Sigour

“Instead of being depicted as a child of God, a bearer of the highest values attainable in this empirical world, and hence sacred, man is reduced to a mere inorganic or organic complex, not essentially different from billions of similar complexes. In so far as materialism identifies him and his cultural values with matter and mechanical motion, it cannot fail to strip him and his values of any exceptional and unique position in the world. Since they are but a complex of antoms, and since the events of human history are but a variety of the mechanical motions of atoms, neither man nor his culture can be regarded as sacred, as constituting the supreme end value, or as reflections of the Divine in the material world. In a word, materialistic sensory science and philosophy utterly degrade man and the truth itself.”
― Pitirim Sorokin

“No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Both personal experience and professional studies of social processes, after all, had led me to think that people rarely accomplish exactly what they consciously plan, and constantly find events unrolling differently from what they anticipated. Why, then, do people's descriptions and explanations of social processes overwhelmingly emphasize conscious deliberation?”
― Charles Tilly, Why?

“As the historian William McNeill observed, “Innumerable bureaucratic structures that had previously acted more or less independently of one another in a context of market relationships coalesced into what amounted to a single national firm for waging war”—a process that played out in every combatant nation.18”
― Moisés Naím, The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn't What It Used to Be