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Quotes by Sociologist
"The mind is not a hermit's cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse."
21
"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."
21
"Schools are successful only insofar as they reduce the dependence of a child's opportunities upon his social origins."
21
"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."
20
"War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society."
20
"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."
20
"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."
20
"There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point."
Life,
20
"The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist."
20
"Every superior personality, and every superior performance, has, for the average of mankind, something mysterious."
20
"Initially, the horrific images of September 11th triggered an enormous wave of solidarity."
20
"In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth."
19
"The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self."
19
"With Germany herself falling, it is not strange that the nations leagued with her also went down to defeat."
19
"The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence."
19
"Finally, in my critique of the immigration image of America, it is also important to know that we're not only a nation of immigrants, but we are in some part a nation of emigrants, which often gets neglected."
19
"The increase in straight-ticket party voting in recent years means that competitive congressional races can tip one way or the other depending on the showing of the candidates at the top of the ticket."
19
"As social beings we live with our eyes upon our reflection, but have no assurance of the tranquillity of the waters in which we see it."
19
"The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village."
19
"Modern culture is constantly growing more objective. Its tissues grow more and more out of impersonal energies, and absorb less and less the subjective entirety of the individual."
19
"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."
19
"In addition to the decline in competition, American politics today is characterized by a growing ideological polarization between the two major political parties."
19
"Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century."
19
"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."
19
"Global conditions are far too complex to be able to imagine that they could ever be really controlled by one power."
19
"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."
18
"Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment."
18
"The main concern of the study is with the outline of a theoretical system. Its minor variations from writer to writer are not a matter of concern to this analysis."
18
"The world is not dialectical - it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil."
18
"The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles."
18
"Every revolution has its counterrevolution - that is a sign the revolution is for real."
18
"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."
18
"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."
18
"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."
18
"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."
18
"If you want to get out of medicine the fullest enjoyment, be students all your lives."
17
"A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius."
17
"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."
17
"There is a continuum of values between the churches and the general community. What distinguishes the handling of these values in the churches is mainly the heavier dosage of religious vocabulary involved."
17
"People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages."
17
"We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has."
17
"Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think."
17
"Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom."
17
"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."
17
"Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated."
17
"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."
17
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