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Quotes by Sociologist
"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
"Every superior personality, and every superior performance, has, for the average of mankind, something mysterious."
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
"Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore."
11
"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."
10
"Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture."
10
"Today's practicality is often no more than the accepted form of yesterday's theory."
10
"The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions."
10
"The collapse of Russia was the second great event of 1917."
10
"Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protest against extermination do so by a biological act."
10
"The point of cities is multiplicity of choice."
10
"In order to accommodate to change and to the contrast of phenomena, the intellect does not require any shocks and inner upheavals; it is only through such upheavals that the more conservative mind could accommodate to the metropolitan rhythm of events."
10
"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."
10
"The basic fault lines today are not between people with different beliefs but between people who hold these beliefs with an element of uncertainty and people who hold these beliefs with a pretense of certitude."
10
"Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment."
10
"We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has."
10
"Verbal and nonverbal activity is a unified whole, and theory and methodology should be organized or created to treat it as such."
10
"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."
10
"The Great Idea in advertising is far more than the sum of the recognition scores, the ratings and all the other superficial indicators of its success; it is in the realm of myth, to which measurements cannot apply."
10
"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."
10
"And it also became clear that these conditions of inequality and historical injustice have given rise to a feeling of hate in the world - a deeply felt hate that cannot easily be overcome with a few good words."
10
"Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom."
10
"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."
10
"In a market economy, however, the individual has some possibility of escaping from the power of the state."
10
"Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly."
10
"Educational institutes can no longer be prizes in church politics or furnish berths for failure in other walks of life."
10
"Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century."
10
"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."
10
"You could say that we are living in an internally globalized country."
10
"We are living in a world that is beyond controllability."
10
"Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things."
10
"There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world."
10
"When the armistice was declared American forces had fought their way to Sedan."
10
"Sales may lead to advertising as much as advertising leads to sales."
10
"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."
10
"Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also."
10
"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."
10
"The idea that you surrender your identity when you relinquish national powers is unhelpful. No, indeed, precisely the opposite is the case: if done in an intelligent way, you attain the sovereignty to better solve national problems in cooperation with others."
10
"We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself."
10
"We do not yet have the solutions to these questions, but the awareness that we live in an endangered world is present in more and more life situations."
10
"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."
10
"Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches."
10
"Religion is love; in no case is it logic."
10
"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."
9
"One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence."
9
"It is in games that many men discover their paradise."
9
"Even if one is interested only in one's own society, which is one's prerogative, one can understand that society much better by comparing it with others."
9
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