, had all passed away. The barbarians were advancing to conquer and desolate. There was no power to resist them, but enervated and timid legions, with the accumulated vices of ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... country-gentlemen, represented a genuine belief.[6] The country-gentlemen formed the class to which not only the constitutional laws but the prevailing sentiment of the country gave the lead in politics as in the whole social system. Even reformers proposed to improve the House of Commons chiefly by increasing the number of county-members, and a county-member was almost necessarily a country-gentleman of an exalted kind. Although the country-gentleman was very far from ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen |
