Social Structures Quotes

“To insinuate that I would break an oath that I made to the ALMIGHTY for my own personal gain is an insult. An insult to me and an insult to the Order. An insult, worthy of death.”
― J.B. Lion, The Seventh Spark: Volume One – Knights of the Trinity

“Boy, you are a hothead, Bane. Your rage makes you an exceptional warrior but quite a boring conversationalist. Good thing I did not keep you for your manners and charm, eh? Now calm down, your spittle is getting all over me, my feet do not require a shower."
-Michael, The ArchAngel”
― J.B. Lion, The Seventh Spark: Volume One – Knights of the Trinity

“Continue your search for the truth but remember one thing--all things are possible.”
― J.B. Lion, The Seventh Spark: Volume One – Knights of the Trinity

“If the bringing of children into the world is today an economic burden, it is because the social system is inadequate; and not because God’s law is wrong. Therefore the State should remove the causes of that burden. The human must not be limited and controlled to fit the economic, but the economic must be expanded to fit the human.”
― Fulton J. Sheen

“I would have hoped you would have learned by now. No matter, a man who refuses to face his destiny offers himself to the GOD of chance—and chance is a wayward bitch.”
― J.B. Lion, The Seventh Spark: Volume One – Knights of the Trinity

“Monster? Monster, you say?” He scratched his chest, blood dripping from what seemed to be an old wound. “No, my friend. I have SEEN real monsters. I have faced real darkness, heart beating out of your chest with death all around you. The stench of piss and shit as men empty themselves in their final moments. I have experienced real terror. Terror, a simple man like you, could never fathom”
― J.B. Lion, The Seventh Spark: Volume One – Knights of the Trinity

“We are Knights of the Trinity, Angels of the Third Realm of Heaven
Warriors of The Almighty
Defenders of Righteousness, Truth. And Justice
Protectors of the Weak and Downtrodden
Guardians of the realms of men.
We pledge our spirits, our swords, and our shields in service,
Not for glory, not for pride, but for the honor to serve the Most-High
May the forces of Darkness tremble in our wake and die at our hands! We are the Chosen Twelve, the Blessed, the Mighty War-riors of the Everlasting Order
Hazah! Hazah! Hazah!”
― J.B. Lion, The Seventh Spark: Volume One – Knights of the Trinity

“You heard me. A creature from another world, a dark world, lurks the halls of Hellgate, tormenting victims at will. A grotesque, gnarled, twisted creature, with thick iron stakes impaled into its body, whip marks across its chest and back-- the beast got inside my brain.”
― J.B. Lion, The Seventh Spark: Volume One – Knights of the Trinity

“Have you ever thought about why GOD did it? Why tempt such fragile beings in the first place? Did GOD give the race of man free will, knowing that they would use that will to defy him, or to take it a step further since GOD knows all, did he know that Adam and Eve would eat the forbidden fruit, allowing him to cast them out of paradise to toil and suffer for a living.”
― J.B. Lion, The Seventh Spark: Volume One – Knights of the Trinity

“You are one, and we are many, We are everywhere and nowhere at the same time. We are the face of justice.”
― J.B. Lion, The Seventh Spark: Volume One – Knights of the Trinity

“Fear, your fear takes hold of you…I can smell it. You are in my world now, and in my world, darkness is light.”
― J.B. Lion, The Seventh Spark: Volume One – Knights of the Trinity

“A spark is exactly what it means. An igniting of something that spreads, and soon it becomes difficult to contain. The sparks, in this case, represent sin, not just any sin, a major undertaking of evil that spreads and infects life, changing the way humans live forever." " The Everlasting protects man for six of these catastrophes, but once there is a seventh, well… anything goes."
"I’m not destroying man; I’m saving man--from themselves.”
― J.B. Lion, The Seventh Spark: Volume One – Knights of the Trinity

“Everyone is so enamored with the puppet; they never notice the man pulling the strings.”
― J.B. Lion, The Seventh Spark: Volume One – Knights of the Trinity

“The Order? Here inside such a weak soul?”
“His spirit is failing, his faith too old."
“He cannot be saved."
“Few have tried."
“He is consumed by the lion."
“He is overtaken by pride.”
― J.B. Lion, The Seventh Spark: Volume One – Knights of the Trinity

“HANG THE LAW AND FUCK THE RULES! Where is your love for others? Where is your compassion? All these warriors want is a chance to serve. Doesn’t their love supersede your rules?”
― J.B. Lion, The Seventh Spark: Volume One – Knights of the Trinity

“Those in authority within institutions and social structures attempt to justify their rule by linking it, as if it were a necessary consequence, with moral symbols, sacred emblems, or legal formulae which are widely believed and deeply internalized. These central conceptions may refer to a god or gods, the 'votes of the majority,' the 'will of the people,' the 'aristocracy of talents or wealth,' to the 'divine right of kings' or to the alleged extraordinary endowment of the person of the ruler himself.”
― C. Wright Mills, Character and Social Structure: Psychology of Social Institutions

“Scholars and enlightened always want to define the differences between communism, socialism, fascism and other economic or political systems. It really doesn't matter to those who are subjected to those societies how someone has articulated their misery.”
― Jake Danishevsky, AfterTastes and Tales from Russia

“My hypothesis is mimetic: because humans imitate one another more than animals, they have had to find a means of dealing with contagious similarity, which could lead to the pure and simple disappearance of their society. The mechanism that reintroduces difference into a situation in which everyone has come to resemble everyone else is sacrifice. Humanity results from sacrifice; we are thus the children of religion. What I call after Freud the founding murder, in other words, the immolation of a sacrificial victim that is both guilty of disorder and able to restore order, is constantly re-enacted in the rituals at the origin of our institutions. Since the dawn of humanity, millions of innocent victims have been killed in this way in order to enable their fellow humans to live together, or at least not to destroy one another. This is the implacable logic of the sacred, which myths dissimulate less and less as humans become increasingly self-aware. The decisive point in this evolution is Christian revelation, a kind of divine expiation in which God through his Son could be seen as asking for forgiveness from humans for having revealed the mechanisms of their violence so late. Rituals had slowly educated them; from then on, humans had to do without.
Christianity demystifies religion. Demystification, which is good in the absolute, has proven bad in the relative, for we were not prepared to shoulder its consequences. We are not Christian enough. The paradox can be put a different way. Christianity is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure. This prescience is known as the apocalypse. Indeed, it is in the apocalyptic texts that the word of God is most forceful, repudiating mistakes that are entirely the fault of humans, who are less and less inclined to acknowledge the mechanisms of their violence. The longer we persist in our error, the stronger God’s voice will emerge from the devastation. […] The Passion unveiled the sacrificial origin of humanity once and for all. It dismantled the sacred and revealed its violence. […] By accepting crucifixion, Christ brought to light what had been ‘hidden since the foundation of the world,’ in other words, the foundation itself, the unanimous murder that appeared in broad daylight for the first time on the cross. In order to function, archaic religions need to hide their founding murder, which was being repeated continually in ritual sacrifices, thereby protecting human societies from their own violence. By revealing the founding murder, Christianity destroyed the ignorance and superstition that are indispensable to such religions. It thus made possible an advance in knowledge that was until then unimaginable.
[…] A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe in its guilt. Having a scapegoat means not knowing that we have one. Learning that we have a scapegoat is to lose it forever and to expose ourselves to mimetic conflicts with no possible resolution. This is the implacable law of the escalation to extremes. The protective system of scapegoats is finally destroyed by the Crucifixion narratives as they reveal Jesus’ innocence, and, little by little, that of all analogous victims. The process of education away from violent sacrifice is thus underway, but it is going very slowly, making advances that are almost always unconscious. […] Mimetic theory does not seek to demonstrate that myth is null, but to shed light on the fundamental discontinuity and continuity between the passion and archaic religion. Christ’s divinity which precedes the Crucifixion introduces a radical rupture with the archaic, but Christ’s resurrection is in complete continuity with all forms of religion that preceded it. The way out of archaic religion comes at this price. A good theory about humanity must be based on a good theory about God. […] We can all participate in the divinity of Christ so long as we renounce our own violence.”
― René Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre

“There seems to be a formula for life, formula devised and perfected over centuries of labour by many anonymous brains. Like all formulas this formula provided a solution too, solutions for real-world problems.
Birth→education→work→earn→marry→reproduce→indoctrinate your child with same formula→die = survival”
― J. Yuvanesh, What life is all about?

“Anxious behaviour is rewarded in our culture. Being high strung, wound up, frenetic and soooo busy has cachet. I ask someone, “How are you?” and even if they’re kicking back in a caravan park in the outback with a beer watching the sunset, their default response is, “Gosh, so busy, out of control, crazy times.” And they wear it as a badge of honour.
This means that many of us deny we have a problem and keep going and going. Indeed, the more anxious we are, the more we have to convince ourselves we don’t have a problem. This is ironic, or paradoxical. And it seems awfully cruel.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“Sanity begins with knowing your place.”
― C.E. Morgan, The Sport of Kings

“Don't waste your energy in fighting the old. Use it to build the new.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“This attitude finds a late but still abundantly clear expression in the conventions of the classical court theatre, in which the actor, quite regardless of the demands of stage deception, addresses the audience directly, apostrophizes it, as it were, with every word and gesture, and not only avoids ‘turning his back’ on the audience but emphasizes by every possible means that the whole proceeding is a pure fiction, an entertainment conducted in accordance with previously agreed rules. The naturalistic theatre forms the transition to the absolute opposite of this ‘frontal’ art, namely the film, which, with its mobilization of the audience, leading them to the events instead of leading and presenting the events to them, and attempting to represent the action in such a way as to suggest that the actors have been caught red-handed, by chance and by surprise, reduces the fictions and conventions of the theatre to a minimum. With its robust illusionism, its forthright and indiscreet directness, its violent attack on the audience, it expresses a democratic conception of art, held by liberal, anti-authoritarian societies, just as clearly as the whole of the courtly and aristocratic art—by its mere emphasis of the stage, the footlights, the frame and the socle—is the unmistakable expression of a highly artificial, specially commissioned occasion, from which it is obvious that the patron is an initiated connoisseur who does not need to be deceived.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages

“Rather than separating our understanding of economic and social practices from our understanding of affective development and human development, we need to bring them together, to align them: we need to realise that politics, the external world, is not a world without an 'inner'. And for this to happen, we need a new integrated model for mental health, and a new politics: we need a new dialogue between the political and personal worlds, and a recognition of how psychotherapeutic practice and the psyche both shape and are powerfully shaped by existing structures and interests.”
― Rod Tweedy, The Political Self: Understanding the Social Context for Mental Illness

“…This lack of morality is not limited to rank. In Alaba, for example, even the simplest social structures are ignored. Alabans claim that concepts of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ do not apply, and insist they have either five or six genders, depending on how they are counted, between which these heathens will move depending on their whims. As a tonal language, the same sound with different inflections carries different meanings, so a Naridan must be very careful to avoid misrepresenting himself: for example, ‘mè’ is ‘high masculine’, used by those in whom the fire of manhood burns strongly, while ‘mê’ is ‘low masculine’, for in Alaban society it is no great shame for a man to admit to womanly character. The largely uninflected ‘me’ is the gender-neutral formal, but ‘mé’ is ‘low feminine’, favoured by women who lack the qualities appropriate for their gender, and ‘mē’ is ‘high feminine’, the only appropriate usage for any Naridan lady of decency. Even stranger is ‘më’, used only by those who insist they have no gender, even in the most informal settings. Such immorality is hardly unsurprising in a land that has provided succour to exiled pretenders since the Splintering.
Needless to say, Naridans should resist these pernicious local customs and only use the ‘high’ forms for themselves when visiting this land, lest they cause themselves considerable embarrassment.”
― Mike Brooks, The Black Coast

“Stability. The primal and ultimate need. Stability. Hence all this.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The path of our future depends on whether we find the will to change the social structures we build technology for. At the moment, representative democracy relies on the creation of endogroups. Technology is being used to accelerate and intensify both the divisive nature of endogroups and the endoreality that accompanies them.”
― Heather Marsh

“Certain mysteries are for formal reasons impenetrable, and here is the vast darkness of the subject.”
― Gregory Bateson, Naven: A Survey of the Problems suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe drawn from Three Points of View