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Quotes by Sociologist
"The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence."
13
"Advertising generally works to reinforce consumer trends rather than to initiate them."
13
"Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval."
13
"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."
13
"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."
13
"In addition to the decline in competition, American politics today is characterized by a growing ideological polarization between the two major political parties."
13
"Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both."
13
"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."
13
"A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy."
13
"An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one."
13
"Initially, the horrific images of September 11th triggered an enormous wave of solidarity."
13
"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."
13
"The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self."
12
"Practice has a logic which is not that of the logician."
12
"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."
12
"With Germany herself falling, it is not strange that the nations leagued with her also went down to defeat."
12
"Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials."
12
"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."
12
"The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds."
12
"Every revolution has its counterrevolution - that is a sign the revolution is for real."
12
"There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point."
Life,
12
"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."
12
"So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are lower or less rational."
12
"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."
12
"To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self."
12
"Global conditions are far too complex to be able to imagine that they could ever be really controlled by one power."
12
"In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth."
11
"A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius."
11
"No American can read the story of the part America took in the war without experiencing a glow of patriotic feeling. Every Allied nation can say the same thing."
11
"We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror."
11
"Most criticism of advertising is written in ignorance of what actually happens inside these agencies."
11
"Leadership does not depend on being right."
11
"Institutions - government, churches, industries, and the like - have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction."
11
"We have no higher life that is really apart from other people. It is by imagining them that our personality is built up; to be without the power of imagining them is to be a low-grade idiot."
11
"When one ceases from conflict, whether because he has won, because he has lost, or because he cares no more for the game, the virtue passes out of him."
11
"Neither science, nor the politics in power, nor the mass media, nor business, nor the law nor even the military are in a position to define or control risks rationally."
11
"Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers."
11
"Secrecy involves a tension which, at the moment of revelation, finds its release."
11
"Sure, I've often been misrepresented - anyone frequently quoted has this experience."
11
"A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail... Fluency, grace, logical order, and the like, are merely the decorative surface of oratory."
11
"What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited."
11
"The functions of the family in a highly differentiated society are not to be interpreted as functions directly on behalf of the society, but on behalf of personality."
11
"Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore."
11
"Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a total coherent system of these integrating with each other, and with behavior, context, universe of discourse, and observer perspective."
11
"In the early days of his reign, Bismarck confided to a friend that it would some day be necessary for Germany to confine William II in an insane asylum."
11
"The intellectual takes as a starting point his self and relates the world to his own sensibilities; the scientist accepts an existing field of knowledge and seeks to map out the unexplored terrain."
11
"There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time."
Time,
11
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