top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Sociologist
"At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance."
57
"A healthy degree of party unity among Democrats and Republicans has deteriorated into bitter partisan warfare."
34
"Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either."
31
"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."
22
"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."
21
"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."
19
"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."
15
"The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society."
15
"Money is a poor man's credit card."
14
"Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination."
14
"So American culture is itself a hybrid and lends itself to use in other people's hybrids."
13
"Every relationship between two individuals or two groups will be characterized by the ratio of secrecy that is involved in it."
13
"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."
13
"We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us."
12
"Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet."
11
"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."
11
"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."
11
"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."
11
"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."
10
"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?"
10
"The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need for words, and ask no more than complicitous silence."
10
"The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity."
10
"Fruitful discourse in science or theology requires us to believe that within the contexts of normal discourse there are some true statements."
9
"We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror."
8
"War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society."
8
"We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has."
8
"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."
8
"The hypothesis may be put forward, to be tested by the s subsequent investigation, that this development has been in large part a matter of the reciprocal interaction of new factual insights and knowledge on the one hand with changes in the theoretical system on the other."
8
"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."
8
"Some people seem to gravitate from one fundamentalism to another, from some kind of secular fundamentalism into a religious fundamentalism or the other way around, which is not very helpful."
8
"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us."
8
"Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity."
8
"Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price."
8
"Modern sociology is virtually an attempt to take up the larger program of social analysis and interpretation which was implicit in Adam Smith's moral philosophy, but which was suppressed for a century by prevailing interest in the technique of the production of wealth."
8
"There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served."
7
"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."
7
"Germany expected that at the most a day or so would see Belgian resistance broken and the dash on Paris begun. It was not safe to start such a forward rush with Belgium unconquered."
7
"Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves."
7
"To meet the shortage of supplies from America, due to lack of shipping, the representatives of the different supply departments were constantly in search of available material and supplies in Europe."
7
"The quarrel of the sociologists with the historians is that the latter have learned so much about how to do it that they have forgotten what to do. They have become so skilled in finding facts that they have no use for the truths that would make the facts worth finding."
7
"Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century."
7
"Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers."
7
"Sure, I've often been misrepresented - anyone frequently quoted has this experience."
7
"The French were generous in giving us assistance in corps and army artillery, with its personnel, and we were confident from the start of our superiority over the enemy in guns of all calibers."
7
"It has not been for nothing that the word has remained man's principal toy and tool: without the meanings and values it sustains, all man's other tools would be worthless."
7
"In addition to the decline in competition, American politics today is characterized by a growing ideological polarization between the two major political parties."
7
"Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both."
7
"Work is the best of narcotics, providing the patient be strong enough to take it. I dread idleness as if it were Hell."
7
"Prestige is the shadow of money and power."
7
bottom of page