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Quotes by Sociologist
"We really only came around to accepting and integrating the propositional dimension of identity into a concept of ourselves at the time of the American Revolution."
41
"We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation."
41
"If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity."
41
"Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be."
41
"To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration."
41
"Today's practicality is often no more than the accepted form of yesterday's theory."
40
"The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self."
40
"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."
40
"The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty."
40
"For the metropolis presents the peculiar conditions which are revealed to us as the opportunities and the stimuli for the development of both these ways of allocating roles to men."
40
"If there are signs that Americans bow to the gods of advertising, there are equally indications that people find the gods ridiculous. It is part of the popular culture that advertisements are silly."
40
"We may repeat the awful revolutionary history of the 20th century because of the vulnerability of social movements to demagoguery."
40
"Our relationship with Mexico in this regard is unique for us, and in many respects unique in the world."
40
"Some versions of patriotism come close to the tribal, which we all want to surpass, and some don't."
40
"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."
40
"Man's nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered."
40
"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."
40
"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."
40
"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."
40
"Power is not of a man. Wealth does not center in the person of the wealthy. Celebrity is not inherent in any personality. To be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions."
40
"The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology."
40
"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."
40
"While Republican voters have remained universally supportive of their President, Democrats and Independents are returning to a more naturally critical stance."
39
"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."
39
"Every relationship between persons causes a picture of each to take form in the mind of the other, and this picture evidently is in reciprocal relationship with that personal relationship."
39
"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."
39
"Navigation is power of a limited sort - it enables us to manage the immensity of the media torrent."
39
"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."
39
"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."
39
"America is an outlier in the world of democracies when it comes to the structure and conduct of elections."
39
"Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom."
39
"Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor."
39
"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."
39
"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."
39
"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?"
39
"The artist does not illustrate science (but) he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does."
39
"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."
39
"If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch."
Age,
39
"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."
39
"Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both."
39
"Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies."
39
"The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it."
Time,
39
"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."
38
"The first internal relation that is essential to a secret society is the reciprocal confidence of its members."
38
"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."
38
"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."
38
"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."
38
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