[In-group exclusivism has] killed more human beings and…

“[In-group exclusivism has] killed more human beings and destroyed more cities and villages than all the epidemics, hurricanes, storms, floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions taken together. It has brought upon mankind more suffering than any other catastrophe.”

Pitirim Sorokin

About This Quote

This interpretation was drafted with AI assistance. It is one reading of the quote, not the author's own explanation.

Highlights how exclusionary group behavior causes massive suffering, surpassing natural disasters

In simple terms: In-group exclusivity kills more than natural catastrophes

Key Takeaway

Beware the destructive power of exclusion

Themes

social division violence human suffering group dynamics

Mood

serious urgent

Type

analytical critical

When to use this quote

policy making
community building
education programs

Key Concepts

sociology conflict studies human rights

Questions to Reflect On

How can societies dismantle exclusionary practices?
What policies best reduce group-based violence?

A Different Perspective

May underestimate individual agency in change

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

Catastrophe Cities Epidemics Eruption Flood Human beings Humans Hurricanes Mankind Nature of man Suffering Village Volcanic eruptions

More by Pitirim Sorokin

Love is the supreme value around which all moral values can be integrated into one ethical system valid for the whole of humanity.

Pitirim Sorokin

Only the power of unbounded love practiced in regard to all human beings can defeat the forces of interhuman strife, and can prevent the…

Pitirim Sorokin

Hate begets hate, violence engenders violence, hypocrisy is answered by hypocrisy, war generates war, and love creates love.

Pitirim Sorokin

Man is a conscious, rational thinker and a supra-conscious creator genius.

Pitirim Sorokin

Either the conscious intellect is impotent, or is not sufficiently strong, or is not the factor positively connected with altruistic phenomenon generally or their…

Pitirim Sorokin

The most effective and most accessible way to acquire the maximum of constructive power is to love truly and wisely.

Pitirim Sorokin

Any Organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is…

Pitirim Sorokin

The resort to human flesh, often after months of ever-increasing hunger pangs, appeared to be an animallike reaction without painful emotional overtones.

Pitirim Sorokin

Are there quantitative aspects to the phenomena of war that can be counted? Evidently!

Pitirim Sorokin

Explore all 10 Pitirim Sorokin quotes

More Catastrophe quotes

Many individuals spend a considerable portion of their lifetimes in terror of one imagined catastrophe or another. The classic is that your immortal soul…

L. Neil Smith

I was asked the other day if I would be interested in the Nobel Prize, but I think that for me it would be…

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“..the sense of a catastrophe perpetually invoked and avoided creates a rapture in whose depths horror and pleasure coincide...”

Michel Leiris

To you, the people of Flint, I say, as I have before, I am sorry and I will fix it. No citizen of this…

Rick Snyder

Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements…

Harold Bloom

It's the hardest thing on earth to like yourself, and then when you do, it's a catastrophe. I mean, the people I know who…

Mike Nichols

We are upsetting the atmosphere upon which all life depends. In the late 80s when I began to take climate change seriously, we referred…

David Suzuki

“War is catastrophe. It breaks families in irretrievable pieces. But those who are gone are not necessarily lost.”

Ruta Sepetys

The biggest catastrophes that we've witnessed rarely come from information that is secret or hidden. It comes from information that is freely available and…

Margaret Heffernan

All the parties of capitalist society, all its moralists and all its sycophants will perish beneath the debris of the impending catastrophe. The only…

Leon Trotsky

When the regime changed in Japan, the Japanese changed; Russians too can change, as long as the conditions for it are present once again.…

Vladimir Voinovich

And in the racial climate of this country today, it is anybody's guess which of the 'extremes' in approach to the black man's problems…

Malcolm X

“But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different -…

Karen Thompson Walker

“How someone wants to explain catastrophe isn't important--that's what I know now. When shit happens, it doesn't really matter what asshole is responsible.”

Catherine Lacey