Social struggle

“ But there are others, on the contrary, who think, who study and, looking about them, discover social iniquities. Is it their fault if they see clearly and suffer at seeing others suffer? Then they throw themselves into the struggle, and make themselves the bearers of the popular claims. ”

“ Now most of the political and social discussion of the last hundred years may be regarded and rephrased as an attempt to apprehend this defensive struggle of the Normal Social Life against waxing novelty and innovation and to give a direction and guidance to all of us who participate. And it is very largely a matter of temperament and free choice still, just where we shall decide to place ourselves. ”

“ Certain stages of this process will be in the nature of crisis according to the strength of the opposition encountered in the personal moral struggle, and in opposing social conditions. Nothing but calamity can forestall this progressive moral adjustment to the whole world. ”

“ It is struggle alone that builds character and arouses enthusiasm, for nations as for classes. Let me remind you of a beautiful saying of Kant's, that expresses the same thought: "Thanks to nature for intolerance, for envious and emulous self-seeking, for the insatiable desire to have and to rule! ”

“ They were obliged to labour hard, yet in the intervals of work, father and son would read or discourse concerning the ills attendant on humanity, and they traced all to the social system, which made the few the tyrants of the many. ”

“ I conclude, gentlemen, by saying that a society in which one sees such social inequalities as we see all about us, in which we see every day suicides caused by poverty, prostitution flaring at every street corner,--a society whose principal monuments are barracks and prisons,--such a society must be transformed as soon as possible, on pain of being eliminated, and that speedily, from the human race. ”

“ The society, once so homogeneous and co-ordinated in all its parts, would become at once a society rent by moral and social problems; and endless suffering must arise to individuals in the attempt to co-ordinate the ideals, manners, and institutions of the society to the new conditions! ”

“ I have just read in a work on sociology, “Men surrender their individual wills to the collective will.” No, the true social process is not when they surrender but when they contribute their wills to the collective will. ”

“ There is conflict between the lower and higher impulses in the human mind, conflict between selfish ambition and the welfare of the group, conflict among individuals and races for a place in the sun. It is conceivable that the baser impulses that provoke much social conflict may give way to more rational and altruistic purpose, but it is difficult to see how all friction can be avoided in social relations. ”

“ In the stationary societies, where all individuals were permeated by the same political, religious, moral, and social ideas; and where each class had its own hereditary and fixed traditions of action and manners, this cause of friction and suffering had of necessity no existence; individual differences and discord might be occasioned by personal greeds, ambitions, and selfishnesses, but not by conflicting conceptions of right and wrong, of the desirable and undesirable, in all branches of human life. ”

“ One night they are discussing the present social order, and what is wrong with it; they are dealing with bad housing, employment, low wages, the cleavage between the rich and the poor, industrial oppression, and social injustice. ”

“ A community set apart, set sharply against the rest in every clashing interest, social and industrial; foreign in language, in faith, and in tradition; repaying dislike with distrust; expanding under the new relief from oppression in the unpopular qualities of greed and contentiousness fostered by ages of tyranny unresistingly borne. ”

“ The problem, which is both social and political, appears in a class that cannot or will not engage in manual labor, the well-educated or fairly-educated sons of men of fair income and a social position. ”

“ He had nothing but contempt for the sparrow-like frivolity of fashionable Society, and was repelled from the middle classes by their servitude to conventions, their prejudices social and political, and their non-receptivity to ideas. ”

“ But this is not all, and you will have but a faint conception of the evil if you do not consider that to all these vices of society, which dry up the sources of wealth and prosperity, must be added the struggle, the discord, the war, in short under many names and many forms which society cherishes and cultivates between the individuals that compose it. ”

“ We have overworked the self-interest of the individual. The line of conflict between individual and social is a progressive one of the discovery of point after point in which the two are identical. Society thus passes from conflict to harmony, and on to another conflict. ”

“ There are ambitions, interests, customs, prejudices, conventionalities, and a thousand intangible forms of social force, that all react upon the individual man like so many conflicting winds and currents. ”

“ Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. ”

“ Nay; the pillars of the state are trembling even now, and the very foundations of society begin to quiver with pent-up forces that glow underneath. The struggle that must either revivify, or convulse in ruin, is near at hand, if it be not already begun. ”

“ The general good nature, the social equality, deprive them of triumphs on the one hand, and of grievances on the other. There is extremely little impertinence; there is almost none. You will say I am describing a terrible society,—a society without great figures or great social prizes. ”

“ He raises the cry of the miserable and the despised, and in a masterly arraignment of commercialism, protests against social conditions, against the grinding of the faces of the poor and weak, and the self-pollution of the rich and strong, in their mad lust for place and power. ”

“ A fermentation of social discontent—bred by the philosophy of the times, by the glaring disparity between the ruling class and the working people, the latters’ distrust of the morals and the assumed authority of the former, by the teachings of freemasonry and the trades unions—was slowly gathering momentum. ”

“ The entire history of social improvement has been a series of transitions, by which one custom or institution after another, from being a supposed primary necessity of social existence, has passed into the rank of an universally stigmatized injustice and tyranny. ”

“ Just so, in our present society, as the majority of individuals are not sure of getting their daily bread, the struggle for life, or "free competition," as the individualists call it, assumes more cruel and more brutal forms. ”

“ The struggle, not indeed for existence, but for comfort, superior position, distinction, is sufficient to maintain the vigor of the society, though it does not require the suppression of sympathy and generosity. ”

“ The only political questions which deeply moved him were those social problems to which his sympathy for the poor had always directed his attention,—the Poor Law, temperance, Sunday observance, punishment and prisons, labor and strikes. ”

“ As experience and thought enlarged his mental vision, he came to the conclusion that the real source and spring of that secret and organized hostility which he deplored, but was unable to reach and to punish, were evils in government and evils in the structure of society,--aggravating inequality, grinding poverty, ignorance, and the hard struggle for life. Accordingly, he devoted his energies to improve the general condition of the people, and make the struggle for life easier. ”

“ The class war, the push for and the resistance to some vague reorganization called the Social Revolution—such things are the natural inevitable result of the sordid moral and intellectual muddle of our common ideas about property. ”

“ But I fear—In short, I have been told that political strife was a necessary result of human nature."
"Human nature!" cried the old boy, impetuously; "what human nature? The human nature of paupers, of slaves, of slave-holders, or the human nature of wealthy freemen? ”

“ I know that in the diseased social body the forces of resistance are gathering—the Socialist movement, in the broad sense—the activities of all who believe in the possibility of reconstructing society upon a basis of reason, justice and love. ”

“ The maintenance of the social system—that is, of the segregation of power and prestige, of ease and leisure, and the corresponding segregations of labour, privation, and poverty—depends upon an enormously elaborate system of rationalization, tradition, and morals, and upon almost innumerable indirect mechanisms ranging from the drugging of society with alcohol to the distortion of religious principle in the interests of the established order. ”

“ This prejudice is based on the ground that bad economic conditions and an unwholesome environment are the source of all social evils, and that a better distribution of wealth, or a vast scheme of social welfare, is the one thing necessary, when that is achieved all other things being added unto us, without any further trouble on our part. ”

“ The device of insuring greater harmony of social life by segregation of the insubordinate and elimination of the criminal, aims, on the other hand, at progress, and belongs to dynamic sociology. The thing does not have to be done over and over again in order to hold ground already gained. ”

“ If we consider what are the chief centres of discontent throughout the civilised world, we shall find that they are the great aggregations of population in wealthy industrial countries. Social unrest is a disease of town-life. Wherever the conditions which create the great modern city exist, we find revolutionary agitation. ”

“ Society has evolved from savagery to barbarism, from barbarism to feudalism, from feudalism to individualism, and with every change the relations of individuals to each other have been modified, the form of the struggle has altered, and the situation of those individuals who have not been successful is somewhat improved. ”

“ By that inevitable law of action and reaction which prevails alike in moral and social as in physical phenomena, the community which has so large a portion of its members in a condition of ignorance and brutality, must, throughout its whole body, partake of the degradation which exists within it, and must be affected, by the very contact, in all its feelings, sentiments, and purposes, through the gross and ignorant passions which such an association cannot fail to arouse. ”

“ This involves a strain on both, which increases in direct proportion to our socialization, and, so far, has resulted in the ultimate destruction of the social organism acted upon by such irreconcilable forces. ”

“ And contemporary events, the phenomena of recent strikes, the phenomena of sabotage, carry out the suggestion that in a community where nearly everyone reads extensively travels about, sees the charm and variety in the lives of prosperous and leisurely people, no class is going to submit permanently to modern labour conditions without extreme resistance, even after the most elaborate Labour Conciliation schemes and social minima are established Things are altogether too stimulating to the imagination nowadays. ”

“ The professional agitators are abroad, sowing discord and nourishing hatred and strife, and even the optimists sorrowfully confess the antagonism between classes. There is an industrial class strong and happy, both rich and poor ”

“ The disputes and struggles connected with labor, and the conditions of the poorest classes of the community, have directed the attention of many thoughtful men and women to the social and economic problems of the day, and in all parts of the world these are presenting themselves to educationists, social reformers, politicians and statesmen, as the matters which above all others are urgently demanding careful study and investigation. ”

“ When hundreds of thousands of children are brought into the world under such conditions that good food, good health, good. education, are for them impossible, the essential foundations though all three are of true morality and sound citizenship in later life, surely here too the anarchy in our commonest social relations is clearly manifested. ”

“ They served only one purpose—every malign influence and reactionary element took the acts of these misguided prodigies as a pretext to fasten upon the people still more firmly both social and political injustice. ”

“ By this natural process the great stream of humanity issued from the virgin forests of savage life and developed with majestic grandeur during the periods of barbarism and the present civilization, which are superior in some respects to the preceding phases of the social life, but in many others are marred by the very products of their own degeneracy, as I pointed out in speaking of reactionary varieties of social selection. ”

“ Turning now to the second class, we must bear in mind that it is the product of a community in which the struggle for existence is the prime life-motor. There, inasmuch as oppression, suffering, weariness, and servitude are the general rule, all will be regarded as good that tends to alleviate pain. ”

“ The millions have fragmentary knowledge of societary relations, and they are trying to transmute that meager knowledge into social doctrine and policy. The peculiar element of danger in the situation was just now suggested. ”