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Quotes by Sociologist
"At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance."
71
"A healthy degree of party unity among Democrats and Republicans has deteriorated into bitter partisan warfare."
44
"Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either."
41
"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."
34
"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."
34
"Every relationship between two individuals or two groups will be characterized by the ratio of secrecy that is involved in it."
31
"The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society."
30
"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."
29
"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."
28
"Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination."
23
"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."
23
"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."
22
"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."
22
"Money is a poor man's credit card."
21
"So American culture is itself a hybrid and lends itself to use in other people's hybrids."
19
"Fruitful discourse in science or theology requires us to believe that within the contexts of normal discourse there are some true statements."
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."
19
"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."
19
"Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet."
18
"In every school, more boys wanted to be remembered as a star athlete than as a brilliant student."
18
"We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us."
17
"The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need for words, and ask no more than complicitous silence."
17
"There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to "Americanize" him."
16
"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."
16
"Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity."
16
"Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price."
16
"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."
15
"Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves."
15
"Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends."
15
"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."
15
"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."
15
"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."
15
"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us."
15
"The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles."
15
"Schools are successful only insofar as they reduce the dependence of a child's opportunities upon his social origins."
15
"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."
14
"War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society."
14
"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."
14
"Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God."
14
"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."
14
"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?"
14
"Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval."
14
"The mind is not a hermit's cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse."
14
"Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, as is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling."
14
"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."
14
"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."
14
"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."
14
"A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy."
14
"Work is the best of narcotics, providing the patient be strong enough to take it. I dread idleness as if it were Hell."
14
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