top of page
"The positive emotions that arise in...unpromising circumstances demonstrate that social ties and meaningful work are deeply desired, readily improvised, and intensely rewarding. The very structure of our economy and society prevent these goals from being achieved."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Sociology quotes

"Some people like to spend their time watching and studying how other people spend their own time."

"Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy profession, and a large number of its practitioners spend many nights drowning their sorrows in Ouisghian Zodahs."

"Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups parties nations and epochs it is the ru)e."

"Best of stories are created at Airports, Dinner Tables and Showers!"

"The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart."

"An average woman is in this superior to an average man-that she never instigates, only responds."

"In the terms of our Great Society the Hell's Angels and their ilk are losers -- dropouts, failures and malcontents. They are rejects looking for a way to get even with a world in which they are only a problem.The Hell's Angels are not visionaries, but diehards, and if they are the forerunners or the vanguard of anything it is not the "moral revolution" in vogue on college campuses, but a fast-growing legion of young unemployables whose untapped energy will inevitably find the same kind of destructive outlet that "outlaws" like the Hell's Angels have been finding for years."

"Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics."
Explore more quotes by Rebecca Solnit

"The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women - of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human."

"Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished."

"I was being cured of soldiering on endlessly: my job was now to be still, which had become almost easy at last."

"The word "lost" comes from the Old Norse "los," meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know."

"For twenty years I have sat alone at a desk tinkering with sentences and then sending them out, and for most of my literary life the difference between throwing something in the trash and publishing it was imperceptible..."

"The revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality."

"How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" (Plato) The things we want are transformative, and we don't know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration- how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?"

"I made my first home there and had been happy, because to be alienated in one's own country, in one's own hometown, among one's kin and peers, was problematic, but nothing could be more natural than to be alienated in a foreign country, and so there I had at last naturalized my estrangement. This may be one of the underappreciated pleasures of travel: of being at last legitimately lost and confused."

"Women have routinely been punished and intimidated for attempting that most simple of freedoms, taking a walk, because their walking and indeed their very beings have been construed as inevitably, continually sexual in those societies concerned with controlling women's sexuality."
bottom of page