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Quotes by Sociologist
"At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance."
183
"Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either."
164
"A healthy degree of party unity among Democrats and Republicans has deteriorated into bitter partisan warfare."
133
"Verbal and nonverbal activity is a unified whole, and theory and methodology should be organized or created to treat it as such."
128
"One can't understand the Christian Right and similar movements unless one sees them as reactive - they're reacting to what they call secular humanism."
122
"Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts."
92
"I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization."
83
"All theory of modernity in sociology suggests that the more modernity there is, the less religion. In my theory we can realize that this is wrong: atheism is only one belief system among many."
75
"The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it."
72
"There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world."
71
"The order of the world is always right - such is the judgment of God. For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire Cat left his grin."
71
"The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society."
70
"We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us."
68
"Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination."
68
"Prestige is the shadow of money and power."
68
"The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life."
67
"Every relationship between two individuals or two groups will be characterized by the ratio of secrecy that is involved in it."
67
"Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity."
64
"For this reason, strangers are not really conceived as individuals, but as strangers of a particular type: the element of distance is no less general in regard to them than the element of nearness."
62
"Money is a poor man's credit card."
61
"One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with."
60
"Work is the best of narcotics, providing the patient be strong enough to take it. I dread idleness as if it were Hell."
59
"In every school, more boys wanted to be remembered as a star athlete than as a brilliant student."
59
"The world has become so complex that the idea of a power in which everything comes together and can be controlled in a centralized way is now erroneous."
57
"As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes."
57
"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us."
56
"Every superior personality, and every superior performance, has, for the average of mankind, something mysterious."
56
"The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need for words, and ask no more than complicitous silence."
56
"The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village."
55
"There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before."
55
"There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each. This is not just a stock of affects or pleasure, but also the possibility of playing double or quits with the share you hold in the other's heart."
55
"Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval."
54
"In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning."
53
"Collectively, we are in thrall to media - because they deliver to us many of the psychic goods we crave, and we know no other way to live."
52
"So I think one can say on empirical grounds - not because of some philosophical principle - that you can't have democracy unless you have a market economy."
52
"And the big question for the West, of course, and to the Europeans is, what other countries, which were formerly part of the Soviet bloc, should be incorporated into western institutions?"
52
"Advertising generally works to reinforce consumer trends rather than to initiate them."
52
"Practice has a logic which is not that of the logician."
51
"Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness."
51
"If you want to get out of medicine the fullest enjoyment, be students all your lives."
50
"The point of cities is multiplicity of choice."
50
"Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves."
50
"A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life."
50
"The effectiveness of advertising depends on the amount and kind of product information available to consumers... advertising will be more successful the more impoverished the consumer's information environment."
49
"We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror."
48
"Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends."
48
"Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within the existing institutions he will be likely to make trouble."
48
"Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price."
48
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