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Quotes by Sociologist
"If the scholar feels that he must know everything about any topic, he is in trouble - and will not publish with a clear conscience."
11
"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."
11
"Communication is a continual balancing act, juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world, we have to act in concert with others, but to survive as ourselves, rather than simply as cogs in a wheel, we have to act alone."
11
"We also thought of ourselves in racial and largely ethnic terms."
11
"Courage to continue comes from deeper sources than outward results."
10
"One of the sad commentaries on the way women are viewed in our society is that we have to fit one category. I have never felt that I had to be in one category."
10
"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."
10
"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."
10
"Holidays in general breed unrealistic expectations. The minute you start wondering, 'is it going to be wonderful enough?,' it never will be."
10
"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."
10
"With acknowledgement of residues, we can be more easily prepared to grant the unit of science, the overlapping of disciplines, and the total coherence of all facts."
10
"Not only is it not remarkable to be a single woman, there's no stigma attached. You see more and more women choosing to be single as well as happenstance."
10
"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."
10
"Our institute's agenda is relatively simple. We study the relationship between social-economic change and culture. By culture we mean beliefs, values and lifestyles. We cover a broad range of issues, and we work very internationally."
10
"As I write at the end, if we step back and face the enormity of the torrent, then we have taken the first step to imagining what we might want to do about it."
10
"Cultural dominance of middle-class norms prevail in middle-class schools with a teacher teaching toward those standards and with students striving to maintain those standards."
10
"It is very likely that many firms spend more on advertising than, for their own best interests, they should."
10
"The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man."
10
"The great problem there is we have to have the cooperation of those other Asian countries."
10
"Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned."
10
"Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten."
10
"Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training."
10
"I don't for the life of me understand how anybody could contemplate the results of the 2000 election in the US and say that electoral politics doesn't matter any more, and that Ralph Nader was right when he said there is no difference between the two parties."
10
"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."
10
"I think clearly the United States, as well as other western nations, should stand by their commitments to human rights and democracy and should try to influence other countries to move in that direction."
10
"Without a possibility of change in meanings human communication could not perform its present functions."
10
"If advertising is not an official or state art, it is nonetheless clearly art."
10
"Of course there may well be particular reasons why Spencer rather than others is dead, as there were also particular reasons why he rather than others made such a stir."
10
"The price that one pays for refusing to act on the truth as one sees it, is to be led to believe untruth to avoid guilt."
10
"I don't think anyone in the media thinks strategically about society."
10
"Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression."
10
"That a society controls, to a greater or lesser extent, the behavior of its members is a universal; but the methods, the particulars of that control, vary from one culture to another."
10
"Housework is work directly opposed to the possibility of human self-actualization."
10
"The part an actor played on stage was once written on a separate roll of paper."
10
"Christianity stands or falls as a living program, a way of life, made concrete in the life of man by the life of God through the life of the concretely living Christ."
10
"Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage."
10
"Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities."
10
"The only people available to change the world are the people now living in it, with all the beliefs they bring along - however retrograde those beliefs may appear to those of us who see ourselves as enlightened."
10
"Further-more, partisan attachments powerfully shape political perceptions, beliefs and values, and incumbents enjoy advantages well beyond the way in which their districts are configured."
10
"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."
10
"The basic assumption of the secular society is that modernity overcomes religion."
10
"Money is just the poor man's credit card."
10
"In the House, Republican prospects have been buoyed by several successful rounds of redistricting, which have sharply reduced the number of competitive seats and given the Republicans a national advantage of at least a dozen seats."
10
"The other aspect of American identity worth focusing on is the concept of America as a nation of immigrants. That certainly is a partial truth. But it is often assumed to be the total truth."
10
"From all this it follows what the general character of the problem of the development of a body of scientific knowledge is, in so far as it depends on elements internal to science itself."
9
"There is a fuzzy but real distinction that can and I believe should be made, between patriotism, which is attachment to a way of life, and nationalism, which is the insistence that your way of life deserves to rule over other ways of life."
9
"I wanted a theory that would allow one to live outside the office with the same philosophy one uses inside it."
9
"The universe extends beyond the mind of man, and is more complex than the small sample one can study."
9
"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."
9
"Navigation is power of a limited sort - it enables us to manage the immensity of the media torrent."
9
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