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Quotes by Sociologist
"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
"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
"The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli."
47
"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."
47
"Don't take the will for the deed; get the deed."
47
"Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore."
47
"The basic assumption of the secular society is that modernity overcomes religion."
47
"The nearest the modern general or admiral comes to a small-arms encounter of any sort is at a duck hunt in the company of corporation executives at the retreat of Continental Motors, Inc."
47
"The universe extends beyond the mind of man, and is more complex than the small sample one can study."
46
"Today's global justice movement may be the biggest, most diverse and energetic in history."
46
"Navigation is power of a limited sort - it enables us to manage the immensity of the media torrent."
46
"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."
46
"If language did not affect behavior, it could have no meaning."
46
"The scientist rigorously defends his right to be ignorant of almost everything except his specialty."
46
"The first internal relation that is essential to a secret society is the reciprocal confidence of its members."
46
"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."
46
"America is not only big and rich, it is mysterious; and its capacity for the humorous or ironical concealment of its interests matches that of the legendary inscrutable Chinese."
46
"Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom."
46
"I am concerned about how to reverse the process by which a fundamentalist right and a corporate elite were able to seize power in the United States."
46
"With the parties at virtual parity and the ideological gulf between them never greater, the stakes of majority control of Congress are extremely high."
46
"If advertising is not an official or state art, it is nonetheless clearly art."
46
"Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also."
46
"The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real."
46
"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."
46
"Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies."
46
"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."
46
"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."
46
"It is also, I would guess, a universal that in all societies people value respectability granted to them."
46
"It is probably safe to say that all the changes of factual knowledge which have led to the relativity theory, resulting in a very great theoretical development, are completely trivial from any point of view except their relevance to the structure of a theoretical system."
45
"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."
45
"If observed facts of undoubted accuracy will not fit any of the alternatives it leaves open, the system itself is in need of reconstruction."
45
"War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society."
45
"Grades are almost completely relative, in effect ranking students relative to others in their class. Thus extra achievement by one student not only raises his position, but in effect lowers the position of others."
45
"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."
45
"Empirical interest will be in the facts so far as they are relevant to the solution of these problems."
45
"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."
45
"The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way."
45
"There are two sorts of curiosity - the momentary and the permanent. The momentary is concerned with the odd appearance on the surface of things. The permanent is attracted by the amazing and consecutive life that flows on beneath the surface of things."
45
"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."
45
"A gloss is a total system of perception and language."
45
"Some men tend to cling to old intellectual excitements, just as some belles, when they are old ladies, still cling to the fashions and coiffures of their exciting youth."
45
"All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values."
45
"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."
45
"The genius of the economic machine is in its ability to convert these indulgences into profitability. It converts desire into attention, a grip on our eyeballs and eardrums, which in turn can be marketed to advertisers."
45
"At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves."
45
"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."
44
"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."
44
"The intellectually sophisticated person is indifferent to all genuine individuality, because relationships and reactions result from it which cannot be exhausted with logical operations."
44
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