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Quotes by Sociologist
"School divides life into two segments, which are increasingly of comparable length. As much as anything else, schooling implies custodial care for persons who are declared undesirable elsewhere by the simple fact that a school has been built to serve them."
17
"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."
17
"The marvelous thing is that even in studying linguistics, we find that the universe as a whole is patterned, ordered, and to some degree intelligible to us."
17
"If there are four equations and only three variables, and no one of the equations is derivable from the others by algebraic manipulation then there is another variable missing."
17
"Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century."
17
"Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy."
17
"Every revolution has its counterrevolution - that is a sign the revolution is for real."
17
"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."
17
"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."
17
"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."
17
"Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both."
17
"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."
17
"The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture."
16
"But then I came to the conclusion that no, while there may be an immigration problem, it isn't really a serious problem. The really serious problem is assimilation."
16
"Today's practicality is often no more than the accepted form of yesterday's theory."
16
"It is in games that many men discover their paradise."
16
"The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live."
16
"Healthy people are those who live in healthy homes on a healthy diet; in an environment equally fit for birth, growth work, healing, and dying... Healthy people need no bureaucratic interference to mate, give birth, share the human condition and die."
16
"Not wishing to be disturbed over moral issues of the political economy, Americans cling to the notion that the government is a sort of automatic machine, regulated by the balancing of competing interests."
16
"I'm sure Putnam is right that there's been a decline in certain kinds of organizations like bowling leagues. But people participate in communities in other ways."
16
"Redistricting is a deeply political process, with incumbents actively seeking to minimize the risk to themselves (via bipartisan gerrymanders) or to gain additional seats for their party (via partisan gerrymanders)."
16
"Sure, I've often been misrepresented - anyone frequently quoted has this experience."
16
"Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also."
16
"The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare."
16
"An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one."
16
"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."
16
"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."
16
"But the scientific importance of a change in knowledge of fact consists precisely in j its having consequences for a system of theory."
16
"The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions."
15
"Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it comes out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further development."
15
"Most criticism of advertising is written in ignorance of what actually happens inside these agencies."
15
"This experience actually means the very opposite: the largest military power was unable to stop such a sensitive attack and will be unable to rule out such a possibility in the future. Precisely this is the background to the United States' military interventions."
15
"The Engineer Corps is charged with all construction, including light railways and roads."
15
"For a century after the reign of Frederick, Prussia remained the most prominent Germanic state in Europe."
15
"American advertisers rely on 'essentially illogical' approaches to determine their advertising budgets."
15
"America is an outlier in the world of democracies when it comes to the structure and conduct of elections."
15
"It is one thing to take as a given that approximately 70 percent of an entering high school freshman class will not attend college, but to assign a particular child to a curriculum designed for that 70 percent closes off for that child the opportunity to attend college."
15
"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."
15
"What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world."
15
"Spencer's god was Evolution, sometimes also called Progress."
15
"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."
15
"However far modern science and techniques have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson; nothing is impossible."
15
"Advertising generally works to reinforce consumer trends rather than to initiate them."
15
"Secrecy involves a tension which, at the moment of revelation, finds its release."
15
"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."
15
"Secrecy is thus, so to speak, a transition stadium between being and not-being."
15
"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."
15
"Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches."
15
"The collapse of Russia was the second great event of 1917."
14
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