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"Institutions - government, churches, industries, and the like - have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction."
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"Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good."

"There shall be no end to the government of God."

"There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you."

"The ugliest government is the one which is spreading fear to its own people! The finest government is the one which encourages its own people to criticize the government harshly."

"The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act. A general association takes place, and common interest produces common security."

"There is probably a perverse pride in my administration... that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who's occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can't be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion."

"An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination."

"Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles."

"There are no doubts that western governments are willfully inducing radiation sickness into segments of their city populations."

"If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual."
Explore more quotes by Charles Horton Cooley

"Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom."

"The general fact is that the most effective way of utilizing human energy is through an organized rivalry, which by specialization and social control is, at the same time, organized co-operation."

"If we divine a discrepancy between a man's words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted."

"To get away from one's working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one's self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change."

"A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail... Fluency, grace, logical order, and the like, are merely the decorative surface of oratory."

"The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles."

"We have no higher life that is really apart from other people. It is by imagining them that our personality is built up; to be without the power of imagining them is to be a low-grade idiot."

"There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point."
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