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Quotes by Sociologist
"Leadership does not depend on being right."
49
"To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light."
49
"The eventual place the American army should take on the western front was to a large extent influenced by the vital question of communication and supply."
49
"There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God."
49
"Responsibility for overseeing the implementation of election law typically resides with partisan officials, many with public stakes in the election outcome."
49
"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."
49
"Our relationship with Mexico in this regard is unique for us, and in many respects unique in the world."
49
"For the division of labor demands from the individual an ever more one-sided accomplishment, and the greatest advance in a one-sided pursuit only too frequently means dearth to the personality of the individual."
49
"The artist does not illustrate science (but) he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does."
49
"We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation."
49
"Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century."
49
"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."
48
"Today's practicality is often no more than the accepted form of yesterday's theory."
48
"I am a realist as well as an idealist, and I think that it is incumbent upon those of us in opposition to try to work within what are always arduous circumstances to stretch the limits of the possible."
48
"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."
48
"America is an outlier in the world of democracies when it comes to the structure and conduct of elections."
48
"Man's nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered."
48
"Presidents are elected not by direct popular vote but by 538 members of the Electoral College."
48
"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."
48
"The metropolis reveals itself as one of those great historical formations in which opposing streams which enclose life unfold, as well as join one another with equal right."
48
"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."
48
"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."
48
"Good taste is the first refuge of the non-creative. It is the last-ditch stand of the artist."
48
"Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy."
48
"The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other."
48
"If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch."
Age,
48
"In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness."
48
"I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it."
48
"Particular individuals who might never consider dropping out if they were in a different high school might decide to drop out if they attended a school where many boys and girls did so."
48
"Identity in the form of continuity of personality is an extremely important characteristic of the individual."
48
"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."
48
"But the scientific importance of a change in knowledge of fact consists precisely in j its having consequences for a system of theory."
48
"Normal social behavior requires that we be able to recognize identities in spite of change. Unless we can do so, there can be no human society as we know it."
48
"In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth."
47
"In the latter case life rests upon a thousand presuppositions which the individual can never trace back to their origins, and verify; but which he must accept upon faith and belief."
47
"Revelation and the nature of truth must be viewed in reference to the structure of language."
47
"The Engineer Corps is charged with all construction, including light railways and roads."
47
"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."
47
"We may repeat the awful revolutionary history of the 20th century because of the vulnerability of social movements to demagoguery."
47
"Also, of course, for most of this time most Americans thought of America as a white country with, at best, only a very segregated and subordinate role for blacks."
47
"Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor."
47
"When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults."
47
"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."
47
"The manufacture of desire isn't at the heart - if it isn't absurd to speak of a heart - of the media torrent. Chronic dissatisfaction is at the heart of the matter."
47
"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."
47
"Some fine day, Democrats may figure out how to get on the right side of the value divide - how to define America as a place of the common good and not a playground of the strong."
47
"I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again. When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?"
47
"The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles."
47
"Thus, the technique of metropolitan life is unimaginable without the most punctual integration of all activities and mutual relations into a stable and impersonal time schedule."
47
"There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew."
47
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